Jan Balabán: Black Star

Jan Balabán's essay Black Star is dedicated to the city in which Balabán has lived almost all his life and to which he was therefore forced to take a stand. Jan Balabán borrowed the title Černá hvězda (Black Star), a poetic synonym for the North Moravian metropolis, from Jarek Nohavica, and he also acknowledges this authorship. Balabán sees Ostrava with love and hate. Jan Balabán has divided his essay into eleven images framed by two arrivals to a city that is hard to arrive in and even harder to leave. The first one took place sometime in the 1950s, the second one at the end of the 1990s. Between these two extremes, for the extremes are both real and imaginary, the author paints Ostrava with all its secrecy, with the noise, of unkindness, loneliness, of cruelty and undoubted beauty.