SOURCE: “A World Symphony in a Scherzo: Dvorak in Love (1986),” in The Achievement of Josef Škvorecký, edited by Sam Solecki, University of Toronto Press, 1987, pp. 158–64.

In the following essay, Goetz-Stankiewicz discusses Škvorecký's melding of the historical and the fictional in Dvorak in Love.

Imagine a panel discussion on Josef Škvorecký's novel Dvorak in Love. Meet the panelists: a historian, a musical theorist, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a literary critic of Jungian archetypal persuasion, and a literary theorist. As you listen to an imaginary discussion between them you hear entirely different opinions: the historian is impressed by the ‘thorough research’ that has gone into the novel. The musical theorist counters this with the remark that research is inconsequential in a work of art, that the novel is valuable because it ‘synthesizes two of the dominant musical cultures of our time—the classical European tradition...