Now for something from real life

Nominated for the Magnesia Litera award. At first glance, this prose piece by Anna Blažíčková recounts her life in a partnership with Přemysl Blažíček (1932–2002), a leading Czech literary scholar. In reality, she uses this subject as a starting point for a deep reflection on her own personal growth, the course of her life, and public events in the twentieth century from the 1940s to the present day.

The author, herself established in literature as a writer and literary historian, narrates, seemingly in a random chronological order, about the beginnings of her own marriage, then about her first meeting with Blažíček, her university studies in the mid-1950s, her childhood and adolescence in Bechyně, the childhood of her own children in Prague, the Institute for Czech Literature, her illness, and so on. However, as the pages turn, a certain internal logic of the narrative gradually asserts itself. This logic prioritises the more important “life of memory” over the linear progression of life and historical events, guided not by temporal sequence, but by the intensity of the recalled events and a unifying, matter-of-fact, and subtly ironic style.