Zvuk dýní v zákulisí

A collection of texts that Eva Švankmajerová compiled and named during her lifetime. Her husband, Jan Švankmajer, supplemented the manuscript with illustrations from her drawings.

The collected texts of Eva Švankmajerová contained in this book are diverse in genre: childhood memories, dream records, distinctive, in many respects socio-critical essayistic-fiction treatises, texts on the border of prose poems and short stories, small dramatic forms - miniatures of film scripts or theatrical sketches, answers to surrealist surveys, author's contributions to collective surrealist games.

However, the genre diversity does not create a fragmented content and meaning: a distinct unifying axis is formed - in addition to the clear worldview of surrealist imaginative subversion - by the author's unmistakable language, sovereignly transposing the degraded lexicon and stylistic procedures of former "women's pulp fiction" into poetically provocative positions, in which she usually inseparably combines and intertwines her most private themes (love, sex, family life, relationships...) with critical commentaries on social phenomena (women's emancipation, institutionalized education, defiance against all forms of repression and stupidity, etc.).

The texts represent fundamental formal (commentaries) and substantive parallels to her own painting and poetic work: paintings boil, cars change shape as if in some psychedelic trip, the author dreams of putting on worn-out men's boxers and boiling worn-out children's Spartakiad sneakers in a pressure cooker. Omnivorous / creative / critical imagination.

The book is in Czech.