AN ATTEMPT AT A LIFE ALTERNATIVE: PRICE FOR SECULARISATION (Dusan Kuzel: 'Lampa')

The study deals with a novel of a Slovak prose writer Dusan Kuzel (1940 - 1985), called 'Lampa' (A Lamp). This work was written in the first half of the 70th but it was published only in 1991. The novel belongs to the many texts at the turn of 60th and 70th, which could not be published in the political and cultural regime after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. It represents a structural, progressively productive and value relevant alternative to officially published literature of that period. The prose 'Lampa' (A Lamp) is an ambitious project, organically joined several traditional novel, types: a novel of journey, scholastic - autodidactic novel as well as a novel with a socially critical intention. The work of Kuzel is also connected with 90th, mainly with its ironical revealing of literary substance, when the theme becomes a literature itself. The novel is a sceptical polemic with 'great stories': and their teleology: with a Christian story of the 'history of salvation', with a socialist story of emancipation of a person of work and then with another 'story of salvation', based on a belief in technological progress. It is also a fathoming of the situation which follows when the big tightly connected narrations lost their credit and emptified: they are situations of non-control, amorphic freedom, which is transformed from an ideal into a phantom.