The Last Horse of Pompeii

Posledný kôň Pompejí

Slovaška

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Pavel Vilikovský

I declared, for example, that if someone is to see his own emotionality, Slav or any other, they need a mirror, without that they can’t see it on themselves.

Posledný kôň Pompejí – The Last Horse of Pompeii is a narration about the Central European identity confronted with the contemporary world reality. The book is playful, witty, with dark humor, a sad account of the world we live in. As in some of his previous books, Vilikovský unmasks mythicised features of Slovak nation. The narrator of the story, a young documentary filmmaker coming to London for a research fellowship, is expected to write an essay on the elements of Slavic emotionality in the literary work of Joseph Conrad. The narrator realizes at the very beginning that this kind of emotionality may exist, but he refuses to put a label on it. He leads the reader along another path, more winding and obscure, but along it the reader can learn more about the Slavic emotionality, among other things.

Pavel Vilikovský (1941)

Prose writer, translator and journalist. He is one of a strong generation whose appearance in the nineteen sixties fundamentally transformed the physiognomy of Slovak prose. Compositional and thematic originality and the unusualness of situations in the plot classify Pavel Vilikovský as one of the representatives of postmodern literature. Many of his works have been translated into other languages. He is twice winner of the literary prize Anasoft Litera, more recently with the book Prvá a posledná láska/First and Last Love (2013), where the central theme is love. His latest title is the prose work Letmý sneh / Fleeting Snow (2014), which is a concentration of wisdom and love of life. In his translation activities Vilikovský focuses mainly on translating from English and American literature.