Birth date

24. 08. 1904  [en] Rabčice

Death date

10. 03. 1982  [en] Bratislava

Fields of interest

próza, esej, publicistika

Briefly about author

The romantic interior conflict of the protagonists as a reflection of the social appearance of individuals in a style with affinities to European naturism (Ramuz, Giono) is found in Milo Urban's first book Jašek Kutliak from Under Bučinka. The characteristic interior tale, the dramatisation of hidden and declared human values is the axis of conflicts in the seven novellas Calls Without Echo. A similar formula applies to the novella Beyond the Upper Mill, which became the basis of the opera by Eugen Suchoň Whirlpool, perhaps also due to Urban's uniqueness: his dramatisation is not plotted, it appears in the values of relationships, in the interior worlds of the protagonists and his prose builds from this source an implicit musical-symphonic design.
The fabulous secrecy of Urban's novellas is individual through the optics of narration: the author reveals an interior tension, which is concealed and hidden by the narrator. Urban used this principle of ethical causation also in the short story collection From the Silent Front, to spread it further on the wide screen of the village chorus, the provincial wartime polyphony of the novel The Living Whip, which presents a picture of the First World War (at the time of the novel known as The Great War). But this was neither a Barbusse, nor Remarque, nor trench picture. The veracity of this canvas is in its presentations of human life experiencing tragedies of war far from the trenches - in the mountain village of Ráztoky. In The Living Whip themes are freely connected with subsequent novels Fog at Dawn and In the Snares which thus create a trilogy. After a twenty-year interval Urban continues with Lights Doused and Who Sows the Wind which draw epically on the Second World War.
Green Blood (Recollections of a Gamekeeper's Son) is an autobiographical novel whose style distils the whole of the author's experience of life and is also a valuable document and vivid picture of Slovakia in the first half of the 20 th century filmed through the vision of Urban's own life and has the quality of an essay in reconsideration.

Briefly about production

prose:
Jašek Kutliak from Under Bučinka (Jašek Kutliak spod Bučinky, 1922), Beyond the Upper Mill (Za vyšným mlynom, 1926), The Living Whip 1 - 2 (Živý bič 1 - 2, 1927 ), Calls Without Echo (Výkriky bez ozveny, 1928), Fog at Dawn (Hmly na úsvite, 1930), From the Silent Front (Z tichého frontu, 1932), In the Snares (V osídlach, 1940), Novellas (Novely, 1943), Lights Doused (Zhasnuté svetlá, 1957), Who Sows the Wind (Kto seje vietor, 1964), Green Blood (Zelená krv, 1970)

works translated:
The Living Whip (1931 German, 1932 Slovenian, 1933 Serbo-Croatian, 1966 Hungarian, 1966 Polish, 1969 Bulgarian, 1973 Russian)
Upper Mill (1970 Latvian)
Calls Without Echo (1974 Polish)
Selected Work (1987 Russian)
Triptych on Love (1988 Lithuanian)

Biography for author

Born 24 August 1904 in Rabčice. He gained his elementary education in Zázrivá and in Podhora and attended the gymnasia in Trstená and Ružomberok. In 1921 - 1940 he worked as an editor and reporter with various dailies and magazines, and was the chief editor of the daily Gardista (1940 -1945). Close to the end of the Second World War he emigrated to Austria, but in 1947 he was returned to Czechoslovakia and brought to court for trial. In 1948 a people's court sentenced him to public censure for his newspaper activities during the war. Since then he earned his living mostly by translation. Urban died 10 March 1982 in Bratislava.

about author

Urban's protagonists know, or it is better to say, embody the issues of modern humanity to the very roots of their being. The identity and lacunae in an individual with a wider social whole reminds us of the world and structure of ancient tragedy although this is only an analogy to the primitive world of Aeschylean tragedy, which creates law and which knows individuality as a complex of unpredictable change and genetic diversity. The tragic and dramatic in Urban's artistic world emerges from his work.

When Urban published his major work The Living Whip some representatives of the established generation (such as Nádaši-Jégé, but also the younger critic Š. Krčméry) attacked his depiction of the Slovak village. It seemed to them that he was tampering with reality.
In fact, he was experimenting with a new perception, establishing a kind of fictional reality in the general atmosphere of experimentation that involved all European literature after the war, a process whose beginnings went back to the pre-war period. Even in his first successful effort, Urban was aware of the larger European literary context.
Urban saw the Slovak village involved in a dynamic process of change. He was the first one to point out the resulting atomization of village culture. Modernity had made encroachments on the village world earlier, but Urban took as his point of departure the convulsions produced by the war. The world before the war entered the village was markedly different from the world in which the war made itself at home. The allegorical arrival of war in the village is one of the great moments in The Living Whip. In this novel, an expressionist transformation takes place. The fairy-tale world of the village, where myth and legend reside, is gradually replaced by a world of harsh and deadly truths, a delirious, corrupt, and destructive world normally associated with the city. Urban achieved this transformation through the use of striking imagery.

Sample

THE LIVING WHIP (extract)