TORONTO — Celebrated Czech emigre writer Josef Skvorecky was a superb satirist who brought an international prestige to Canada’s literary community, one of his colleagues said Tuesday after hearing of his death in Toronto.
Skvorecky left Prague with his wife Zdena Salivarova in the wake of the 1968 Soviet invasion, first landing in California for a teaching stint before settling in Toronto in 1969.
At that point he’d already achieved wide acclaim with his debut novel, 1958’s The Cowards, which was banned by the Communist party.
Skvorecky became a professor in the English department at the University of Toronto, where he worked until his retirement in 1990.
“Josef was the kind of international star that every university wants,” said U of T Prof. Sam Z. Solecki, who worked with Skvorecky at the school and wrote a 1988 book about him.
“He was invaluable and I also think that, in a way, his kind of figure is irreplaceable.”
Solecki said Skvorecky, who was 87, had been “quite ill” for at least three years, battling cancer and recovering from a number of surgeries that left his hands weak and sometimes unable to write.
“Given Josef’s sense of humour, he would literally make serious jokes like, ‘I never expected to make it past 20,”’ said Solecki, who often visited Skvorecky at his home during his illness.
“It made him sound like Woody Allen but in fact he’d spent a year in a sanatorium as a child for bronchitis and he said the thing that saved him was reading.
“He’s one of these people who started off with a very frail physique and just had an astonishing constitution that somehow kept going.”
Solecki said Salivarova recently told him Skvorecky’s condition had “seriously deteriorated.”
“It’s the kind of thing one says is almost a blessing, that he’s been relieved of the pain,” said Solecki, author of Prague Blues: The Fiction of Josef Skvorecky.
In 1971, Skvorecky and Salivarova founded 68 Publishers in Toronto, giving voice to banned Czech and Slovak writers including Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera.
“He was carrying on with her the only major Czech publishing house outside of Czechoslovakia,” said Solecki.
“It was publishing the books that could not appear under the Communist government under Gustav Husak.”
Skvorecky’s other books, which have been translated into over 20 languages, include The Bass Saxophone and The Engineer of Human Souls, winner of a Governor General’s Literary Award. He’s also written many short stories, essays and poetry, and has numerous film and television writing credits.
In 1986, Skvorecky was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and in 1992 he was appointed to the Order of Canada.
His other honours include the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Order of the White Lion, given by Havel.
“He was wonderfully and gently quietly eccentric, the way any Czech would be, and had a wonderful sense of humour,” said Solecki.
“The one thing I loved about Josef was that he was such a gentle man . . . . He could not bring himself to fail anybody. So if you took a course with Josef, he used to go into agonies when he had to actually fail someone.”