“Czechs! You know what they are? . . . Grinning beasts!” says Councilor Murarick in Closely Watched Trains. Can we still see this in their literature?
The year is 1913, there’s a house in the village of Židenice, today a district of Brno in the Czech Republic. The nineteen-year-old Miss Marie Kiliánová tells her parents she is expecting a child. Her hot-tempered father pulls a flintlock from the wardrobe, drags his daughter outside and yells: “Kneel, I’m going to shoot you!” Her mother, who is calmly pouring a bowl of soup, comes out in front of the house and puts her foot down: “Stop fooling around and come eat, it’s getting cold.”
This story apparently marked the beginning of the life of future author Bohumil Hrabal, who wrote Closely Watched Trains. He was the bastard child of František Hrabal, a brewery accountant in Polna. The picturesque scene with the soup is perfect for Bohumil Hrabal, in whose writing even dramatic events became amusing, anecdotal stories to tell over a glass of beer.
In this regard, the travails of the workers at a provincial railway station in Closely Watched Trains are significant: young Miloš Hrma is wracked by his first sexual mishaps, the train dispatcher Hrubička stamps the bottoms of beautiful girls, the stationmaster is mainly occupied with breeding pigeons. And the whole story unwinds during the war, signified by the titular trains that keep passing through the station.
Hrabal learned from the best—in Czech humorist and writer Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk, the artillery booms off in the distance. Protagonist Švejk skillfully dodges and weaves to stay as far away as he can. And at the same time, he makes us laugh till we cry in the absurd predicaments arising from how literally and thoughtlessly he follows his orders. War seems to be fun and games.
“In Czechia even the king incomprehensibly turned into a jovial, somewhat comic old uncle,” writes Irena Dousková in Bear Dance, a novel about the final weeks of Jaroslav Hašek’s life. Humor, distance, and irony, and also something scholars call “defamiliarizing everyday life,” are the literary tools the most famous Czech writers of the twentieth century used particularly often. This helped to come to terms with personal dramas, to cope with traumas, and to soften the edges of a cruel world where totalitarian regimes prevailed. Czech playwright Karel Čapek explained the reality around him (and surprisingly accurately anticipated the future) by creating worlds full of fantastical inventions and creatures. As part of his psychiatric therapy, writer Ota Pavel transfigured his childhood and youthful memories into fairy-tales. Writer Josef Škvorecký, perhaps the most serious of the bunch, sketched out an ironic, and often fairly cynical picture of historical changes. And like Hrabal, he reduced some of these changes to an unsettling footnote on the margins of the mundane concerns of everyday life, as in his debut, Cowards. Meanwhile, playwright Václav Havel’s dramas shone a light on the absurdities of the communist system.
Czech novelist Milan Kundera also valued irony. As Czech critic Antonín J. Liehm has pointed out: “Kundera is an ironist, in the finest tradition of Hašek, Čapek, and even Kafka. It is very Czech. All these writers use irony, but each one a bit differently” (these words were recalled by journalist Šárka Jančíková in her article published in Český Rozhlas after Kundera’s death). “Prague irony,” Hrabal called it. “The discreet subversion of bar room laughter,” Dousková added.
Feel-Good Literature
This ironic subversiveness has had a strong impact on how people in Poland perceive the people, culture, and literature of Czechia. Initially, in part due to a superficial reading of The Good Soldier Švejk, many Poles formed a stereotype of Czechs as cowardly, devoid of ideals, and rather dim. Later, in the 1970s and 80s, through the efforts of some outstanding translators like Andrzej Czcibor-Piotrowski, Cecylia Dmochowska, Piotr Godlewski, Andrzej S. Jagodziński, Jan Stachowski, Józef Waczków, and Emilia Witwicka, Poland began to have access to works by some of the other authors mentioned above, and a positive stereotype also emerged. As scholar Krystyna Kardyni-Pelikánová observed in her article “Czechs Do Not Live off Laughter Alone, or: Identity Problems,” Poles began to view Czechia as “a fairly idyllic land, without various demons of duty,” where people “drink beer all day and tell each other fantastical and amusing tales.”
Poles are no exception in this department; the whole world knows the famous Czech sense of humor. “The Czechs have the world’s best sense of humor,” enthused Michael Palin, one of the creators of Monty Python. But it would seem that in Poland, where people are weary of all the seriousness, pathos, and historical martyrdom, Czech stereotypes fall on particularly fertile ground. We Poles adore Švejk because he is not like us: he does not throw himself at the bayonets, he ducks them, wheeling and dealing. The fact that our imagined Czech is happy to hide out from history in a quiet beer hall is something we find incredibly charming. “They have a sense of humor” and “likability” are the most oft-repeated comments about our western neighbors according to the Center for Public Opinion studies. “Fun-loving” and “beer-drinking” appear thereafter.
