A Short Survey of Czech Literature

James Naughton



CZECH LITERATURE SINCE 1918


An independent Czechoslovak Republic was established after the First World War under the leadership
of its first president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937). Masaryk’s own writings on the course of
Czech history, his war memoirs, and expositions of his political and philosophical ideas won him a
devoted following, though there is doubtful matter in his seductive interconnecting of Hussitism
and Czech plebeian or non-aristocratic traditions with modern ideas of democratic government into a
Czech “meaning of history”.

Jaroslav Hašek’s (1883-1923) Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka (The Good Soldier Švejk, 1921-23) is one
place to begin a look at post-1918 literature, with its First World War theme and its status as the
most widely known Czech-language classic from the interwar period. The anarchistic, war-, army-,
church- and state-debunking clever-fool hero of this baggy (strictly speaking unfinished) novel,
with his endless zany blarney, has won the undying affection of readers, but also incurred more
solemn reactions from earnest thinkers who have seen the indisciplined, evasive, unprincipled,
materialistic sides of his behaviour as a bad national model. Does this approach possibly just miss
the point? Švejk’s exuberant language becomes a lot more pedestrian in translation, but the
exuberance of Hašek and Švejk’s anecdotage still comes across.

         Franz Kafka

For most readers, however, without doubt, the most famous Prague author of this century is, of
course, Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Born of Jewish parents near the Old Town Square in Prague, in
1883, Kafka wrote his literary works in German. However, since this survey is now restricting
itself, in the modern period, almost completely to Czech-language writing, we must really only
mention him here in passing. Maria Ripellino’s book Magic Prague makes certain comparisons between
Kafka and Hašek. However, Hašek’s Švejk would seem to present a quite different kind of fictional
absurdity, as well as a cheery unintellectualising attitude to life.

Closer to Kafka in tone and spirit are some stories by Richard Weiner (1884-1937), a Czech Jewish
writer and poet from Písek, who later lived as a journalist in Paris, and was close to the
Surrealists and avant-garde painters such as the Czech Josef Šíma. Some similarity has also been
observed between Kafka and the outsider and refugee anti-heroes of Egon Hostovský (1908-73), a
Czech novelist of Jewish family, who went to the United States after the 1948 Communist takeover.

A skilful practitioner of the mystery short-story, especially in its detective form, as well as of
anti-Utopian science-fiction, was the Czech author Karel Čapek (1890-1938). An admirer of H. G.
Wells and Chesterton, Čapek was rather well known in English translation before the Second World
War. His drama R.U.R (=Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920) turned the Golem and related figures into
commercially useful products of bio-engineering, who proceed to threaten mankind and the survival
of the human soul. The play gave the world the term “robot” (from robota - feudal labour), nowadays
associated with fairly unworrying Japanese machine-tools. His detective stories in Povídky z jedné
a druhé kapsy (Tales of Two Pockets, 1929) explore epistemological and moral issues with a light,
often whimsical touch. The most readily available of his several anti-Utopian novels is Válka s
mloky (War with the Newts, 1936). In it the newts (just like the robots) take over the world. Čapek
also wrote a much-admired trilogy of novels Hordubal, Povětroň, Obyčejný život (Hordubal, Meteor,
An Ordinary Life, 1933-4), which (perhaps even a little postmodernistically?) examine our
apprehension of events, persons and the self, using multiple, sometimes conflicting viewpoints, and
suggesting the enigmatic in the psychology of the commonsensical “ordinary man”. Dying on the eve
of the Second World War, after the shock of Munich, Čapek tends to be seen as a leading
representative of the democracy of the First Republic.

The most visible (and perhaps still the most visible) young poets of the First Republic were
members of the left-wing avant-garde, in general strongly influenced by modern French poetry (the
outstanding translator of which was Karel Čapek). This Czech avant-garde writing moved from a kind
of primitivist naivism, and a certain blend of Christian imagery and Marxist proletarianism - as
practised briefly by the young poet Jiří Wolker (1900-24), who died of tuberculosis - into a
playfully associative, popular-culture-influenced approach called in their manifestos “Poetism”. In
general - but this applies in particular to the poet Nezval - they were strongly influenced by
Guillaume Apollinaire, whose longer polythematic poem Zone contains a passage about a visit to
Prague. The term pásmo “zone” used for the Czech title of this poem soon came to be applied to any
polythematic poem of this type.

