LITERARY CREATIVITY OF THE STRANGE CZECH VISUAL ARTISTS AND NO JOKE

The article aims at presenting the literary creation of several Czech visual artists of the second half of the twentieth century (Jan Koblasa, Rudolf Nemec, Otakar Slavik, Nadeaeda Pliskova, Jiri Salamoun), whose texts could be construed - regardless of the original intention - as autonomous artistic utterances. The chosen artists were - at least periodically in their careers - participants in different groups which inclined towards the poetics and aesthetics of the grotesque, specifically towards a Czech variant of the grotesque. The phenomenon of the grotesque is important because it appears in some form in the literary works by the designated artists, but the affiliation of the artists to the given movements and schools is still considered merely as an occasion which should not occlude the particular strains of their literary creativity.