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donate Summary of Revolver Revue 69 (2007)
RR 69 presents, among other things, two larger thematic segments: the first is devoted to Andrej Stankovich, the other to Isaak Babel. Stankovich's unfinished memoir is called What Remains Remembered: "My horoscope is that of a dead Gemini and live Cancer. It was put together by Prague's Rabbi, Karol Sidon. He commented on it with his typical chuckle: 'Nikolaj, your horoscope is even nicer than Jesus Christ's, ha, ha, ha!'" Stankovich's work in poetry and as a critic, and his social activities, are brought back to life in an interview conducted with his wife Olga, by Olga Havlova and Jarmila Belikova. In a text by Viktor Karlik, memories of the late Stankovich serve as the springboard for contemplations on the relationship of our society to an extraordinary critical personality, who demonstrated the integrity of his thoughts and his moral integrity on many occasions: "He was not afraid to think freely and to stand up for others publicly. He will not be forgiven for some time for this "asininity". In her study on Isaak Babel's play Maria (an excerpt from which we are reprinting, in Jan Zabrana's translation), Bettina Kaibach documents that this little-known play, at first glance condemning the representatives of the "old world" and agreeing with social transformation, can rightly be read as criticising the blind mechanism of revolutionary power and the author's "grim forecast of his own fate". The founder of American "new criticism", John Crowe Ransom, realised seventy years ago that "in a department of English, as in any other going business, the proprietory interest become vested. [...] The laborious Ph.D.s and historical publications [of the vestees] are their patents. Naturally, quite spontaneously, they would tend to perpetuate a system in which the power and the glory belonged to them." Ransom's disturbingly topical essay was translated by Petr Onufer. The new prose of Jaroslav Formanek and of Robert Krumphanzl is characterised by the specific modelling of the narrator. "The thirty-six-year-old Josef Bolf is one of the most prominent authors of the generation born in the 1970s," writes Petr Vanous in the introduction to a selection of Bolf's paintings. Inta Ruka from Latvia is another in the line of young photographers whose work caught Viktor Kolar's attention: "All her attention is directed toward people in front of the camera". "There is not so much fuss about a painting," thinks Lubomira Kmetova-Portelova, and RR shows her paintings and drawings on the theme of Doors and More Doors. In the second part of the Documentarists series, Adam Gebert focused on the work of Martin Marechek. Also continuing are the sections Studios (this time from the premises where paintings by Jan Merta come to life), and the Typography Notebook of Frantisek Storm (this time with the new font Anselm). The mechanical circus of Dagmar Urbankova came to life in Bergen, Norway; samples from the work of the Studio of Illustration and Graphic Art at the Prague Academy of Art, Architecture, and Design were chosen by Helena Santava. The Couleur opens with an analysis looking into Quality Czech Literature and State Subsidies. Other colourful pages offer texts about the drama of René Levinsky, the exhibitions of Neo Rauch, Veronika Richterova, and Karel Haloun, the collection James Bond and Major Zeman, the advancing normalisation in contemporary Czech television, and many others.
Published 2008-01-17
Original in Czech
Contributed by Revolver Revue
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