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Reason

Rozum

Slovaška

Rudolf Sloboda

Those long nights without words! What shall I think up for my further life? The state I am in, it is no longer either scepticism or anger, or despair. It is death itself. I’m a dead soul and I am worse than all the criminals in the world.

Sloboda‘s prose writing has strong autobiographical features. The author, nearly always, describes his own experience and workings of his mind in his prose writing: he focuses on the search for the meaning of life and on the attitudes of an individual in an estranged society. Rozum – Reason brings out a story of an intellectual, engaged in filmmaking, who in vain tries to seek the way out of the maze of problems of contemporary society and of ruffled family relations. The motif of suicide echoes through the novel as a solution for a situation without a proper way out. This Sloboda‘s most appealing novel, taking place partly in his native village, where he lived all his life, and in the film studios where he worked as a scriptwriter, is the evidence of the difficult situation of an intellectual in the 1970s

Rudolf Sloboda (1938 – 1995)

Prose writer, poet, dramatist, script writer and author of literature for children and young people, he is one of the most outstanding and most interesting authors of Slovak literature from the second half of the 20th century. A distinctive feature of his prose work is the brilliant narrative style. The basic motifs in a number of his works are love, jealousy, eroticism, loneliness, the search for a meaning to life or belief in God. An important part of his work was the writing of dairies, some of which were later published in book form. One of his most remarkable works is the novel Rozum/Reason (1982), in which he developed the dominant theme of his work – the story of a frustrated intellectual groping around in the labyrinth of a communist society, but also in the maze of his own mind. In the nineteen nineties his work became the symbol of freedom in Slovak society (his surname also translates as “freedom”). His last book, which appeared shortly before he chose to put an end to his life, is a collection of stories Herečky/Actresses (1995).