Dušan Kužel (1940 – 1985)

Prose writer, author of radio and television plays. At the beginning of the period of “Normalisation” he was labelled an antisocialist element and the communist regime did not allow him to publish any more literary works. In the seventies he wrote mainly radio and television plays designed for an adolescent audience. In the last years of his life he worked as an editor of the journal Film a divadlo/Film and Theatre.

Kužel’s only novel Lampa/The Lamp is an original work, in which the distinctive features of the author’s prose find their culmination along with his views on literature, which he perceived as a search for authenticity in life. The superficial comicality of his narration both harbours and reveals more serious, even tragic motifs and this special mixture has the effect of making the resulting form almost like a grotesque comedy. The novel could only be published in 1991 and a year later the author was awarded in memoriam the Prize of the Association of Slovak Writers.  

The novel was written in mid 1970s, but was published only in 1991. It belongs to those literary works that could not be published in the political regime after the 1968 invasion of the Soviet army and represented an alternative to the official literature.