Mirákl

This large-scale novel from 1972, subtitled Political Detective Story, deals with miracles, politics and ideology. It is based on a detective plot connected with the murder of a rural parish priest by the Aesthetists and the plot is based on the Czechoslovak reality of 1949-1970. Radio recording from 2024. The narrative has two linked epic centres based on real events: so-called the Číhošt' miracle of the spring of 1949 and the attempted political miracle also called the Prague Spring of 1968. The narrator Danny Smiřický is a witness and actor of both. Mirákl not only conveys what the narrator and his acquaintances experienced in 1949-1970 in Czechoslovakia and abroad, but also speaks about questions of faith, about the possibilities and limits of human knowledge. The basic building principle of the novel is an associative chain of cinematic episodes and scenes. Repeated returns to certain ideas, parallels or parables significantly co-create the complex structure of the text. There are several mysteries and miracles in the novel, some of which are logically explained and others that are not. Škvorecký's novel respects the tension based on the fact that the essence of the detective story is a rationally solvable mystery, while the miracle is conditioned by the operation of irrational forces, but at the same time it masterfully exploits this tension. From the author's notes: "I wrote Mirákl three years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. It is usually said that one should have a distance from the events one is narrating, which is said to guarantee a higher quality. I don't know. As for anything in literature, there is no law that applies to this without exception, and I can only hope that Michael is such an exception. The basis of the novel's detective storyline is the famous murder of the parish priest Toufar, who was murdered by the StB in connection with the so-called. the miracle of Číhošt'. But I only used that as a springboard for imagination; otherwise the story and character of the worthy lord Doufal and his miracle is completely fictional. For the first time I applied here the technique that Joseph Conrad called deliberate confusion, i.e. a deliberate confusion, for it seemed to me appropriate to the depiction of our confused times." Petr Turek