Sylva Fischerová: Elza a muchomůrka

Sylva Fischerová's new prose (published in Druhé město, 2022) is set in Prague in the 1980s, which, however, is not depicted in a first-hand and straightforward way, through notorious events and phenomena. The author evokes the atmosphere of the period from the inside, so to speak, through the characters and their dialogues and feelings, by inserting diary entries, descriptions of dreams or excerpts from reading. The realistic gradually transitions into the dreamlike, the description of the pubs of the time and the military cathedral in Motola slowly changes into a description of foreign mythical events and places, and everything is supported by a love story, which is not the main purpose and meaning of the narrative. A firmly constructed text thus becomes a parable situated in a specific time and place, but at the same time very universal. Sylva Fischerová's novella is absolutely remarkable and offers much more experience in a small space than the thick novels that today are devoured by crowds of tens of thousands.
Petr A. Bílek

Sylva Fischerová (b. 1963, Prague) studied French at the language school in Brno. In 1983, she began to study philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of the UK and physics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the UK, two years later she switched to classical philology at the Faculty of Arts of the UK, where in 1991 she graduated with a diploma thesis The Problem of the Unity of Areté in Plato (on the dialogue Prátagoras). In the years 1995-2003, she completed her post-graduate studies there, which she finished with her dissertation Can the Muses Lie? (The Muses in the prooimium of Hesiod's Theogony). Since 1992, she has been working at the Institute of Greek and Latin Studies as an assistant professor. He currently lectures on ancient Greek literature, religion and philosophy at Charles University. She is the author of eleven poetry collections, she also writes short stories, novels and children's books. For her book interview with the philosopher Karl Floss, God will always shake the building (Prague 2011), she received the Award of the Foundation of the Czech Literary Fund.

In Czech language.