V. Raphael: The Sterile Canon. The resurrected mummy heads out to Šumava

Vladimir Ravel was born in 1898 in Fotis, Belhasimov region. He graduated from grammar school and then medicine in Prague and Montpellier, France. Practice psychiatry. After completing his medical practice in Dýšina and Blovice in Western Bohemia, he joined a psychiatric clinic in Prague in 1949. After a few years he left Prague and went to work in Moravia. In Kateřinky u Opavy, he became director of the Institute of Mental Illness. In the 1960s, he moved to the Dín region, where he passed away in 1967.

Vladimir Ravel was a physician all his life, and he was probably only a writer in the 1920s. It was in this decade that all of his six books were published – electrical stories, dance stories, stories about the body, pitiful stories, stories, and the novel, the psychology of the sympathetic businessman. Influenced by poetics and expressionism, his work blends magic with the possibilities of modern technology with the skeptical and cynical observation of human figures. Vladimir Ravel is considered a pioneer in the field of science fiction in Czech literature.

In addition to short stories and articles in newspapers and magazines (June, Guest, The Red Law), he was also translated from French. However, in the early thirties of the last century, the author preferred his civil profession as a doctor, and devoted himself to it until the end of his life.

In a letter to writer Jan Weiss, possibly from 1930, Ravel wrote: “The time has come for me to be swallowed up by the science of Moloch. I must admit that I now prefer reading physiology and things like that over reading fairy tales. That doesn’t mean that I will somehow pause. I do not appreciate the imagination, but at that time I swim more in colloids and tumors than in metaphors. “

In 1997, The Raphael Short Stories Committee was published under the title Electric Forest. At the end of last year, Acropolis Publishing published a study on Vladimir Ravel entitled I Sing to the Electric Body, written by literary historian Vladimir Babushik.

• Did you know that if you listen to all the sequel readings and short stories filmed in 2020 on Czech Radio, it will take 24 and a half days? We made a total of 1,645 of them in the last year. Check out more facts about radio on the web nasecislahraji.cz.

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