The ornament - FSK - forum slovanskih kultur

The ornament

Ornament

Slovaška

Vincent-Sikula-Foto-Peter-Prochazka-150x150.jpg.pagespeed.ce.I_Sd-h8bqh

Vincent Šikula

I am only a priest. No one has passed judgment on me. Because they had no reason to. How can they lock up someone who has done nothing? They don’t even say they have locked us up, they really don’t have the right to do that, they say they are isolating us, because we are religious fanatics.

Ornament – The ornament: The story of a student, Matej Hóz, takes place in the 1950s in the days of persecution of Christians by the communist régime. Matej billets a priest hiding from the state police in his apartment. They form a strange friendship, which remains the central theme of the story even after the priest disappears, nobody knows where. The absent friend is remembered through his sister Eva who becomes Hóz’s lover and wife, but also through the secret police, shadowing Hóz continuously and trying to recruit him as a police informer. The mysterious atmosphere of the story, warm emotional relations between the main characters and authenticity of the Slovak village make Šikula’s story an extensive testimony to a complex situation of a moral individual in a society with humanity stigmatized by totalitarian ideology.

Vincent Šikula (1936 – 2001)

Prose writer, poet and dramatist, author of books for children and young people.

His prose works are permeated with emotionality, musicality, colour and a feeling for poetic detail and musical themes are an important element. His trilogy of novels Majstri/Masters, about the Slovak National Uprising and the Second World War, holds a special place among his prose works. In his short stories he brought his style to perfection, its characteristics being brevity of expression, kind humour and excellent dialogue. Two of his last prose works were Tam, kde sa cesta skrúca/Where the Road Twists (2002) and Požehnaná taktovka/The Blessed Baton (2003). Both these books take the form of memoirs. The latter book mainly features people: painters, poets, prose writers, musicians, as well as the author’s own father and mother.

Šikula is a prose writer with distinguished authorial style and a unique gift for narration. He is considered one of the most gifted writers of the generation of 1960s.