Alongside Kundera's The Joke, The Axe was one of the most influential novels to appear in Czechoslavakia during the cultural awakening of the 1960s.In late Sixties Czechoslovakia, communist ideology is failing. A disillusioned middle-aged journalist retreats from the politics of Prague to the Moravian countryside of his youth. There he rediscovers the complex relationship with his dead father, a communist crusader. But when the journalist is accused of disgracing his father and his proletariat background, he realizes that he, too, is a leader--and that the stakes are now reversed.

The axe

Literature & Fiction

Vaculík, Ludvík

Contemporary

Harper&Row

Deutsch

The Guinea Pigs is a chilling fable about dehumanization and alienation representing Vaculik's vision of the menace of Soviet domination in the wake of the 1969 invasion. Written in 1970, it is a sweeping condemnation of totalitarianism, embedded in a rich, imaginative, highly experimental narrative. In the words of the New York Review of Books it is "one of the major works of literature produced in postwar Europe."

The Guinea Pigs

Northwestern University Press

Morčata (Czech Edition)

Sixty-Eight Publishers

The Guinea Pigs is a chilling fable about dehumanization and alienation representing Vaculik's vision of the menace of Soviet domination in the wake of the 1969 invasion. Written in 1970, it is a sweeping condemnation of totalitarianism, embedded in a rich, imaginative, highly experimental narrative. In the words of the New York Review of Books it is "one of the major works of literature produced in postwar Europe."

Literary

Okpaku Communications Corp

Guinea Pigs ('London Magazine' editions)

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

London, London Magazine [

These witty and ironical short essays in the classic Czech genre known as feuilletons, or chronicles, show Ludvik Vaculik's philosophy, honesty and humor. His work, in George Theiner's stylish translation, will evoke a powerful response today from English-language readers wondering how to think clearly and keep their values in confusing times.
Author of the radical 2000 Words manifesto for writers during the Prague Spring of 1968, Ludvik Vaculik was banned from all official publishing after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia during two decades until the fall of communism with the Velvet Revolution of 1989. However, as founding editor of the "Padlock Editions" of informally circulated typescripts, he was central to maintaining independent writing and ideas in the Czech language.
After the Velvet Revolution confirmed his importance as an independent thinker and cultural figure, Vaculik continued his refusal to subscribe to accepted conventions. 'Democracy has made me a poor democrat' he wrote of the new Czech age of consumer culture, media sound bites and public relations.

Cup Of Coffee

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Readers International

"One of the major works of literature produced in postwar Europe. this brilliant book must be read."—New York Review of Books
A clerk at the State Bank begins to notice that something strange is going on— bank employees are stuffing their pockets with money every day, only to have it taken every evening by the security guards who search the employees and confiscate the cash. But, there's a discrepancy between what is being confiscated and what is being returned to the bank, and our hero is beginning to fear that a secret circulation is developing, one that could undermine the whole economy.
Meanwhile, the clerk and his family begin to keep guinea pigs, and at night, when everyone is asleep, our hero begins to conduct experiments with the pets, teaching them tricks, testing their intelligence and endurance, and using some rather questionable methods to encourage the animals to befriend him.
Ludvík Vaculík's The Guinea Pigs is one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century. Vaculík owes much to Kafka, his fellow countryman, but he had direct experience of the oppressive absurdity that lived in Kafka's imagination, which here is expressed with an ironic and knowingly innocent Czech smile.
Ludvík Vaculík is the author of a number of number of novels and essay collections. One of the leading literary figures during the Prague Spring of 1968, his manifesto The Two Thousand Words led to his banishment from the Communist Party, the censorship of his writing, and decades of persecution.
Káca Polácková has translated numerous prominent Czech writer in addition to Ludvík Vaculík, including Josef Skvorecky and Bohumil Hrabal.

Open Letter

Tagträume: Alle Tage eines Jahres (German Edition)

Reich

It’s 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing period known as normalization, and Ludvík Vaculík has writer’s block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his powerful novel, The Guinea Pigs, and it was in 1968 that he wrote his anti-regime manifesto, Two Thousand Words, which the Soviet Union used as a pretext for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of his friend, the poet and surrealist painter Jiří Kolář, Vaculík begins to keep a diary, “a book about things, people, and events.” This marks the beginning of A Czech Dreambook. Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculík turns out to have written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction—an inverted roman à clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses, and the real leaders of the Czech underground play major roles. Undisputedly the most debated novel among the Prague dissident community of the 1980s, it is a work that Vaculík himself described as an amalgam of “hard-boiled documentary” and “magic fiction,” while Václav Havel called it “a truly profound and perceptive account. . . . A great novel about modern life and the crisis of contemporary humanity.” A Czech Dreambook has been hailed as the most important work of Czech literature in the past forty years. And yet it has never before been available in English. Flawlessly translated by Gerald Turner, Vaculík’s masterpiece is a brilliant exercise in style, dry humor, and irony—an important portrait of the lives and longings of the dissidents and post-Communist elites.

A Czech Dreambook (Modern Czech Classics)

Karolinum Press, Charles University

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