“Poetism” was posited as modernity's recreational counterpart to Constructivism. it was theorised
about especially by the writer on art and architecture Karel Teige (1900-51), and cultivated with
huge zest by the poet Vítězslav Nezval (1900-58), in polythematic poems such as Podivuhodný
kouzelník (The Marvellous Magician, 1922) and Akrobat (Acrobat, 1927). Nezval later went through an
avowedly Surrealist phase, and collections such as Praha s prsty deště (Prague with Fingers of
Rain, 1936) reflect this influence. A later collection Absolutní hrobař (1937, Gravedigger of the
Absolute) was strongly influenced by the paintings of Salvator Dali and might be said to be his
most Surrealist work. Later Nezval rejected André Breton’s doctrine, and returned to a less
experimental versifying idiom which was also less alarming for his Communist political comrades. In
the post-1948 era this accommodation produced an effusive praise poem to Stalin, though he
continued to produce some other effective lyrical works.

Another prominent Poetist was Jaroslav Seifert (1901-86), particularly in his collection Na vlnách
TSF (On the Waves of Wireless Telegraphy). Seifert moved away from the Communist Party before the
War, outlived much of his poetic generation and became a much beloved grand old poet, winning in
the eighties the Czechs’ first Nobel Prize for literature.

The poet František Halas (1901-49), though also left-wing (and fondly regarded for resonantly
patriotic poetry from the time of Munich and 1945) could even at times be mistaken for a Catholic
poet, so quasi-religious, and obsessed with time and nothingness, is much of his lyric verse.
Halas’s themes range from the personal to the political. The 1930 collection Kohout plaší smrt (The
Cock Scares Death) opens with a motto from Blake’s “Europe”: “Thrice he assayd presumptuous to
awake the dead to judgment.” In his cycle Staré ženy (Old Women, 1935) he addresses the eternal
themes of beauty, women, time and aging.

Another poet Vladimír Holan (1905-80) is best known in English for his postwar works, both the
often teasingly obscure longer poem Noc s Hamletem (A Night with Hamlet, 1964), and his short,
gnomic lyrical reflections, with occasional submerged notes of political protest. Under the
Communists (whom he had briefly supported at the end of the Second World War) Holan retired to his
house in Kampa park beside the Vltava in Prague, becoming a legendary poet-recluse.

Next to him lived a theatrical avant-gardist Jan Werich (1905-80), famous before the War as a
double act with Jiří Voskovec (1905-81 - he emigrated): as V + W, a satirical cabaret duo at
Prague’s Osvobozené divadlo (Liberated Theatre).

Left-wing fiction was most prominently original in the work of Vladislav Vančura (1891-1942), full
of exuberant verbal acrobatics, archaisms and expressive oddities. His Rozmarné léto (Capricious
Summer, 1926), set in a small-town spa, has been transferred (with much original text from the
book) into a humorously lyrical film by Jiří Menzel. Another book, Marketa Lazarová (1931), an
epic-reviving tale of early medieval brigandage, has also been transferred to the cinema (1967,
directed by František Vláčil).

Social and social-psychological fiction from this period has left more a series of worthy attempts
than masterpieces. Amongst these Vančura’s Pekař Jan Marhoul (Baker Jan Marhoul, 1924) is
untypically imaginative and experimental. Marie Majerová’s (1882-1967) left-wing social fiction is
more conventional, though not without documentary qualities: Siréna (The Siren, 1935) with its
Kladno industrial setting, and Havířská balada (Ballad of a Miner, 1938) have both been translated.

Period is vividly recreated by the outstanding historical novelist Jaroslav Durych (1886-1962).
Though impressive on the period of the Thirty Years’ War in his long novel Bloudění (1929,
translated as Descent of the Idol), Durych is arguably at his best in the atmospheric and lyrically
effective short volume Rekviem (Requiem, 1930), three stories set at a time just after the
assassination of the ambitious charismatic Valdštejn, or Wallenstein. Durych displays a powerful
tension between spirituality and sensuality.

A gloomier atmosphere generally in writing from the later twenties may not too unreasonably be said
to reflect the demise of post-First-World-War optimism, the onset of the Great Depression, and the
political crises of the thirties.

The Munich agreement of 1938 led to the dismantling of Czechoslovakia, and the setting up of a
Protectorate under Hitler’s Germany; the Second World War brought near-obliteration of the Jewish
community, and at its end the expulsion of most of the three million Germans from Czechoslovakia.
An uneasy coalition between Communists and others tipped over into total Communist rule in February
1948. Much artistic energy was suppressed or sent underground by the regimentation and didacticism
of Socialist Realist doctrines. Many writers of course adapted to these cultural dictates, whether
willingly or otherwise, continuing to publish and make a living.


