The Clerical Republic (Farská republika)

Abstract

About the Author: Dominik Tatarka (1913–1989) was born in Drienové in the Kysuce region of North-Western Slovakia into a large family of peasants. His father was killed in World War I, his mother had to take care of him and his five sisters alone. He studied French and Czech philology at Charles University in Prague and at Sorbonne in Paris (1934–1939). During World War II he taught in high schools in Žilina (1939– 1941) and Martin (1941–1944). In 1944 Tatarka became a member of the Communist Party and took part in the Slovak National Uprising against Nazi Germany. After the war he worked as a journalist and as a scriptwriter. His works often reflect his personal experiences. His first pieces of prose were influenced by surrealism and the avantgarde. Tatarka translated French works (Musset, Maupassant and Vercors) into Slovak. In 1956, he wrote a satirical short story The Demon of Conformism against Stalinism (it was published in the journal Kultúrny život in 1956, but it couldn’t be edited into a book until 1963). Tatarka protested against the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and resigned from membership in the Communist Party. In the 1970s and 1980s he was persecuted by the Communist regime, banned from public life and not allowed to publish anymore. From 1970 he worked as a forest worker. Later he lived as a permanently disabled pensioner, his works were edited only in samizdat or exiled publishing houses. He was one of the few Slovak signatories of Charter 77. In October 1987 he was the first to sign Charter’s Declaration on the deportation of Jews from Slovakia (to the 45th anniversary of the deportations organised by the Slovak government).