Pavel Novák

* 1962

  • "Actually, at that Acadian school, under the heading of SSM, there were these Fialka and St. Nicholas festivals, and that was always in the autumn and spring when school started - and when school started after Christmas - there was just a party where they would get together... The way I handled it was I'd get the bands together, so we'd... Because I was in those circles, I was just going to that Hokaido thing, and they'd always tell me who to talk to and where to get those people. I got it together, and then it became apparent that those people couldn't get the playback by some - so we came up with Parník. So instead of a Fialka festival, it was Parník. It got so rocked that the captain even called the cops on us, so it was a big settling down after that. But mostly there were bands playing that didn't have playbacks. They weren't non-artists, they really were back then... The band Zebra started a big reggae band there, those musicians played with Ales Drvota too, so they weren't any Bs... And then for the first time, I remember, there was also Petr Bublak - Bubák - Bublak, who plays with Jakub Noha on guitar, a great guitar player. So he played there for the first time with his band on that Parník too, because of the fact that somehow I was thinking about how to do it like that, so that we could have our culture again, which we love."

  • "The situation was such that the students were all already a bit different from the regime. It was a bit like... the professors, most of them were heavy drinkers by today's standards, including those I respected, like Standa Hanzlík and so on. So they had a very, I think, considerable consumption. They didn't see it as a problem yet, because they were getting enough money for it. Well, actually for some of them it ended fatally very early."

  • "She taught me Russian. She knew Russian well, because Russian was one of the compulsory languages at school and Russian was the official language in Ukraine at that time. So she knew Russian well - and at the same time she hated it. It was kind of ironic that she kept telling me that it was actually the people who took everything from her. And I had that in me for quite a long time, as well as towards those Russians. But I have to say I'm terribly sorry actually, because I'm... I found a lot of great people among them, great friends. Now when I'm playing, I go among the foreigners and there are a lot of Russians among them. And I've met a couple of them and they're great people, they don't deserve to be put anywhere, because to me they're just great people."

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Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I was getting tired of how an artist has to coddle his ego

Pavel Novák in 1981
Pavel Novák in 1981
zdroj: During filming

Pavel Novák was born in Pardubice on 19 November 1962. His paternal grandfather‘s farm was taken away by the communists in 1950, his father Bedřich was expelled from high school and sent to a labour camp because of his „kulak“ origin. His mother, Lydia, came from an evangelical family of Procházka, while his mother, Pavel‘s grandmother Emilka, grew up in a family of Volhynian Czechs in the Mykolay region of southern Ukraine. In the early 1930s, when Ukrainian farmers had their seed confiscated, her parents were shot there. It was probably thanks to Masaryk‘s help to the Volhynian Czechs that she was brought to Czechoslovakia at the age of twelve, where she was adopted by the Chyba family. Her grandson Pavel Novák graduated from the Pardubice grammar school and then came to Prague in 1982. He worked as a stoker in dissident boiler houses or as a postman. In 1984 he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts for the third time. In addition to his art, he also devoted himself to music and organised St. Nicholas and so-called violet festivals at the school. He took part in the Parník event, when unauthorised bands played on the Vltava River. After the revolution, he taught figure painting at the SUPŠ in Žižkov and curated the U Řečických gallery. In the mid-1990s, he was engrossed in restoration, for example, restoring a Baroque fresco in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Bohuslavice u Hlučína or the Bethlehem Chapel in Žižkov. He was active in the family band Žižkovský dezert and also in the eldership of the Evangelical congregation in Žižkov. He also worked as a book illustrator. He lives in Prague.