Peter Pi��t'anek remembered

Peter Pi��t'anek, 2014; (c) SME

By DONALD RAYFIELD

Peter Pi��t'anek, the finest of modern Slovak novelists, died of a drug overdose on March 22, just before his fifty-fifth birthday. I discovered his work ten years ago, as an external examiner for Rajendra Chitnis���s doctorate on Slovak prose. I was duty-bound to read the Pi��t'anek works Chitnis discussed: I rolled on the floor, helpless with laughter. Pi��t'anek���s irreverence, obscenity, wit and ingenuity would, I was sure, find a British publisher. After a year���s wait I gave up, wrote to Pi��t'anek and found a translator, Peter Petro, who shared Pi��t'anek���s own background in Bratislava���s semi-dissident demimonde, and his mix of languages (Viennese German, Hungarian and even Romany enrich Bratislava Slovak). We then published his most striking novel Rivers of Babylon and its two sequels with the Garnett Press.

No one has evoked so well Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, when thugs and secret policemen metamorphozed into racketeers and ���businessmen of the year���. Pi��t'anek portrayed sex and violence as graphically as a manga novelist and as convincingly as if he had experienced every sado-masochistic ploy of his anti-heroes. Yet when he came to London to launch Rivers of Babylon at Foyles, despite an endearing resemblance to Uncle Fester of the Addams family, he was all charm and self-deprecation. For all his dark satire, he was a reticent man, but with an uproarious sense of humour.  

His passion in London was not literary, but for a rare Spanish brandy, traced to a stockist in Ealing. His literary admirers found that he was an expert in Scotch whisky and had visited every distillery in the Highlands and islands. Even a successful Slovak novelist can���t sell enough books to make a comfortable living: Pi��t'anek made his main anti-hero R��cz an enthusiastic brandy and whisky drinker, so the Bratislava distributors for Hennessy, R��my-Martin and Macallan happily paid for placement with crates of their products. Food, unimportant to his heroes, was a preoccupation for Pi��t'anek: if his book, Recipes from the Family Archive, finds an English publisher, his study of brandies will prove as appealing as his fiction.

Pi��t'anek was in Communist days a drummer in a rock group (a life he celebrated in his novella The Musicians): this was then one of the few careers that allowed young Slovaks to travel abroad, if only to Bulgaria. Becoming a writer was harder, even after the Velvet Revolution. Pi��t'anek���s exposure of the underbelly of Slovak life and his satire on sacred Slovak pretensions (which he called ���narcissism���) caused a scandal. His novellas sympathized with the underdog: in the Young D��n��, he offended patriotic readers by taking as his hero not the wise beekeepers and chaste maidens of conventional Slovak novelists, but rather, a subnormal child of alcoholic peasants who spends his first wage on a Bratislava whore. Pi��t'anek���s genius became manifest in Rivers of Babylon which, with its sequels The Wooden Village  and The End of Freddy, formed a trilogy in which the thug who takes over the money-changing and prostitution rackets in a hotel transmutes into an oil oligarch. Pi��t'anek���s plotting has the ingenuity of Quentin Tarantino, the irony of Evelyn Waugh and, in the later novels, an obscenity that makes Last Exit to Brooklyn seem mealy-mouthed.

The third novel, The End of Freddy, showed another side to Pi��t'anek, who wrote in Czech whenever the novel���s action moved to Prague. Slovaks always felt like the underdogs in Czechoslovakia; although the two languages are mutually intelligible, Slovak films used to be subtitled for Czechs, while Slovaks had to watch Czech films without assistance. This homage to the Czech language provoked Pi��t'anek���s readers as much as his low-life characters did. Pi��t'anek loved to torment authority: his scurrilous trilogy of Tales about Vlad were such a thorn in the flesh of Vladim��r Me��iar, the Slovak prime minister, that nobody would have been surprised if the author had been drowned in the Danube.

Rivers of Babylon has now been translated into several European and Asian languages. Pi��t'anek was beginning to get, via the English versions of his novels, an international reputation; the Slovaks, more sophisticated with every year, came to value their enfant terrible. Pi��t'anek was full of plans: a fourth novel in the Rivers of Babylon series, in which the terrifying R��cz would lust after an aristocratic title and plot to get it by murdering his former enemy, the newly restored Hungarian Count Feri (after becoming the count���s adopted son). Pi��t'anek���s own childhood was reflected in the childhood of his other unsavoury hero, the car-park attendant and pornographer Freddy Piggybank: he planned to expand on this with an autobiographical novel about growing up in a brickworks to the sound of locomotives.

A decade ago Pi��t'anek���s now defunct online magazine and radio programmes won him fans half his age: they have grown up to be his most appreciative readers. Pi��t'anek recently published a new novel, The Hostage, which was to be adapted for film. His marginalization seemed over. But the depression that plagued him returned.