Essay

Tak už mám konečně opravenou tu esej, která napoprvý byla ohodnocená jako naprostá fraška na anglický jazyk. Nakonec jsem dostala 85%, což... je trochu lepší průměr :). Nechápu, proč u jedný věty bylo napsaný "bad sentence", a že asi nechápu význam slova "autobiographical", ale už to nehodlám řešit. Taky jsem měla špatně pár členů, 3 jsem teď opravila, zbytek si nepamatuju, takže tam je ještě pár chyb, ale... podle mě je to naprosto úžasná esej a ať se jde vycpat, angličan pitomej!!! :D:/
Taky se chci omluvit, že v publikaci a vlastně ve všem teď bude opět pauza, další tejden mám 4 nebo 5 zápočtů nebo zkoušek (nechápu, proč se to vůbec rozlišuje) a... no prostě do konce května mám co dělat :D:/
Mějte se ;)


Theme: What are the main themes that concern contemporary Czech writers and poets?

Something slightly different

J. K. Rowling is a bestselling author, partially thanks to the popularity of the fantasy genre. The number of vampire stories is so large there is a special section for them in libraries and bookshops.  Sex and forbidden love are other themes admired by millions of readers.  Books like Gabriel’s Inferno, Eighty Days, My Body and many others are being published as a follow-up to the successful Fifty Shades Trilogy and people around the world cannot get enough of them. Still, Czech authors are not very interested in this phenomenon…

According to the “Portál české literatury“, most significant features of our contemporary writers are autobiography and authenticity. For example Ludvík Vaculík and Michal Viewegh have been inspired by daily life. Michal Viewegh is our most popular author whose literary work has been translated into more than 20 languages and some of it was filmed. The Axe by Ludvík Vaculík was one of the most influential novels to appear in Czechoslovakia during the cultural reawakening of the 1960s and is still mentioned in History and Literature classes. The characters of autobiographical authors are usually ordinary people placed in ridiculous situations or dealing with complicated relationships; so the readers feel close to them. Also the language and style are rather banal, informal and natural.

However, some of our writers seem to be more attracted to the East than to the native land. Exceptional and highly regarded documentarian Martin Ryšavý and his Journeys to Siberia gives us very exact picture of local people and their feelings since 1989. Unlike the preceding authors he prefers more complex and flowery language and pays attention to the details. One of his books called Vrač was awarded the Josef Škvorecký and the Bank Literaris Austria prices. Also, two women writers have travelled to the East: Petra Hůlová (Memories to my Grandmother) and Pavlína Brzáková (The Larch Soul). Pavlína Brzáková spent ten years among Siberian people and apart from collecting plenty of their fairy-tales and popular wisdom she wrote down her life in the wild nature.

Nowadays, it is popular to keep a blog and publish stories for free. When you draw attention of a considerable number of readers and have the courage to send your writing to the publishing house, you might become a regular author as well. This concerns especially young women and girls, e.g. Michaela Burdová who wrote her first successful trilogy The Legacy of Unicorns at the age of 16 and was even translated into Serbian. The youths more often choose world popular themes and foreign country to place the plot in. They usually tell stories of young women living in the United States, solving problems with love and dealing with not so ordinary (but very real) lives. There are at least two books where you can read about this: The Bravetts by Kateřina Petrusová and The Cuckoo by Karolína Limrová.

All summed up, I would say the Czech literature is something slightly different; it has its own phenomena and does not suffer from a lack of readers at the same time. I wish all of our writers a great deal of inspiration for their next masterpieces because, in my opinion, it is more important to bring something new and thoughtful than to be a bestselling author of pulp fiction.