A positive stereotype can, however, be harmful, and that has been the case with the Polish reception of Czech literature. Many readers were seduced by the easily digested form of twentieth-century Czech writing and stopped at their surface. But after all, as Aleksander Kaczorowski recently noted in an interview for the H7O site, beneath the accessible language of Hrabal, Kundera, or Pavel, there are several layers of intellectual depth. “Niech pan spróbuje rozkroić żart, z którego pan się śmiał! Zobaczy pan, ile smutku kryje się wewnątrz,” writes Milan Kundera in Laughable Loves (roughly translated: “Try to dissect the joke you laughed at! You will see how much sadness is hidden inside”).
“Czech literature is mature, extensive, and diverse,” claimed the outstanding translator Leszek Engelking in his introduction to an essay collection, Švejks and Don Quixotes, displaying Czech literary phenomena that defeat all stereotypes. Yet despite the efforts of translators and experts, it was labeled “feel-good literature” for years (a term used by Lenka Németh-Vítová, a Polish- and Bohemian-studies scholar from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland). Works that do not fit this picture, more directly depicting the tragedy of human fate or simply linguistically more sophisticated, have met with an icy reception.
The result is that the whole metaphysical literature movement, for instance, has been overlooked. Andrzej S. Jagodziński sometimes recalls the “astonishing commercial failure” of the first edition of Forgotten Light (2000, trans. Andrzej Czcibor-Piotrowski) by Catholic priest Jakub Deml. This book, which many consider one of the finest Czech works of the twentieth century, was blessed by a recommendation from Hrabal himself, but still failed to attract readers.
Until the twenty-first century, three kings dominated the Polish market: Hrabal, Kundera, and Hašek. After that came Zdeněk Miler and Hana Doskočilová, the creators of the Little Mole series, Michal Viewegh, the author of ironically humorous novels, and fantasy writer Miroslav Žamboch. This meant books succeeded when they stuck to the Czech “brand,” as well as light and genre prose. Has anything changed since then?
A Herstory of Violence
Above all, Czech literature itself has changed. It is quite apparent that the aforementioned giants are in a boy’s club. Although in the nineteenth century an important role was played by outstanding female writers, translators, and critics—such as Božena Němcová, the author The Grandmother, one of Czechia’s most important pieces of writing, the novelist Karolina Světlá, and Eliška Krásnohorská, whose translations into Czech included Pan Tadeusz—in the twentieth century they vanished almost entirely from the literary scene. The absence of a female perspective greatly limited the spectrum of topics, and female characters were often quite two-dimensional. Not knowing one’s place meant getting a lashing; to set an example, the female protagonist of Cutting It Short, is publicly punished in this way by her husband for cutting her hair. The situation only began to change at the turn of the millennium, with the rise of winners of the prestigious State Literary Award, Daniela Hodrová and Květa Legátová.
We can safely say this was a change for the better because in today’s Czech literature, women’s voices are finally being heard. Their books have reached print-runs of a hundred thousand copies (Kateřina Tučková, Alena Mornštajnová), they are readily translated into other languages, and more often appreciated on the international market.
Critically, Czech women aren’t taking a page from their elder male colleagues; they are boldly blazing their own literary trails. They do not sidestep the difficult subjects, they are not afraid of harsh, vulgar language, and they have broken with “Czech humor” for good—with the beer-drinking culture, anecdotes, irony, and distance so characteristic of the older generation. They feel no need to smooth the world’s rough edges. On the contrary, they sharpen them as much as they can.
They sometimes set their stories against exotic backdrops (Mongolia for Petra Hůlova, South America for Markéta Pilátova, Japan for Anna Cima) or return to the past, but they speak of it from a new, feminine perspective. They write about physicality, sexuality, motherhood—about everything that affects them. What is the contemporary Czech female writer like? Journalist Jarmila Flaková responds to this question in “Česká moderní literatura psaná ženami” (“New Czech Literature by Women”): “They are unafraid to shock, to transgress, they know no borders. They feel free to serve their readers a taste of their intimate lives—albeit between the lines, and not on a silver platter.”
Along with the younger generation of socially aware Czech male writers and poets, these women are giving voice and space to talk to those who have been excluded. They are bringing something fresh into Czech literature.
