Prague Winter
Skvoreclý, Josef
Josef Skvorecky
PRAGUE WINTER
Fifteen years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a reassessment.
Suppose an aircraft designer talks the Boeing Company into financing an airplane which,...
...A metaphor, of course, for what the Czech Party ideologues have come to call realnf socialismus...
...This is not an attempt to emulate Kafka...
...Bertolt Brecht knew the answer when, in Galileo Galilei, he has one character exclaim: "Unhappy is the country that needs heroes...
...I just thought it would be with a bang, not with a whimper...
...That's why it will move only such readers who, in this land of soft bodies and pampered souls, still believe that to oppress the mind is as reprehensible as to oppress the body...
...But he faces a dilemma...
...Consequently, the year 1968 does not ring many bells, and The Writing on the Wall will go unnoticed by most Americans.* In the distant days when I still attempted to explain things to left-leaning North American acquaintances I invariably asked: "If you are interested in Communism because you think it would be good for this country, why try to find out how it works in Albania, Angola, Mozambique, or in some other safely unverifiable region of the Earth...
...They forgot also that the majority of the public had never subscribed to Communism...
...Yes, indeed: You have to be marked "present," if you happen to have a daughter, and she wants to go to high school...
...I am not particularly fond of literary symbols, but some are simply a natural outgrowth of reality...
...An old butler of a former non-Communist politician fell into a well and per-, ished...
...For a brief time after the armored ambush the public supported the Party leadership as their acknowledged leaders...
...Gusta V Husak, the Soviets began to undermine the reformists' position...
...In that kind of society...
...They expected, for instance, that the enforced discipline of Stalinism would continue even after the total abolition of censorship (another bit of lunacy from a CP gone mad...
...Judging by the manuscript novels smuggled to me from Prague, the vast and truly silent majority is now past even hating Communism...
...Was it naivete that led the Dubcekists- all of them, for years, dedicated Marxist-Leninists, in many cases with a shady Stalinist past-to create a situation that could not but become explosive, and eventually unmanageable...
...not way back in the fifties, as in Czechoslovakia...
...Did they indeed intend to hold free elections, convinced, as some of them said, that the people, out of gratitude to the Communist Party for giving political freedom back to them, would return it to power...
...it is not even a story...
...This is a traditional socialist holiday in Europe, commemorating the victims of the Haymarket Riots in Chicago...
...On the outside, these "conformists," the "grey zone" of real-socialist society, have become "normalized," as the Party lingo has it...
...No music, either folk song or symphony, resounds against the strangely barren landscape...
...Then, with the help of a Fifth Column, an anti-Semitic pressure group of old Stalinist stormtroopers called the Jodas Men (Jodasovci), and also of the surviving Stalinists in Dubcek's Central Committee, and of the opportunists on all levels of the Party apparatus led by Dr...
...He gets the idea for Huck Finn...
...This hypothetical Sam Clemens is as obsessed by literary fame as any budding writer anywhere anytime...
...Like the Zauberlehrling in Goethe's poem, the reformists had brought to life the dangerous spirit of democracy, and now they were unable to get rid of its logical consequences...
...Instead of treating him like Imre Nagy, the Kremlin masters returned him to office-to office, mind you, not to power...
...They don't even hate Marxism-Leninism...
...Husak, who replaced Dubcek as Party chairman...
...Emotions naturally swelled under the impact of Soviet violence, cruelty, cynicism, primitiv-ism, and murder...
...In Vaculik's description of the same day's celebration three quarters of a century later, a worker, waiting for the commencement of the march, calls to a busy functionary: "Mr...
...More horrifying things happen to bodies elsewhere...
...that is, they have conformed to the post-1968 political climate...
...The Stalinist president Antonin Novotny along with his cohorts and censors tried to curb the flow...
...mainly soccer...
...The girl has a more grandiose dream...
...Eventually-quite soon, in fact-only a tiny group, which in time proclaimed the Charter 77 document, was still willing to combat the plague, not just abuse it over a glass of beer...
