Jiří Gruša: Questionnaire

The poet, prose writer and essayist Jiří Gruša (1938-2011) first published his novel The Questionnaire in the Prague samizdat edition Petlice in 1976. The landscape architect is unsuccessfully looking for a job, and when he holds his personal questionnaire in his hand for the sixteenth time, he decides to fill it out as carefully as possible. He therefore goes back in his memory to the history of his ancestors, explaining his origins and reconstructing stories from long before his birth. In contrast to the disembodied rubrics of the cadre questionnaire, the author tries to point out the diversity and elusiveness of concrete human life. The story ultimately reveals the state of permanent threat to man in a totalitarian system. reads: Jan Vlasak.