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.
Peter Valček
