The page of Hykisch, Anton, English Reception
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Reception
CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS WRITINGAnton Hykisch is one of the major representatives of “Generation 1966”, a generation that rejected the canon of socialist realism and systematically featured the fundamental problems of the time. This orientation included social criticism presented through the medium of interiorised confession and the advent of a new main character stripped of heroic qualities, usually an ordinary young man. Social criticism remains an organic element from the time of Hykisch’s debut (A Dream Pulls into the Station) until his mature prose works (Nadia, A Square in Mähring, Relationships, Desire). Hykisch unmasks the increasingly cumbersome social order marked by moral turpitude, incompetent organization of labour, favouritism, corruption and other evils that produce disillusion, apathy, and disenchantment with life. The stories and novels of Hykisch that deal with contemporary themes have a journalistic immediacy, but also emphasize personal concerns and psychology, and eroticism. No wonder that at the beginning of the Seventies, Hykisch was branded an enemy of socialism and his publishing possibilities were limited.
Among readers’ favourite books are his historical novels The Time of the Masters and Adore the Queen. In the first one, from the period of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, he reconstructs the fate of an unknown author of a famous painting. The story unfolds against the background of society and significant events in the Slovak mining towns, particularly the miners’ uprising of 1525–1526 in Banská Štiavnica. In the second novel, there is an evocation of life in Slovakia during the reign of Emperor Maria Theresa. In a dramatic development there are shifts of scenery from the royal court to libraries, workshops, and battlefields. The novel brings to life the period of economic and cultural flowering that came as a result of Theresian and Josephian reforms of 1740–1780. It instances the destiny of educated Slovaks of that time, together with the outstanding figures of European history (Voltaire, Haydn, Mozart). In both novels, Hykisch bases his stories on historical sources that help him outline his plot and create his characters. He reinforces the effect by pondering in the eternal problems of existence and history.
ON THE AUTHOR
In his novel, Hykisch’s creative strategy, ideology and view of history are brought together by his concentration on the exeptional plucked from the anonymous historical existence of people. In Hykisch’s view, the artist is not exeptional merely because he is an artist. Rather, this is achieved by encapsulatnig the main features of the age and the character of people and being able to communicate this both to his contemporaries and future generations. (Ján Števček)
In the novel The Time of the Masters, there is an attempt to construct an irreconcilable conflict between the brutality, of the time and the flourishing of the human spirit. However, history has a solution: it is not “grand chaos”, or “inexplicable wandering”. (Ivan Sulík)
THE AUTHOR ON HIMSELF
Memory, memory... Of my unwritten novels: 1 pray for nay health to hold out so that I could bring to light truth for myself and for others. For when we turn to the past, what horrors we see! All those things that frightened its! Entire generations had to pretend, crushed by the weight of totalitarian might. Anyone who rebelled for a while and threw off the mask of hypocrisy, got into a conflict with the regime.
