Patrik Linhart: Language in the Lion’s Maw

The short stories and poems in the book Jazyk ve lví tlamě (Language in the Lion’s Maw) were written at a time when the author headed a Czech language course in Lviv while a war raged at the other end of Ukraine in Luhansk and Donetsk. While battles were taking place far away, the war was also present in Galicia… groups of soldiers at Lviv train station, the stories of veterans, war wounded. These stories are rhythmic with the author’s sense of the grotesque. “For us, Europeans, it’s an almost unreal feeling, oppressive, that bombs are falling so near us. What’s more for me it’s a deeply familiar city and that lunatic Jurko wants to fight! I saw him brandish a machete against birch trees… and I myself can stand up to such evil armed with only humour – otherwise I too will fall to it,” Patrik Linhart writes on the current situation in which the Russians are shelling Lviv.