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Bohuslav Woody Vašulka

A selection of poetry and short prose written by Vašulka when he was still preparing to study at FAMU in Prague was published at the end of 2022. It should be recalled that the Brno native was a generational contemporary of writers and poets such as Jiří Kratochvil (1940), Milan Uhde (1936), Jiří Kuběna Paukert (1936), Jaroslav Mareš (1937) and Pavel Švanda (1936). In his literary experiments, which Vašulka himself arranged in an inedited collection, some of the themes he returned to throughout his life appear: war and technology, the utopian and dystopian vision of the interconnection between the human world and the world of machines, the tense relationship between the individual and society, the myth of the romantic artist, the desire for freedom and overcoming the earth's gravity, and a sense of play and irony. 

The short stories and poems reflect the atmosphere of Brno in the 1950s and early 1960s, with various appropriations of historicism, symbolism, decadence, poetry and surrealism. Sometimes the texts border on parody, sarcasm, sometimes contemporary allusions flash between the lines (exclamations "to the Hungarians"). Among the short stories are short, self-contained memories of childhood and youth, including the experience of military service, while others resemble a chapter of an existential novel or the script of a science fiction film. The controversial relationship between man and machine, elaborated here, for example, in the texts Silence and As He Leaves, became the philosophical framework for the author's later work in the field of electronic media art.

The book contains photographs from the private archive of the Vasulka family, from the archive of Jiří Vanýsek and from the archives managed by the Vasulka Kitchen Brno and the Vasulka Foundation in Iceland.

Prepared by Miloš Vojtěchovský for the Centre for New Media Art - Vasulka Kitchen Brno.