Petr A. Bilek
Petr A. Bilek is a professor of modern Czech literature at Charles University, and of cultural studies at the University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic. He authored six books on literature and culture. He wrote on modern Czech poetry, literary theory, and recently mainly on contemporary Czech prose fiction.
At the end of the 19th century, with the conclusion of the modern period of development, literature (having fulfilled its role as a device for public education and political struggle within society) became an “autonomous” presence. Czech literature, however, was remarkable within the European context for its dual roles. This was down to the Czech National Revival that had developed over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, and that was distinguished by its affirmation of the history and “spirit” of the Czech people and its programme of filling the public space with ideologically consistent national literature. The movement offered a vision of the people as part of an enlightened and egalitarian group, and literature was not required to transmit, fuse, or effect change, but rather to actively and effectively reiterate a message of homogeneity and divergence from other groups. Accordingly, from the perspective of “higher-order” literature, 19th century Czech literature existed as an autonomous playground, wherein the “other” (the cultures of other ethnicities and regions) was used to illuminate Czech-like examples, and the greats (Goethe, Scott, Byron, Schiller, Heine, Dickens and Tolstoy) were no more than a list of names. At the same time, however, through the medium of the literary hit-making translations of the time, a world of “depravity”, or pop-culture, also developed throughout the 19th century. (Alexandre Dumas from the 1850s, Jules Verne from the 1870s, James Fenimore Cooper and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson from the 1880s, Karl May and Arthur Conan Doyle from the turn of the century, and Jack London and Ernest Thompson Seton from the early 1910s).
For more than 20 years from 1880 onwards, as well as stories of indigenous Americans, Czech literature was fascinated by Scandinavia, where it found issues that paralleled its own pertaining to the relationship between individual and society. Just as a miniature Eiffel Tower was built in Petřín in Prague in 1891, so, during the same period, European and world literature spread via translations, with Exoticism even sparking an interest in non-European literature (and an unremitting fascination with Japan). As a result, in the 1890s it became possible to move away from a collectivist programme, and transition from themes of ethnicity to individuality, and from mutual support, surveillance and exclusion to topics of personal interest and issues of individual identity.
For the first decade of the 20th century, within its – in some respects -natural habitat of European literature, Czech literature developed a sense of the “here and now.” Several Czech writers (for example the early works of the Čapek brothers, Jaroslav Hašek, Jakub Deml, and Ladislav Klíma) in the emergent spirit of modernism, took as their subject the crisis of individual identity, going on to establish a concept we might call Central European modernism, alongside Franz Kafka, Alfred Kubin, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Bruno Schulz, and Witold Gombrowicz. There were clear trends in avant-garde literature (the Devětsil writers of the 1920s, the surrealism of the 1930s, and in some respects socialist realism), and with each, the Czech context was inspired by exoticism, celebration, revolution, and marginalisation both in Europe and further afield. In parallel with mainstream European literature, Czech literature in the 1920s and 30s explored themes of threat and crisis, existential nihilism, the loss of temporal sense, and the phenomenon of death, particularly in the late 1930s. This characteristic of Czech literature can be seen in the 1930s not only in mainstream works like the stories and plays of Karel Čapek, and the prose of Ivan Olbracht, Jan Čep, Egon Hostovsky, Jaroslav Havlicek and Václav Řezáč, but in the prose of Vladislav Vančura and Milada Součková, and the experimental prose of Marie Majerová’s The Dam etc.
With the fall of democratic Czechoslovakia in 1939 and the emergence of totalitarianism, Czech literature once again found itself tied to its context, questioning its existence, and taking as its central themes the icons of Czech history and culture. Ordinary people sought the Czech “spirit” both in themselves and in the beauty of their language. With the emergence of Communist totalitarianism after the War, a Soviet cultural model was imported. The country was no longer isolated, but now collectivist housing was built, the public good was prioritized, the private, individual domain was erased, and Czech literature was once again forced to become an artificial open-air museum prioritizing education and ideological propaganda. The Stalinist mood spread in the 1950s, but the impression that this created fertile ground for individualistic writers like Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Josef Škvorecký, Arnošt Lustig, Ivan Klíma, Václav Havel, Věra Linhartová, and Ludvík Vaculík, who from the 1960s became popular first domestically and then overseas, is no more than a superficial paradox. In 1960s’ Czechoslovakia these writers were seen as experimenting with new social themes and literary approaches, but when they were later received abroad, they were conflated with the traumatic images of 1968, and used as effective propaganda material as victims of a totalitarian regime. As a result, their work has been seen overseas – without being thus intentioned by the author, as we know from Kundera’s example – as being about the promise and collapse of utopian society in the exoticized space of a Soviet communist satellite nation.
Communism fell in 1989. However, this did not result in Czech literature being immediately admitted as a branch of European literature. Hailing from a society that had developed in a unique way, and having been elevated so far as to be institutionalized, Czech literature was expected to “pay its dues” and “fill in the blanks.” Yet at the same time, it was faced with the puzzling fact that in a “normal” society, literature was just another market commodity. Czech literature responded to this paradigm shift by withdrawing from the spotlight and exploring the possibilities of new ways of writing (best-sellers, political pamphlets, “authentic” autobiographical works). By the latter half of the 1990s, a new generation of writers had begun attending overseas events and residencies, and reflecting external (export-minded) registers tied to the possibilities of the media. Writers like Jáchym Topol, Michal Ajvaz, Emil Hakl, and Petra Hůlová cemented their international status, and alongside writers from Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine, offered through a limited body of work complementary images of a changing East, which for Western readers read as “other”, exotic, and distinctive. For example, the prose of Topol is an excellent complement to the prose themes and poetry of Andrzej Stasiuk and Olga Tokarczuk. What appears is a symbolic image of an “alternative”, as yet disorganized and floundering Eastern European culture (seen from which point of view, the concept of Central European literature retreats into the background, and Russian literature also assumes its own unique position), which is both accessible and at the same time deals with themes that remain on the margins of, or are forgotten altogether by, Western European literature. For those who still believe in the power and potential of literature, this position of “gentle barbarian” harbours clear and compelling possibilities.
English Translation: Bethan Jones
