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works are o f some literary merit, if jejune and derivative, he could, after all, have laughed them off as the output of a callow youth and left others to decide their status. Still, these are biographical speculations, and one is not oblivious to the fact that Hostovsky may also have been aware o f contemporary literary debates on the state o f the novel. Revealing perhaps the literary atmosphere of the times, Vaclav Cemy writes in an article of 1935 that the novel is in a state o f intense change and is subject to experimentation, ‘Hleda se pro nëj nova forma, nova struktura, nové metody’ and that a revival of the genre is best directed not towards its subject-matter (he argues this is the mistaken route of the Socialist Realist novel) but ‘v promène oka, které svet vnfma, a ne ve zmenach sveta. V subjektu tvùrcim, a ne v objektivm r é a l i t é . Cemy cites approvingly two Czech writers, Karel Capek (in his Hordubal trilogy) and Hostovsky (in Zhaf), who in their conception of space are innovating the form of the novel.

While in Ztraceny stin and P npad profesora Kornera the protagonists considered the relationship between the individual and other human beings, both in space and time, the protagonists o f Hostovsky’s works o f the 1930s begin to search for patterns of relationships beyond their empirical existence and struggle to decipher a mysterious order or tmth in a universe where signs are severed from their meanings: in the sequence of novels Cerna tlupa, Zhaf and Dûm bez pana the black gang, the arson attacks and the absent father (Adler), together with the relic o f his personality, the house, become the focus for a coalescence of themes concerning some kind o f transgression o f the metaphysical order of the universe. Hostovsky will later (in Vseobecné spiknuti) use the double as a symbolic projection of lack — the double embodies the protagonist’s conscience rebelling against the spiritual emptiness of society. In these novels he uses the gang, the ‘arsonist’ and Adler/the house as ways of questioning people’s failure to give meaning to their lives and to constmct sympathetic relationships with one another. The mysterious events which each novel treats would not occur were it not for some spiritual and communicative vacuum at the heart of society. In Zhdf, for example, the members o f the Simon family, with the exception o f Josef Simon, are aware

69 Vaclav Cemy, ‘O românovém prostom’ in Literarni noviny, 8, 1935-36, no. 6, 29 November 1935, p. 5 (the whole article is printed on pages 5 and 7).

that something vital is missing in the family: ‘odhalujice nahodou one zivé ovzdusi, jaké utvafi lidské vztahy a jaké je podstatou kazdé sdilnosti a pospolitosti, odkryli — prazdno, ticho, tmu, nic. Nic — misto ocekâvaného vyrazu tvafe, nic — misto hledaného smyslu slov, nic — misto spasné srozumitelnosti myslenek’, (p. 33) and each of them harbours a guilty secret. Similarly the members o f the Adler family are conscious that they share a common malady in their isolation from one another: ‘Co se s nami stalo, co nam jenom chybi, nac vsichni stûnëme’ frets Emil (p. 132). They are also aware that their home is a tangible ghost not only of their father but also of their guilt; ‘Ano, v nëm kdesi je ukryta vina, v nëm a v nas vsech’ (p. 134). In Cernà tlupa children resist the spiritual vacuity of the adult world, with its cynicism and materialism, by constructing their own imagined worlds — loosely based on adventure novels, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Jules Verne’s Deux ans de vacances^^ — and their own Black Gang in which the miraculous or mysterious is close to hand. Rostovsky’s depiction of the children’s retreat into another world is itself perhaps influenced by Henri Alain-Foumier’s 1913 novel. Le Grand Meaulnes, with its enchanted world of the ‘domaine mystérieux’, the insigniflcance of adults and the central theme of irretrievable innocence.

The Gang, the arsonist and Adler/the house each represent the protagonists’ frustration with the existing state of the world; these emblems also embody a mysterious universe which is almost perceptible and yet indecipherable. The notion o f mysterious, unknown forces is treated differently in each novel. In Cerna tlupa the children conceive of the mysterious world, which is concealed from them by adults, as beautiful, and the creation of the Black Gang answers to Jin ’s desire to incorporate this beauty into everyday life. The Gang becomes a vessel for the children’s imagination.

The gestures o f Jin ’s hands are a central motif in the novel. Hostovsky uses them as a metaphorical expression of this world o f beauty and mystery which Jiri apprehends and yet which eludes him. On old Kamet’s first visit to his grandson’s bedside, he observes how the small boy lacks the strength to sit up and ‘jak se tfepotavé prstlky namahaji uchopit nëco, co tu nebylo nebo co usychalo pred tapajicimi pazemi’ (p. 11). When Jin ventures outside his