Bohuslav Reynek à Petrkov

by Sylvie Germain

Bohuslav Reynek, born and deceased in Petrkov (1892-1971), a tiny village in the hills, belongs to the kind of artists whose work, created in loneliness, humility, and passion, constitutes a wonderful answer to the philosophical question raised by Holderlin:"... and why having poets when it is indigence time?". The life of Reynek took place in an era of particular and extreme moral and spiritual indigence, but he fought that misery and refused to fall for its fading.

144 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 1998

About the author

Germain received a doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne, and taught it at the French School in Prague from 1987 to 1993.
She claimed that philosophy, 'a continuous wonder' to her, was also too 'analytical', and she switched from Descartes and Heidegger to Kafka and Dostoevsky.
She grew up in rural France, in an area steeped in mythology and folklore, and she admitted 'that the power of place had a huge effect on me but it was an unconscious one'. That her prose was 'related to the earth ... the soil, the peasants, the trees', was revealed in her first novel, The Book of Nights (1985), which won six literary awards.
The second novel, Night of Amber (1987) continued from the first, and was followed by Days of Anger (1989). Despite this three-part structure, Germain claimed that she was 'trying only to express an obsessive image and to explain it to myself. I have no pretensions to creating a mythos. Each book begins with an image or a dream and I try to express that and give it coherence.'