Birth date

20. 09. 1943  [en] Lehota pod Vtáčnikom  

Fields of interest

próza, esej, scenáristika

Briefly about author

Baláž is one of the foremost Slovak novelists. In his first works he followed the tradition of the social novel. They bear features of narration, with parallel plot lines and a complex composition of changing settings and time zones. Baláž demonstrates a gift for characterisation in portraying his protagonists, inventiveness in plotting, ingenuous composition, and the ability and courage to define and name the social evils of the age. After his first novel Gods of the Four Seasons had been banned from distribution and pulped, he entered literature with the novels Dream of the Cellars and Shadows of the Past, where he captured the anti-fascist resistance of the last period of the Second World War and the first post-war years in their whole complexity. His novel Greenhouse Venus deals with the issue of the scientific-technological revolution and with its effects, both favourable and deleterious, on man and nature. The situation of the allegedly privileged labour class, its way of life, its problems, worries and joys was the theme of Baláž's two novels You Must Live Here and An Armchair for Two. The attitudes of social criticism in the last years of the totalitarian regime can be heard from the mouths of representatives of various social groups in a collection of loosely connected stories A Surgical Decameron. In the books of short stories, Giddy Up, Stalin's Horses!, The Chronicle of Happy Tomorrows, and especially in the novel The Camp of Fallen Women Baláž's poetics begin to be dominated by a grotesque and fantastical perception of reality. The Camp of the Fallen Women is a carnivalesque image of the "historical liquidation" of prostitution in Slovakia in the Fifties. Together with erotic licence the tale has an Orwellian dimension: it shows a world in which the perverted philosophy of social engineering prevails, the society is treated like an ant heap where every class and group fulfil a historically determined task and disobedience results in liquidation in a camp. This novel had a great response from readers and represents one of the peaks of Baláž's work. In the second half of the Nineties Baláž discovered new thematic areas for his work: the Holocaust of the Slovak Jewish community and the post-war destiny of those Jews who survived the German extermination camps and tried to discover a new meaning in life. In addition to his radio plays The Rift, Reviving and Ophelia Is Not Dead, the tragic fate of the Jewish community forms the thematic base of his novel, The Country of Forgetting. It is a story of Central European Jews attempting to move to Israel - "the country of forgetting" the trauma and humiliation which they encountered in the totalitarian regimes in the first half of the twentieth century.

Briefly about production

prose:
Gods of the Four Seasons (Bohovia ročných období, 1971 - pulped), Dream of the Cellars (Sen pivníc, 1977), Shadows of the Past (Tiene minulosti, 1978), Greenhouse Venus (Skleníková Venuša, 1980), You Must Live Here (Tu musíš žiť, 1983), An Armchair for Two (Kreslo pre dvoch, 1986), A Surgical Decameron (Chirurgický dekameron, 1989), Giddy up, Stalin's Horses (Hijó, kone Stalinove, 1992), The Camp of Fallen Women (Tábor padlých žien, 1993), Love as Long As You Live (Kým žijes, miluj, 1995), The Chronicle of Happy Tomorrows (Kronika šťastných zajtrajškov, 1996), Penelope's Return (Penelopin návrat, 1998), The Country of Forgetting (Krajina zabudnutia, 2000), Gods of the Four Seasons and other pulped tales (Bohovia ročných období a ine zošrotované príbehy, 2003) and The Tender Heron (Nežná volavka, 2004), The Wicked Vydrica (Hriešna Vydrica, 2007), Transportations of Hope (Transporty nádeje, 2010) 

radio plays:
Living Without Adam (Žiť bez Adama, 1982), In the Deep Snow of Your Memory (V hlbkom snehu vašej pamäti, 1984), The Rift (Trhlina, 1994), The Secret Confession of Fero Kukáč (Tajná spoveď Fera Kukáča, 1996), Reviving (Oživovanie, 1999), Ophelia Is Not Dead (Ofélia nie je mŕtva, 2003)

television and film scenarios:
Law of the Future (Zákon budúcnosti, 1977), Greenhouse Venus (Skleníková Venuša, 1984), You Must Live Here (Tu musíš žiť, 1996), The Camp of Fallen Women (Tábor padlých žien, 1998), Penelope's Return (Penelopin návrat, 2003)

works translated into foreign languages:
You Must Live Here (1986, Polish), The Camp of Fallen Women (1998, Czech)

Biography for author

He was born 20 September 1943 in Lehota pod Vtáčnikom. He studied at the Philosophical Faculty at Comenius University in Bratislava, specialising in journalism and then pursued a career as a journalist. After completing his studies he became an editor and later editor-in-chief of the general interest weekly Sloboda (Freedom). After November, 1989, he was the editor-in-chief of Slovenský denník (Slovak Daily). From 1993 to 1994 he worked in the Office of the President of the Slovak Republic. At present he works in the Centre for Information on Literature. He lives in Bratislava.

about author

Baláž is not a joyful, harmonising author. His humour, too, changes to a grinning grotesque. The Slovak village after the Second World War is presented in an image inspired by Marquez's magic realism: not only externally, a world of unofficial culture, a world of superstitions, people variously marked, but also through the seriousness of the issues. His picture is expressive but as a result is capable of restoring faithfully the time of the various campaigns - from the cult of personality through collectivisation to the era of normalisation.

An element of the working-class environment and honour in Baláž's work are connected to his own biography and life philosophy. Baláž's perception of everyday life its and details, of mood and language, of atmosphere and specific issues is precise and this results in his ability to extract the maximum from this bedrock and is authentic in description and explanation of reality. Originating from the intimate knowledge of the author's environment, his philosophy is original, reasoned and pure, which colours the whole mood of his novels and makes it appealing and artistically valid for readers.

In the character of Miriam and her friend, Erna, the author has succeeded in creating convincing women protagonists. Women's experience is important here because it is determining certain psychological traumas which originated in the concentration camps. In this case there is the experience of women's nakedness as the worst form of humiliation and the showing of a woman's body as an object of evaluation and criterion of selection. Miriam and Erna carry the Auschwitz experience with them as an ancient burden from which they only gradually succeed in breaking free. Obviously what is most valid in the novel The Country of Forgetting is that it brings to light some hitherto hardly considered historical facts on the post-war fate of the Jews in the former Czechoslovakia and other Central European countries.

Awards

The Prize of the Union of Slovak Writers for the novel You Must Live Here (1983)
Premium of the Slovak Literary fund for the novels Dream of the Cellars, Shadows of the Past and Greenhouse Venus
Prizes from domestic and foreign festivals of radio plays (for Living Without Adam, In the Deep Snow of Your Memory and The Rift.

Sample

SIMON THE PILGRIM