Gravedigger

Jan Kameníček

He is described as a leading Czech writer of the Kafkaesque type. He wrote biographical short stories and radio plays, including Třináct krásných let (1978), Zrání (1979), Interview (1980), Variace na Paganiniho téma (1982), Kontrapunkty (1983), Z mého života (1984), Hodiny u Bachů (1985), Podzim v Novém světě (1986) and others. For television, he wrote musical screenplays with his long-time co-author Svatoslav Gosman, including Obrazy z dějin české hudby and the ballet Alenka v říši divů (Alice in Wonderland). He began publishing in magazines, and his first manuscripts were distributed as samizdat. Jan Kameníček made his official book debut in 1988 with Rekviem za kantora Bacha. In his first books, Kameníček naturally continued to develop the themes he had previously prepared for radio and television. Soon, however, he began to devote himself more and more to questions of human existence or directly to existentialism. As early as 1990, and then repeatedly later, the Czech literary historian František Kautman described Jan Kameníček as, in a sense, a follower of Franz Kafka, or rather a writer of the Kafkaesque type. Kameníček's retrospective book Zdánlivé zbytečnosti (Apparent Superfluities, 2013), created in the form of an interview with editor Jiří Lojín, is, unlike his previous work, dedicated to young creators and all those interested in creative writing. In it, the authors “analyse writing techniques and the inherent need to write, the construction of dialogue and monologue”. At the same time, Kameníček reminisces about the cultural environment of the seventies and eighties in socialist Czechoslovakia and some of its personalities.