The Supermarket of Soviet Heroes is a collection of texts by Jáchym Topol. It includes plays and short stories

The title story The Supermarket of Soviet Heroes is Topol’s only non-fiction text that has also appeared in book form. Although Topol had previously made a name for himself with his lengthy reports in the weekly Respekt, including one on a hike across the Greenland icecap, this travel chronicle, as he himself calls it, is actually a diary. It is more or less a series of loose notes with abrupt transitions, leaving it up to the reader to fill in any gaps, interspersed with digressions on historical events. Among those historical events are the extraordinary fortunes of Ludvík Svoboda’s heroic Czechoslovak army, which was frequently deployed against Nazi Germany’s troops on the Eastern Front in WWII. In the footsteps of that army, Topol and his friends undertake their journey through Galicia, meeting all sorts of people, such as Polish writer-friend Andrzej Stasiuk, or someone from the forgotten population group of the Lemken, the ‘Forest Kurds’ of central Europe.

“In Supermarket of Soviet Heroes, it is already clearly visible what characterises Topol’s later novel work: directness as opposed to explanatory and thus inviting the reader to think along with him, high pace, mixing collogial, raw spoken language with written language and a richness of images. Elements that Topol manages to forge into literary precious metal.”

— Tzum

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