...In 1963, Alexander Dub Cek, a bona fide working-class boy, signed one of the most horrifying documents on the unspeakable crimes of the fifties, the report of the Kolder Commission "investigating the violations of socialist justice...
...In Czech literature, its mood was first captured in a feuilleton by the poet and journalist Jan Neruda (a nineteenth-century Czech liberal whose surname was misappropriated by the twentieth-century Chilean Stalinist Ricardo Reyes...
...No sound comes out of the amplifiers, and so the crowd resumes talking "quite loudly" about what interests it most...
...And although we, unfortunately, cannot read Czech, we are told that not everything in the bookstores there is trash...
...A general strike saved Dubcek's life...
...The manager displays the new acquisitions in his shop window...
...All they feel for it is boundless contempt...
...Apparently one is not permitted to quote from Neruda's account in today's Czechoslovakia...
...This city of-ancient Western culture, driven over by the Marxist steam roller...
...What it does to such cultures is touched upon hi The Writing on the Wall...
...Just a sealed coffin in the crematorium...
...The commander of the Czechoslovak armored forces put a bullet through his head...
...But how grateful can you be to a thief, who, for unclear reasons, returns your stolen property...
...The struggle was fierce and outspoken...
...Only the soul bleeds occasionally...
...Yes, ordinary folks definitely are better off under Realsozialismus...
...The people, disgusted, frustrated, oppressed more than ever before, came mostly to the conclusion that the entire Prague Spring was just another case of one set of Commie rascals fighting another set, and since non-Communists will never again have a say in anything, anyone in his right mind should not concern himself with these gang-wars, but instead give all his energies to the building of private retreats of well-furnished apartments, well-stocked wine cellars, and well-chosen country cottages...
...In a feuilletonty Vlastimil Tenak, a man badly in need of money sells a few drawings to an art shop...
...The director of my publishing house, the one-time secretary of the...
...Yet the call ofthe printer's ink is irresistible...
...Eventually, Dr...
...in fact, as pioneers of some kind of democracy...
...Just a piece of reportage...
...In the course of a century the company goes on to build several dozen prototypes, but they all prove slower and more uncomfortable than the previous models, and able to return to Mother Earth only by means of crash-landings...
...Ivan, for a man like you twenty thousand means nothing...
...Which, in the context of all totalitarian dictatorships, translates as cowardice...
...If he builds his novel around the central issue of Southern society, i.e., slavery, the book will be seized by the censors, and its author, quite possibly, by the police...
...Those window-dressing parties listed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as proofs of pluralism in Communist Czechoslovakia made efforts to come to real life...
...They remember what happened in 1968...
...It's just that something is missing from the story...
...What about ordinary folks who are believed to be better off--perhaps because the Western liberal presumes such types can live by bread alone-than they were in the old days of the Thomas Bate Shoe Company...
...perhaps even loved some, above all the kindly, innocentlooking, and so obviously suffering Mr...
...Josef Skvorecky PRAGUE WINTER Fifteen years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a reassessment...
...But occasionally the accumulated frustration spills over into the clandestinely penned pages, delivered then by courageous emissaries to distant Canada...
...Were they serious about their promises...
...The ultimate result of his dialectics seems to be Poland, where the workers' party has been replaced by an alliance of army and special units of stormtroopers, where class justice has been superseded by martial law, and where the folksy party leader has given way to a ramrod general who looks like a South American junta boss envisioned by Costa-Gavras...
...Suppose an aircraft designer talks the Boeing Company into financing an airplane which, according to its creator, is guaranteed to be faster, safer, and more comfortable than any ever built...
...Out of frustration and disgust, some have become apolitical...
...a subtle demagogic trick...
...Non-Communists started the KAN, a club of non-Party activists...
...But this time people did take their words seriously, and so did the Soviet Union...
...She tells the writer about gas stations where one can "pull in ten thousand a month if it's a halfway decent pump...
...Nothing much, is it...
...All right, so far the stories I have quoted have been about intellectuals who, if American experience is any indication, have a tendency to grumble...
