Vashan Laskoc

The following is excerpted from the introduction of  Citrad Hrouvy’s book The Many Lives of Vashan Laskoc:

Knowledge about Vashan Laskoc is almost outweighed by the lack of it.  We do know that he was born in Prague at the turn of the twentieth century to a Czech father and a French mother, who herself was half English.  The date of his birth itself is uncertain, estimated between 1902 and 1905.  With the birth of Czechoslovakia after the First World War, the incursions of the Germans into it prior to the second war and the later the invasion by the Soviet Union, any paperwork giving a definite date of his birth has been lost.  In addition to this, his surname, Laskoc appears to be more Yugoslavian than Czech, though his father claims their family to be one of the many Prussians who settled in Bohemia during the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  It is this amorphous beginning that leads me to understand why Vashan Laskoc wrote more of his fiction under assumed names in different countries than he did using his own name in his own homeland.

I first discovered Laskoc while I was reading Jorge Luis Borges.  One of Borges’ ideas was not to write all the books he thought of but to write about people discussing those books.  This led me to an idea of finding a writer in a certain geographical place and historical time with a specific psychological makeup and then exploring what these affectors, if I might use that word, would have upon his writing.  Having been reading a great deal of Modernist European literature, I was not surprised, in that time of expansion, experimentation that I should stumble upon Laskoc.  I should like to post a photograph or drawing of Laskoc, however the few that I have found all seem to be of different men.  Given his desire for anonymity, this is not surprising.

The period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a hotbed of change across all of society with the invention of the wireless radio, the automobile, aircraft, new drugs and medicines have shaped the world to this day but it was in the area of the arts that change was felt the most.  Avant gardes would rise to prominence only to be overtaken by a different avant garde, many of them never lasting long enough to become movements much less schools.  In writing realism was still being written but the rise of psychology, the pushing aside of plot as a necessary device, experimental forms in both poetry and prose gave writers more tools to work with than they had ever had before.  Science, through physics, had pulled the canvas back on reality and writer and artists wanted to reveal there was more to reality than met the mind.  Even the surrealists, on page and canvas, sought a different yet equally valid way of representing this sort of new reality.  This is the era in which Vashan Laskoc grew up.

On this page look for links to all of the fiction I post from Vashan Laskoc as well as links to more excerpts from Hrouvy’s forthcoming book.