Chad Evans Wyatt
Jáchym Topol was born in Prague on August 4, 1962. He comes from a well-known literary family. His father, Josef Topol, is a renowned Czech playwright, poet, and Shakespeare translator, who was very active in all dissident activities, while his grandfather, Karel Schulz, was a prominent Catholic writer best known for a trilogy on the life and work of Michelangelo.
Topol's writing began with lyrics for a rock band called Psí vojáci (Dog Soldiers), led by his younger brother, Filip, in the late 70s and early 80s. In 1982 he cofounded the samizdat magazine Violit, and in 1985 Topol cofounded Revolver Revue, a samizdat review that specialized in new Czech writing.
Because of his father's dissident activities, Topol was not allowed to go to university. Therefore, after graduating from the gymnasium, he worked as a stoker, stocker, construction worker, and coal deliveryman. Several times he was imprisoned for short periods, both for his samizdat publishing activities and for his smuggling across the Polish border in cooperation with Polish Solidarity. He was also a signatory of the Charter 77 human rights declaration.
Topol played an active part in the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, taking part in initial meetings of Civic Forum, as well as writing, editing, and publishing the independent newsletter Informacní servis (Information Service), which became, after the revolution, the investigative weekly Respekt. Topol remained at Respekt as a reporter while continuing as editor-in-chief of Revolver Revue. (He left Respekt in 1992 and Revolver in 1993.)
His first collection of poetry, I Love You Madly, published in samizdat in 1988, received the Tom Stoppard Prize for Unofficial Literature (founded in 1983 by Mr. Stoppard, a British playwright of Czech parents, and awarded by the Charter 77 Foundation in Stockholm). In 1990 I Love You Madly was published officially by Atlantis. Topol's second volume of poetry, The War Will Be On Tuesday, came out in 1993. Topol's poetry has been translated into Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Polish, and Vietnamese. In October 1994, Allen Ginsberg read a few poems by Topol, in Mr. Zucker's translation, at a festival in New York City.
Topol's first work of fiction, City Sister Silver (Sestra), published by Atlantis in 1994, won the Egon Hostovský Prize as Czech book of the year (the prize was founded in 1973 by Regina Hostovská, widow of the Czech novelist Egon Hostovský, who had gone into exile in the United States; until 1989 it was awarded each year to a work of prose by a persecuted Czech author published in exile, and then became the major award for all Czech prose).
Topol's novella Andel (Angel, the name of a Prague metro stop) was published in 1995. In 1996 Topol translated a collection of Native American legends and myths from English into Czech under the title Trnová dívka (Thorn Girl).
Topol's publications in English include an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Sister (Trafika no. 5, 1995); poems from War (Trafika no. 2, 1994); an excerpt from the short story "A Trip to the Train Station" (Prague: A Traveler's Literary Companion, Whereabouts Press, 1995); and a longer excerpt from the same story in a Czech story anthology titled This Side of Reality (Serpent's Tail, 1996). Chapter 19 of City Sister Silver appeared in translation in the Spring 1997 issue of The Chariton Review, published by Truman State University (Kirksville, MO). Chapter 2, portions of Chapter 6, as well as a chapter from Andel appeared in Catbird's 1997 anthology Daylight in Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation.
In 1995, Topol was awarded a literary residency fellowship by the Ledig House in upstate New York.
Topol has also written lyrics for three albums by singer Monika Naceva: Monosti tu sou (Possibilities Are There, 1994), Nebe je rudý (The Sky Is Red, 1996), and Mimoid (1998). In addition, poems from Sister were set to music and released as a CD (Sestra: Jáchym Topol & Psí Vojáci) by Filip Topol and his band in 1994.
He lives in Prague with his wife and daughter.
CITY SISTER SILVER is a phantasmagoric attempt to capture the emotional dislocation that followed the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.
"A masterpiece of postcommunist Czech fiction."
--Talk
$19.95 paper, $40 library edition, 508 pp., ISBN-0945774-45-1, 43-5.
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