Jaroslava Blažková's Jahniatko a grandi is the work of a major Slovak writer who was a key member of the new voices of the liberalization in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. She published two novels, numerous short story collections and much work for children. Her work Ohňostroj pre deduška won the Hans Christian Andersen International Prize for children's literature.

Jahniatko a grandi is a collection of short stories published in 1964. The stories are of outsiders, of young women who cannot, will not settle into the conventional paths offered them. In the first story the protagonist, after the first few weeks of teaching in a village school is confronted by her principal and four colleagues with, "What do want want? What is it you really want? Embroidered pillows, no. Warmth, no. A subscription to Slovakia Today magazine, no. Recipe collecting, no. All that we have heard. But what do you want?" And her answer typifies the answers of all the protagonists of these stories: "I was afraid of settling, of getting old in a decent practical blue coat, I was afraid of growing moldy in a moldy shack, in a moldy village, from which all the youth had fled, where an unmarried man was rarer than a wolf. I was afraid that my dreams about miraculous independence, about actions, adventures and passion would disappear into the wind and turn sour like poorly corked wine with the corpses of fruitflies on the bottom." So she fights, flees and has adventures, as do all the protagonists in the collection. A city girl visits her boyfriend in the country and elicits nothing but horrified scorn at her bleached blond hair and her city manners. A young girl, born to a whorish mother, father unknown, fights her nose-upturned classmates and teachers. Josef the bricklayer will not talk to, or even hear, the rabbly drunk lewd talk around him. These protagonists are united in their sense of their need to live, to be different.

Jaroslava Blažková, the author, was herself a little too different. In 1968 the armies of the Soviet Union and the rest of the Warsaw Pact had had enough of the liberalization experiment in Czechoslovakia. They took over, and installed a puppet government which did not fall for over twenty years. Blažková, along with hundreds of thousands of her compatriots, left the country. She settled in Canada, but suffered from enormous depression and homesickness which prevented her from writing. Only in the last ten years had she come out with new works.

Unfortunately, as is the case with a great many writers from Eastern Europe, the vast majority of her work has never been translated into English. (There are translations into twelve other languages.) Two translators are currently working on rectifying this, one working on stories from this collection.… (más)