...I've already saved up the rest, I know about a great pump, in six months it would be paid off and from then on it would be all gravy...
...The gory events of the fifties do not find their way into the 35-odd pieces in this volume...
...The Communist reform movement was quickly assuming the characteristics of a cheap thriller...
...All this, mind you, in an official Party document, available-in the Czech-also in the West...
...Only the smell of wieners seeps through an atmosphere of devastating senselessness...
...The profit is split up among all the employees who work as a team...
...Where they differed was in the forgetfulness of the self-hypnotized Party liberals, and the good historic memory of most of their subjects...
...Certainly, the originator of such an, insanity would be recognized as a genius...
...There is a crucial difference between the creative and performing arts when it comes to their manageability and propaganda value...
...So, as I see it, in the beginning was this eye opener...
...Unfortunately, the process created new illusions...
...Czech resistance was not entirely passive...
...some even sent anonymous donations...
...In the feuilleton of the past, the workers listened silently and attentively to their leaders...
...When Ludvik Vaculik leaves home to attend the funeral of Professor Patofka, a 70-year-old philosopher who died during a twelve-hour police interrogation, he is picked up and driven to the police precinct, where he is kept until the funeral is safely over...
...And he was being hypocritical when he got mad at Orson Welles for telling him the play was anti-Stalinist...
...Ivan Svitak, now a professor of philosophy at California State University, drew attention to the case of Jan Masaryk, the half-American son of Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, who although he owned a-revolver and a wide assortment of sleeping pills, was said to have committed suicide by jumping out of a third-floor window...
...The girl is so obsessed by the vision of the riches-bringing pump that she drags the writer into a big crate in the storage room and offers to sleep with him if he'll promise to become a partner in the bribing-scheme...
...A victorious pandemonium: the joy of a small nation over the justice of games, where an ant-sized David can beat a bronto-saurus of a Goliath...
...Then the woman says goodbye, the writer retires to his room...
...What goes on between the two policemen is also perfectly normal: the younger complains about his unfaithful wife, the older gives him advice about how to deal with females in general, and with fickle ones in particular...
...But most also regarded its members as dare-devil idealists...
...In countries where the Marxist-Leninists got their first chance at blood-letting only recently...
...The feelings about Communism captured there are much more critical-to use a polite word- than those one can find in books by such dissidents as those represented in The Writing on the Wall...
...The popular emotions reached their peak after the self-immolation of Jan Palach, a non-Communist Charles University student,t and then, in true Czech style, after two consecutive victories of the Czechoslovak ice hockey team over the Soviet kommanda during the 1969 World Championships...
...This is a story about the future of the future, and how it works...
...Organizer, mark me present...
...a shift in meaning...
...This perhaps is more useful reading for the Western left-leaning man than news items about poetry workshops, recently organized for the Nicaraguan police force...
...The uninformed manager is reprimanded, the drawings are confiscated...
...I am not speaking about the works of known dissidents, but of authors who are university students, members in good standing of the Communist youth, "progressive non-party citizens": in short not the third- but the second-class citizens...
...He knows that he owes his relative safety and relative prosperity to his civil obedience...
...A remarkable story by Eda Kriseovd, "Our Small Town," illustrates the impact of Marxist social engineering on a society where problems of literacy were solved in the previous century...
...But the shocked ones got used to this private-club democracy, and slowly, with the Stalinist guard weakening and the opportunists changing sides, some of it spilled over, first to the cultural weeklies, eventually to general periodicals...
...Smacking so patently of the Gestapo rather than of noble revolutionary violence, these confessed horrors shook the idealists among the comrades: the former young activists and hotheads who had been blinded by uncritical acceptance of an unex-amined ideal...
...Then somebody smashed the shop-windows of the Soviet airline Aeroflot...
...Crowds shouting ultra anti-Soviet slogans filled Wenceslas Square, drivers honked their horns...
...Of course, every citizen of Czechoslovakia is aware of the answer, too...