Authors Radka Denemarková and Kateřina Tučková create herstories, raising such delicate topics as the resettlement of the Sudetan Germans (Denemarková’s Money from Hitler, Tučková’s Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch). The writings of both authors illustrate a quote by Franz Kafka that Denemarková likes to recall: “A book has to be like an axe that splits the frozen sea inside of us.” And so, sparing us no cruel images, they write of rape, incest, domestic violence, and discrimination against minorities. They also get involved in society. Denemarková actively comments on political events in Czechia and in the world; for her vociferous support of Chinese dissidents, she was prohibited from entering China for ten years. The Chinese situation is the subject of her most recent, monumental novel, Hodiny z olova (Hours of Lead). Tučková, in turn, is involved in work to commemorate victims of historical events, and shines a light on important female figures in Czech history; she widely comments on the subjects of her books in the media. In recent months, in conjunction with the premiere of Bílá Voda (White Water), a novel about the harassment of Czech nuns by communist authorities which took her a decade to write, she gave a great many interviews about the place of women in the Catholic Church. Bestselling author Alena Mornštajnová also explores historical themes; her most highly rated novel, Hana, speaks of a female Jewish Holocaust survivor and her relationship with her niece, whom she must tend to after the rest of the family dies in a postwar typhoid epidemic.
Issues of family, motherhood, and reconciling women’s various roles appear in the prose of Petra Hůlova and Petra Soukupova. The latter’s novels present various models of femininity: the caring and self-sacrificing “Czech mother,” but also wealthy successful women or lost artists trying to find themselves in parenthood or difficult relationships with men. Hůlová, in turn, is mainly famous in Poland for The Stepmother, a powerful monologue by an alcohol-abusing writer of Harlequin novels struggling to have her own work space. In her other novels she also gives voice to a Prague sex worker leading a personal crusade against the omnipresent digital reality, which she calls the “digiworld” (Plastic M3, or: Czech Pornography), a young Mongolian woman seeking a place for herself in the big city (Time of the Red Mountains), and a Ukrainian immigrant woman in Čechy, země zaslíbená (Czechia, the Promised Land). Hůlová tackles some hard topics, such as alcoholism, prostitution, or pedophilia.
Bianca Bellová does not pull punches either. The Sea, which recently took home the EBRD Literature Prize, is a dystopian tale written in coarse and vulgar language (one of the author’s linguistic models is Charles Bukowski), inspired by the environmental disaster of the Aral Sea.
Current events, such as the environment and the climate crisis, refugees, the fate of minorities, and digital progress and disinformation that warp human relationships, also appear in Czech literature written by men. In two short-story collections published in Polish—Stay with Us and Anna’s Map—Marek Šindelka writes of the difficulties in building relationships in the era of consumerism, the Internet, and new media (similar issues often crop up in recent Czech poetry, as in Jan Škrob’s Real, released in Polish). In a novel presently being translated into Polish, Únava materiálu (Material Fatigue), Šindelka provides a literary response to the migration crisis of 2015, the story of a flight to Europe told from a Syrian refugee’s perspective. Some works by Jiři Hájíček or Jaroslav Rudiš, in turn, might be read as tales of the contemporary crisis of masculinity (though we should add that, in terms of form, the latter follows in the footsteps of his great forebears: Jaroslav Hašek and Bohumil Hrabal).
Owing to the younger generation of publishers and translators who have hit the Polish publishing scene in the last fifteen years, all these literary phenomena began making inroads to Poland. Afera, Książkowe Klimaty, Amaltea, Stara Szkoła, and Dowody publishers have taken up a courageous fight against how we imagine Czech literature, and they have caused the picture in Poland to change. We in Poland are beginning to perceive its wide spectrum of topics and poetics, and humor has ceased to dominate the field.
Even More Serious
Some of the changes undergone by Czech literature in the past few decades also seem to be found in other Central European literatures. After the Communist period of confinement, on one hand, a literary revision of history was needed; on the other, there was a greater openness to the world.
The topics raised in Central European literature today are fairly similar. Yet, considering the seriousness with which it is approached by the literary representatives of the nation of Hašek and Hrabal, we may conclude that Czech literature has come a long way. The humor has not vanished entirely, but it now takes a special form. It can be black, as in the works of Petr Stančík, or the as-yet-untranslated Destrukce (Destruction) by Stanislav Biler, or pointed and sarcastic, as in Instastory by Iva Hadj Moussa. Czech writers, and women writers above all, treat contemporary life very seriously. In a world unbound from censorship, humor is no longer needed as a tool to express allusively what could not be stated directly.
When it comes to female writers, the long decades where women had no voice seem to be of high significance. The smothering of emotions that accompanied all these years are released in powerful, direct narratives. The “women’s revolution” we are presently observing in Czech literature is a breath of fresh air. Yet do all the participants in Czechia’s literary scene share this opinion?
Many signs seem to show that in the Czech literary world, men still pull the strings. The fuss over last year’s State Literary Award for Kateřina Tučkova among Czech commentators, the solid majority of men among those honored by Czechia’s most important prize, the Magnesia Litera, the openly anti-feminist stances of some Czech writers—Miloš Urban’s Proč nejsem feministou (“Why I Am Not a Feminist”) comes to mind—and the paternalistic tone of male responses to the manifestos of women writers show that there is still a great deal of work to be done when it comes to Czech women reclaiming the literary world. Perhaps things will get even more serious?
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