Original title: Urmedvěd
Genre: novel
Publisher:
Petrov 1999
ISBN: 80-7227-061-3
Pages: 320
“This is a novel that is absolutely reckless towards its readers, but at the same time it is my most precious and most important work and all my other books published in the 1990’s borrow many aspects from it shamelessly,” the author has said about Ur-Bear. The text is published in an unabridged version, exactly as it was written between 1979 and 1983, containing the real and unchanged version of the A Bear’s Novel, which the author had to adapt in accordance with the aesthetic standards of unofficial literature, and which was then subject to his publisher’s requirements in 1990.
"A strange combination of a chaotic concealed composition, and then some passages which are all the stronger for their fragmentary nature. This novel of Kratochvil’s is one of the most impressive and suggestive literary images of the weird (human as well as societal) reality of 1970’s Czechoslovakia."
Kamil Činátl, Tvar