THE COMMUNIST TAKEOVER OF 1948 UP TO THE COMMUNIST COLLAPSE IN 1989 AND BEYOND


Stalin died in 1953. Agriculture was collectivised, public culture remained closely supervised and
regimented, but the Communist regime inched its way, heavily implicated in its own (although by
Soviet criteria small-scale) executions and show trials, into the reforms of the sixties, which
then moved into the “Prague Spring” reforms of 1968 under Alexander Dubček’s new-style Communist
leadership.

As cultural space widened, Czech writers such as Milan Kundera (b. 1929) tried, or perhaps
inevitably failed, one might say, to “settle accounts” with history. In Kundera’s first novel Žert
(The Joke, 1967), the central protagonist Ludvík fails to compensate for his earlier humiliation at
the hands of the Party by sleeping with the wife of one of his humiliators. The action is presented
from the differing points of view of four of the characters. In the short stories of Směšné lásky
(Laughable Loves, 1963-8, 1970) the author’s characters wander through erotic labyrinths of
inauthenticity, thwarted intentions and desires. History and the individual, love and sex, remain
antithetically entwined in Kundera’s later writings.

Josef Škvorecký’s (b. 1924) adolescent Danny in his first published novel Zbabělci (The Cowards,
1958) plays jazz, courts girls and gets involved with uprising activity at the end of the Second
World War, enabling a de-bunking, de-solemnising view of recent history. His novella Bassaxofon
(The Bass Saxophone, 1967) is another work playing with his favourite theme of jazz, where art is
portrayed as a provider of spiritual and sensual epiphany and emancipation which also engages with
primitive levels of the psyche. Škvorecký goes on to chronicle his fictional Kostelec, alias
Náchod, in a whole series of Danny novels. He takes forward his debunkingly satirical view, in
Mirákl (The Miracle Game, 1972) and Příběh inženýra lidských duší (The Engineer of Human Souls,
1977), to the protagonists of the Prague Spring itself, and the life of Czech emigrés in North
America.

The Jewish community and its fate were focussed on soon after the War by Jiří Weil (1900-59) in the
novel Život s hvězdou (Life with a Star, 1949), and later by Ladislav Fuks (1923-94) in his not
unrelated novel Pan Theodor Mundstock (Mr Theodore Mundstock, 1963) and other works. The Jewish
theme is also explored in a number of works by Arnošt Lustig (b. 1926), such as the novel Dita
Saxová (1962).

Ivan Klíma (b. 1931), who lived as a boy in Terezín concentration camp, has a love story “Miriam”
placed in that setting. In his novel Láska a smetí (Love and Garbage, 1978) or the stories of Moje
zlatá řemesla (My Golden Trades, 1990) he later autobiographically examines the perspectives given
to a banned writer post-1968 who takes on otherwise unlikely jobs and occupations.

Another mode of “reckoning with the present” is to be found in the plays of Václav Havel (b. 1936),
influenced by Absurdist playwrights including Ionesco and Beckett. In his Zahradní slavnost (The
Garden Party, 1963), Vyrozumění (The Memorandum, 1965) and Ztížená možnost soustředění (Increased
Difficulty of Concentration, 1968), Havel, later to be President Havel, takes the existential angst
and black comedy of the Drama of the Absurd and uses it partly to address a morally and
ideologically eroded society. As a leader of the informal group Charter 77, working to monitor
Czechoslovakia's behaviour on human rights in the later 1970s, after the international Helsinki
accords, Havel continued to write plays, but also notable essays. In his one-act drama Audience
(The Audience, 1975), a pseudo-Havel figure faces his boss in a brewery, like the Trutnov brewery
where Havel briefly worked.

Another dramatist from this period Josef Topol (b. 1935) is a complex, lyrically expressive writer,
still almost unknown to British theatre-goers, though a translation of one of his plays Kočka na
kolejích (Cat on the Rails, 1965) has been issued.

In Czech poetry since 1945, apart from the older Holan and Seifert, English-language readers have
particularly taken to the wry, analytical and drily playful lyrical commentaries of the
scientist-writer Miroslav Holub (1923-98), with their own brand of satirically questioning and not
totally un-Absurdist mini-narratives.

Another prose writer with a playful streak is Ludvík Vaculík (b. 1926), whose novel Sekyra (The
Axe, 1966) in its themes of father and son, rural life and urbanising change, seeks to reckon with
the recent past, but likewise, if not more, with the present and its shifting predicaments. His
novel Morčata (The Guinea Pigs, 1977, samizdat 1973) plays teasing narrative games with the reader,
while appearing to reflect upon human cruelty and manipulation, totalitarian society and the
individual struggle with absurdity.