...What about the lavish Shakespearean productions...
...What is going on is perfectly normal: the writer has breakfast with his wife, they are seized by a sudden lust and make love on the floor...
...an all-penetrating conspiracy of people who saw the futility of all ideals and the murderous ambiguity of human illusions . . . a determined fraternity of true materialists who knew that you could count only those things that can be counted, that money can buy anything and anyone-except Death (which they don't worry about) and except a few isolated fools whom they clap into prison, kick out of the country or shove into cellars to stoke furnaces and indulge their idle cogitations...
...In my own simplified view, it all started in the early sixties, after official revelations of Stalinist "excesses" began spilling out...
...One aspect of this daily life is a special kind of schizophrenia...
...It is in conflict with the instinct for self-preservation...
...Some of the pieces are more ominous...
...The final metaphor for the metamorphosis of the working class and their leaders in Realsozialismus is Vaculfi's feuilleton "First of May...
...Or is it...
...In the end, they labored under the illusion that, far from just being leaders of a Party faction, they were spokesmen for the entire people, loved and esteemed by the masses...
...This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx...
...Then came Ludvik Vaculik's famous speech at the Writers' Congress in 1967, contrasting optimistic visions of socialist reality with actual achievements...
...Father Plojhar, the quisling priest (and worthy ancestor of Nicaragua's pro-Sandinista divines) who for twenty years had been chairman of the Catholic People's Party, had to resign in disgrace...
...There is just one hitch: the franchise costs, in bribes, at least 25,000 crowns...
...It contains allusions to the Prussian invasion of the country in 1866, and a surrealistically associating reader might be reminded of something the Soviets did in 1968...
...Quite a few unread volumes describe and analyze the events, idealize or defame their protagonists...
...As predicted, the state has withered away: first into the country-wide jail of martial law, then into the universal barracks of military discipline imposed on the industrial work force, with everybody drafted for an indeterminate length of time...
...yes, even as characters who are not quite right in the head...
...Stalinist president Klement Gottwald, died in Prague after a prolonged visit to Moscow, of a heart attack during a stroll in the park: his body was never seen by anyone, not even his widow...
...Doctorow, you don't see much difference between Auschwitz and Disneyland, how could you see the dissimilarity between New York and Prague...
...Savage battles were fought over such grave ideological issues as the nakedness of the protagonist in Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde, about, the resemblance to Lenin of the leading actor in Jan N&nec's Report on the Party and the Guests, or about the wasting of food in Vera Chyti-LOVA's The Daisies...
...the man then goes to the toilet and has a bowel movement (at this point, one of the policemen discreetly turns down the volume...
...But to make such demands in a Soviet colony exposes the demander and his family to untold miseries, to the dangers of socialist prisons, even of death...
...Soviet psychiatrists, naturally, never ask the interesting question: namely, what, indeed, makes such actions abnormal...
...A nurse revealed that the priest Father Toufar, arrested after a cross had miraculously moved in his village church at Ciho St, died on the operating table from numerous internal injuries suffered during police interrogation...
...The past 25 years or so have witnessed other crash-landings of Marxism, and the story is becoming a bore...
...Gustav Husak, the Czech president, is about to make a speech, when all of a sudden the public address system fails...
...In Ivan Klfma's story "A Christmas Conspiracy," a former writer, now working at odd jobs and occasionally finding a "front" for his TV plays, gets a temporary job selling Christmas carp for a grocery store...
...In actual fact, the common people supported them only because they knew-having learned the hard way-that in a totalitarian state decisive change can come only from above...
...In the heat of battle, it slipped then-minds that other leaders had once been duly elected, and then-often with their help-silenced, forced into exile, or even liquidated...
...The fact that close to one hundred people died in Prague alone during street fighting (including, allegedly, the black actor from my film End of a Priest) is often overlooked...
...The police soon arrive, equipped with a secret list of undesirable artists...
...It is a funny, entertaining, well-written book...
...Few people who feel like cowards will relish the power that makes them feel that way...
