The only known prose works from the 1950s by an author who was one of the contemporaries of Bohumil Hrabal, Egon Bondy and Vladimír Boudník and was known mainly as a poet. His fondness for the monstrosities of communist socialist art is subtly present in both of Vodseďálek's prose works. They bring a new quality in that the author here follows in the footsteps of Ladislav Klíma's texts, whose absolute pretension and solipsism he crosses in an original way with the ideological, stylistic, and motivic mobilisation of Jan des Esseintes. Such a combination evokes a subtle ironic humour, for although the protagonists of Calvary and Compensation are bored here in a truly honest way and reflect on their condition as much as they can, their decadent attitude is consistently and absurdly disturbed by the realities of the 1950s.
Czech edition