The exuberant writings of Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97) also address time, the flow of time, sometimes
presenting an immediacy of temporal flux in cascades of concrete, sensory and sensual detail. This
is notable for example in his lyrically memorialising but also fictionalising books about his
Nymburk youth and his parents, Postřižiny (Cutting It Short, 1976) and Městečko, kde se zastavil
čas (The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, 1978). Such concerns are wedded to Hrabal’s particular
concept of pábitelství, of palavering inventive play, as a modus vivendi amidst a sense of the
absurd, whether social and political or philosophical and existential. See also the stories in the
English volume The Death of Mr Baltisberger, or on a more philosophical level his novella Příliš
hlučná samota (Too Loud a Solitude). His texts often inextricably blend elements of the pub
anecdote, popular ramblings and oral improvisations with the inheritance of Surrealism and the
imagery of art and film, with juxtapositionings and collages of imagery and expressively
interlocking documentary-like details. One of Hrabal’s more extended and ambitious texts is
Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England, 1980), which also dismantles the
solemn mythologies of Czech history since the thirties in the comic, and blackly comic, but not
only blackly comic, story of a young waiter who rises in the world and gets involved with the
occupying Nazis.

Another, younger writer, with some gentle affiliations with Hrabal, and a lyric and comic gift,
applied to themes of his wartime youth, was Ota Pavel (1930-73), whose two admired story
collections appeared in Prague in the early seventies: Smrt krásných srnců (Death of Lovely
Roebuck, 1971) and Jak jsem potkal ryby (How I Encountered Fish, 1974).

Amongst the historical novelists one of the most effective at giving the genre imaginative and
expressive bite (with strong Aesopian references) was Jiří Šotola (1924-89), with novels such as
Tovarišstvo Ježíšovo (The Society of Jesus, 1969), Kuře na rožni (Chicken on the Spit, 1976), about
an eighteenth-century puppeteer, and Svatý na mostě (Saint on the Bridge, 1978), about St. John of
Nepomuk.

Experimental, intellectual prose following somewhat the line of Richard Weiner has been notably
practised by Věra Linhartová (b. 1938), who later left for Paris and study of Japan art.

Social mores, the limping Socialist consumer society, careerism, modern-day sex and everyday
superficiality are powerfully incorporated in energetic, rhythmically seductive novels by Vladimír
Páral (b. 1932), works such as Katapult (Catapult, 1967) and Milenci a vrazi (Lovers and Murderers,
1969). Later he moves into science-fiction fantasies, and also, especially after 1989, what one
might call further explorations of the erotic satirical novel.

The years after the 1968 Soviet invasion brought much internal cultural repression, and
impoverishment of the domestic publishing scene, though this was far from absolute. Obviously the
work of authors who went into exile, such as Škvorecký, or Kundera, who later did so, was affected
by all this, in its themes and its sensibilities. But the seventies also saw fruitful directions in
the work of several non-exile authors: in the work of Hrabal, both accommodating to regime
pressures and disobediently circulating typescript texts, and Vaculík, Havel and others, who
distributed their writings in typescript samizdat (e.g. in Edice Petlice, “Padlock Editions”) and
were published abroad. The repressive policies very much affected the general reading public at the
time (who, although they also read Hrabal, Páral and others, also replaced the American light
reading they were later to devour with their own, not very exciting domestic surrogates, disguised
as morally uplifting social critiques). However, in retrospect the 1970s in Czech literature were
hardly a desert at all.

During the 1980s there also began gradually to appear, even in official publishing houses (against
the grain of the times), a number of younger, in fact rather “ideologically subversive” names, such
as Alexandra Berková (b. 1949) in prose, or Sylva Fischerová (b. 1963) in poetry. After 1989 a
number of other Czech writers also became more visible, such as two novelists-cum-literary-scholars
Daniela Hodrová (b. 1946) and Vladimír Macura (1945-99). The latter also produced some sharp short
social-semiotic essays, called punningly “semi(o)-feuilletons”, on subjects such as the cultural
significance of Macdonald's burgers in post-Velvet Prague society. The most popular of the younger
novelists at present would seem to be Michal Viewegh (b. 1962), whose Výchova dívek v Čechách
(1994) wears its postmodernism, if that is what we may call it, with a light touch, and has been
translated into English as Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia.

The commercial book market since 1989 has altered the publishing scene a great deal, producing a
flood of translated entertainment literature, but native output seems to have revived, not only
with the support of grants, and continues to find both publishers and readers.


The pages above are adapted from the latter part of my own chapter on Czech literature in the
Traveller's Literary Companion to Eastern and Central Europe, Brighton: In Print Publishing, 1995.
© James Naughton, draft last revised 2001