...The police ask for the address of the seller, who is then apprehended and accused of trafficking in anti-state art...
...The job becomes his initiation into socialist entrepre-neurship...
...A police helicopter hovers a few feet above the open grave...
...The one which describes innovative methods of Marxist penology, such as keeping prisoners' hands in tight rubber gloves until fingers begin to rot away, or a spectacular variation of age-old hunger-torture which leads half-crazed prisoners to offer their eyes for medical research in return for a piece of bread, or to eat their own excrement...
...It followed in the wake of a long internal Party struggle between those who were not shocked-the convinced Stalinists and the cynical opportunists-and those who were...
...I remember them after these revelations, talking excitedly into the wee hours over empty bottles of slivovitz, swearing, blaspheming, weeping, even apologizing to some of their victims...
...He was also familiar with the content of the later Piller Report which cited the recommendation of the Ministry of Justice that the passing of death sentences be slowed because their accumulation in brief spans of time affects the sanity of the executioner...
...To the amazed former writer, who compares them to himself and his fellow dissidents, officially described as "antisocialist conspirators," their lively community appears as a "world full of real conspirators...
...And as for "not-so-trashy" books . . . Let's imagine a young Mark Twain who lives in the Old South in the days of slavery but under conditions of literary censorship as strict as those in today's Czechoslovakia...
...defamiliarized, if you wish...
...They know it by heart...
...In the meantime, on a track adjoining the cemetery, a group of motorcycle racers begins intensive training, and the priest's funeral oration is drowned out by the unmuffled exhausts...
...Wouldn't it be more logical to study what it does to old Western cultures, as for instance that of the Czechs and Slovaks...
...They are jenseiis von Kommunismus und Kapitalis-mus...
...In the feuilleton of the future's future, the leader performs the pantomime of a TV announcer rendered mute, and the workers, not giving a damn about him, twaddle about trivialities...
...But the lure of uncensored freedom proved too tempting...
...These little clashes with real-socialist power accumulate, and eventually become nauseating...
...The demands of the dissidents are perfectly legal: respect for the Constitution which guarantees personal liberty and all the human rights specified in the UN Charter and reaffirmed by the Helsinki Agreement which was signed by the Czechoslovak government...
...English lacks the decidedly pejorative connotations "real-ny" has acquired in Czech, and "real" in English may also mean "true...
...Aimed at readers who will never know of their existence, they end up in libraries of people who do not need their message...
...not perhaps of aircraft design, but of conmanship...
...The public was puzzled, then amused, finally excited...
...Such naivete" in people as politically hardened as the Dubcekists seems incredible...
...The Writing on the Wall is a book of ruins, of hopes "grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured" (Joseph Conrad...
...Although Communism creates an elitist society and there is no democracy for the citizen, there is something called "inner Party democracy" (a Leninist heritage...
...This is not a book about Communism's past but about its future...
...But there is little blood in these stories...
...In Pavel Kohout's story "Trouble," two secret policemen, by means of electronic bugs, tape the goings-on in the private apartment of a dissident writer...
...In short, everything in the story is perfectly normal...
...Prague, these days, is simply uninteresting...
...say my left-leaning acquaintances, fresh from a trip to Prague of half-Didion duration...
...But it was also the year of the Prague Spring, of the glorious temporary insanity that befell the Czechoslovak Communist Party...
...This recent addition to the Marxist lexicon cannot be translated as "real socialism...
...Proof was provided by the ever-ready Dr...
...But the non-normalized voices of the "normalized" are anonymous, and they therefore speak without solicitude, without the hard-to-overcome consideration for one's political past (they have hone), and without illusions...
...But such shares in the fruit of fraudulence are small change...
...At least a portion of such carryings-on could have been genuine...
...But chances also are you won't...
...So whereas the dissidents ask for things that, in terms of the Constitution and of valid laws, must be considered legally normal, the act of demanding them is psychologically abnormal...
...And people literally got drunk on freedom...
