Pišťanek, Peter (1960–) Works Biography Bibliography   en pl sk

Reception

Pišťanek is a prose writer who managed to come out with a new type of prose at the beginning of the 1990’s. He began publishing at the end of the 1980’s in Slovenské pohľady, the best literary magazine in those years. His novelistic debut, Rivers of Babylon was an unusual success with the readers as well as the critics. The author describes what was then a non-traditional topic for the Slovak literature – the Bratislava underground – using very expressive language and a variety of stylistic levels. The characters that fill his novel are small-time crooks and bigime entrepreneurs-privatizers as well as prostitutes. The only ambition of these people is to make their life more pleasant which, in their understanding, means to cheat, exploit, or destroy the others. In this world, one person manages to make his way to the top, a man from the village, the main character Racz, due to his unswerving pursuit of power and money. Somewhere in the background of these activities, the revolutionary changes of 1989 (the break-up of the Soviet Empire, the liberation of Eastern Europe) unfold. Inspiration for this novel comes from the para-literature and Pišťanek stresses the rectilinear narrative and fast-paced plot. While he presents the situation in an impersonal, laconic manner, he is precise in his analysis of the actual situation, even though the subject of his work may be rather bizarre and grotesque. The Young Dônč is a collection of three long short stories: Debutante, The Young Dônč, and Music . In the story The Young Dônč we encounter the topic of the degeneration of the Dônč family caused not only by alcoholism of all its members, but also by its accompanying feature: the total ignorance and disinterest in anything that goes on outside the territory of their own home. The author parodies here some texts of previous periods, nevertheless, his irony is aimed at the present. Even his story Music, with its grotesque elements, is a precise sociological probe of the “normalized” life of the Seventies. Pišťanek followed-up his successful novel by publishing Rivers of Babylon 2, or Wooden Village, and Rivers of Babylon 3, or Fredy’s End. This trilogy is so unusual, provocative and controversial that it will take Slovak criticism and literature in general some time to come to terms with it. One should also not overlook his fascinating The Tales of Vlado the Great and The New Tales of Vlado the Great. These are satirical tales that combine the charm of Hassidic fairy tales, Sufi instructional tales, and Slovak folktales with Buddhist koans in a transcendent manner, so that even the intended target was said to have enjoined reading them.
When the objects of Pišťanek’s irony become his faithful readers (it is generally known that in order to understand irony one needs a certain degree of intelligence), Pišťanek’s Tales will be taught to the children in Slovak schools (on the basis of a decision by some national-government institution)as a compulsory reading.