Gravedigger

Jan Kamenicek

He is described as a leading Czech writer of the Kafka-type. He wrote biographical short stories and radio plays, including. Thirteen Beautiful Years (1978), Maturation (1979), Interview (1980), Variations on a Theme of Paganini (1982), Counterpoints (1983), From My Life (1984), Clock at the Bachs (1985), Autumn in the New World (1986), etc. He has written television music scripts for television together with his long-time co-author Svatoslav Gosman, including. Images from the History of Czech Music or the ballet Alice in Wonderland. He began to publish in magazines, and his first manuscripts were published in samizdat. Jan Kameníček debuted in official book production in 1988 with his book Requiem for Cantor Bach. In his first books, Kameníček naturally continued to develop the themes he had previously prepared for radio and television. Soon, however, he became increasingly concerned with questions of human existence or existentialism. Already in 1990, and repeatedly afterwards, the Czech literary historian František Kautman described Jan Kameníček as in a sense a follower of Franz Kafka, or a Kafka-type writer. Kameníček's balance book Zdánlivé zbytečnosti (2013), which was written in the form of an interview with editor Jiří Lojín, is, in contrast to his previous work, dedicated to young creators and all those interested in creative writing. The authors "discuss writing techniques and the actual need for writing, the construction of dialogue and monologue". Kameníček also recalls the cultural environment of the 1970s and 1980s in socialist Czechoslovakia and some of its personalities.