...So young Clemens does a little focus-shifting-away from the immorality of taking a man's freedom to, let's say, offenses against proper Southern table manners-and his "sivilized" Huck Finn is soon on the market...
...Neruda writes about the silence of the marching workers and about the dedicated speeches of their leaders...
...Yet the company continues to turn them out...
...So far so good...
...But re&lnfy socialismus can mean a deadpan general or toneless country gluttons, depending on the state ofthe local economy...
...It enables high Party functionaries to indulge in frank discussions behind closed doors...
...For too long they had been used to shouting meaningless slogans, which no one had ever taken seriously...
...Ivan . . . your friend told me about you, that you write for the TV and make a nice bundle . . . Mr...
...By then, completely flabbergasted by the incredible commedia, I saw with absolute certainty how this experiment would end...
...News-unworthy...
...But never a workers' council or a blooming contemporary culture...
...A shopgirl, regularly employed by the grocery, tells him about a number of tricks based mostly on mixing cheap stuff with more expensive stuff, which brings the store a nice profit...
...To me (I was there) this annus mirabilis remains something of an enigma...
...The dissidents (they themselves don't like this label, since it's not they but rather the government that dissents from the Constitution) either continue to consider themselves democratic socialists, or, understandably, are somewhat inhibited by the fact that they are not and cannot be- their literary styles are easily recognizable-anonymous...
...Only readers who once lived among those ruins are likely to pick it from a bookshelf...
...The shocked ones, having once succumbed to the illusion of a just dictatorship, now began to see themselves as the natural leaders of a democratic movement...
...Just a little unpleasantness...
...This, I suspect, is the fate of most such works published in the United States...
...in two years we'll save up enough for a house . . . we'll take trips to the seashore, won't that be great...
...Not some John Birch Society pamphlet...
...And can you trust him in the future...
...Political prisoners organized themselves into a vociferous Gub...
...They express their thoughts and feelings only in intimate circles of the moft trusted friends, otherwise they follow the nauseating rituals of "socialist progressivity...
...On this there was tacit agreement between the public and the proponents of reform...
...Dub Cek resigned, lingered on as the chairman of the National Assembly, a powerless club of yes men, then as ambassador to Turkey, then as a clerk in a forestry office in Bratislava, eventually as old-age pensioner...
...Well, all dictators love fiddlers, but suspect penpushers, except those who are safely dead...
...Yes, the Democratic Convention...
...A criminologist showed me, without commentary, police photographs of a hanging judge from the fifties who had just hanged himself from a tree, his legs bent stiffly at the knees...
...Dub Sek...
...But there is a hitch here...
...Multiply it by ten million, and chances are you will begin to sense the quality of daily life under Realsozialismus...
...His supporters from among the shocked emigrated or submerged Some ended up in jail, others as professors at American universities...
...Really...
...In better days, an artist-friend had given him those pictures...
...The Soviet commander responded with an ultimatum: either the Dubcek government prove to be in control, or he will move his forces stationed twenty miles east of Prague to the capital...
...that too...
...The group had the sympathies of most people...
...Its female intellectual narrator quietly observes the daily habits of contemporary villagers who spend their free time gorging themselves on smoked pork and drudging on the building sites of private retreats...
...If, like Mr...
...The rest was almost all a bad miscalculation by politicos who, despite their many years of speaking in the name of the masses, knew nothing about the real and often vengeful spirit of the democratic crowd...
...In a perverted way, Soviet psychiatry is accurate: civil disobedience in the Soviet empire is indeed a symptom of mental abnormality...
...Or rather, a gang: penalties for betraying the collective are forbidding...
...Naturally, for the public stage, they are required to change back into parrots, no matter how openly they quarreled in camera...
...And what about those wonderful concerts in the Renaissance Rudolfinum Hall in Prague...
...For the rest of the policemen's shift he pounds on his typewriter...
...The difference between what Neruda saw many years ago and what Vaculik witnessed in 1975 stands revealed...
...We had them, too, thirty years ago...
Vol. 16 • September 1983 • No. 9
