Karel Hvížďala

* 1941

  • “My grandpa and grandma had a summer house in Luka pod Medníkem. A guy used to come and graze his goats around our garden, looking like James Joyce. He wore remnants of an English uniform, shorts, round glasses and a baseball cap with a long green peak. He apparently didn’t belong to the goats, which caught my attention. So one day I escaped to graze goats with him. Suddenly, he had a listening ear and could tell stories. It turned out he was formerly Jaroslav Šalda’s editor who got fired from Melantrich publishing house. He had a huge library in a little house which he built near to ours. I used to come there, borrow books and listen to his stories about the workings of the publishing house. Suddenly, I could sense that he was speaking of a world which had disappeared, which was no more, and I felt like writing it down. So I took notes of his stories in notebooks. But when I read it after myself, I found out it wasn’t what it should have been. I could remember the content well but the sensation and the experience from the storytelling wasn’t there. So I kept rewriting it throughout the whole summer. Back then for the first time in my life realized that it wasn’t about the words, about compiling them together, but that I had to get inside all of what there was in the man – his looks, his impressions, the gestures he was making.”

  • “At home, they knew this was it. For a long time. Actually, our father told me and my brother to leave the country. He himself made a mistake not accepting a job offer from Philips company. He didn’t want to leave his parents and family behind. Probably this wasn’t even true and all of them could have left but for some reason they didn’t. So the first thing dad told us was that life was short and things would get worse still in here. But I thought that it was up to them to leave, that I wouldn’t go so quickly. Only after Charter 77 when it appeared it would take a long time, I made the decision and left in ’78. My brother still laid our parents to rest and then joined me.”

  • „Když se to celé obrátilo a dostal jsem nabídku se sem vrátit a rychle privatizovat jedny noviny, vytrhnout je z toho chumlu, kde bychom mohli být vydíráni jak přídělem papírů, tak časem tiskáren, dal jsem si jen dvě podmínky. Ať mi vrátí byt a občanství. Byt mi dali během několika dnů, ale to občanství trvalo rok. Vrátil jsem se a neměl jsem žádné problémy, někteří exulanti si stěžují, že je tady nikdo nechtěl. Kromě prvních dnů, kdy mi chodily do redakce dopisy, kde byl třeba namalovaný strom na Karlově náměstí, kde budu viset, až se to zase obrátí, jsem se s ničím takovým nesetkal. Já jsem se ale nikdy nevrátil, abych tady byl ministr nebo něco takového. Tak to asi nikomu nevadilo.“

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    Praha, 08.03.2016

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I was always interested in writing rather than in functions

Karel Hvížďala
Karel Hvížďala
photo: sbírka Post Bellum

Karel Hvížďala was born on 16 August 1941 in Prague. He graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague but already at that time focused on writing, most of all poetry. In the 1960s he was a member of the editorial staff of the Mladý svět magazine, and later worked for the publishing house Albatros where he established the Objektiv edition. In 1978 he and his family immigrated to West Germany. For twelve years he lived in Bonn, continuing in both journalistic and literary work. He wrote several radio plays there, contributed to exile magazines, worked in the Index publishing house and as a journalist collaborated among others with Radio Free Europe. In the 1980s he became known for his book Dálkový výslech (“Long-distance Interrogation”), an interview with Václav Havel. After the Velvet Revolution he returned to Czechoslovakia where he worked for a while as editor-in-chief of Mladá fronta DNES daily and in 1994 co-founded Týden magazine. Since 1999 he is a freelance journalist and writer. He authored numerous other interview books (with personalities such as Karol Sidon, Pavel Landovský, Václav Bělohradský, Jiří Gruša and others), novels, novellas and radio plays.