Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (79 page)
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Authors: Peter Demetz
BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
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Among the soldiers who returned from the Siberian front to Prague in 1919 was the writer Jaroslav Hašek, but he did so halfheartedly at best. His picaresque novel
The Good Soldier Švejk
has been called by many of his contemporary colleagues a Dada enterprise, and his life was Dada even more. At home (when he did not roam on foot through Central Europe), the young man stylized himself as a Prague Maxim Gorki, worked for a while for a periodical specializing in zoological questions (among others, he contributed an article suggesting that elephants like gramophone music whereas tigers do not), and organized with his beerguzzling friends a Party of Moderate Progress According to the Law, demanding a more severe supervision of the poor, the nationalization of sextons, and the transfer of all credit institutions into the hands of the clergy. When war broke out, he enlisted as a cadet officer; on August 13, 1915, he was awarded an imperial and royal silver medal for valor. A few months later, when the Russians broke through the Austrian positions, he used his chance, as did thousands of Czechs, and changed sides. The fraternal
Russians put him first into a camp (where everyone suffered from hunger and typhoid fever), and from there he joined Czechoslovak legions fighting on the eastern front.
The Good Soldier Švejk
has been called by many of his contemporary colleagues a Dada enterprise, and his life was Dada even more. At home (when he did not roam on foot through Central Europe), the young man stylized himself as a Prague Maxim Gorki, worked for a while for a periodical specializing in zoological questions (among others, he contributed an article suggesting that elephants like gramophone music whereas tigers do not), and organized with his beerguzzling friends a Party of Moderate Progress According to the Law, demanding a more severe supervision of the poor, the nationalization of sextons, and the transfer of all credit institutions into the hands of the clergy. When war broke out, he enlisted as a cadet officer; on August 13, 1915, he was awarded an imperial and royal silver medal for valor. A few months later, when the Russians broke through the Austrian positions, he used his chance, as did thousands of Czechs, and changed sides. The fraternal
Russians put him first into a camp (where everyone suffered from hunger and typhoid fever), and from there he joined Czechoslovak legions fighting on the eastern front.
Politically, Hašek developed rather fast, to say the least; early in 1916 he declared in a soldiers’ newspaper that Bohemia should be ruled by Romanovs, but a year later he defended parliamentary democracy (and Masaryk), in February 1918 he joined the left Social Democrats, and in May was among Bolsheviks, who sent him to Samara, on the Volga River, to do propaganda work there. Promoted to chair the party committee of the Fifth Soviet Army in April 1920, he edited a revolutionary newspaper in Irkutsk and married his assistant, Comrade Shura, a former aristocrat; somehow he forgot to tell her about his wife and son in Prague. He felt quite comfortable in Siberia, and the Prague party committee had to ask Moscow to send him home to Prague, where he was urgently needed. But when he finally arrived with Shura, the Communists had just lost their first battle against the parliamentary government and most of their leaders were in prison. Hašek was nearly lynched in the street when Czech legionnaires recognized the “commissar” who had deserted to the Bolshevik enemy, and the police suspected him, rightly, of bigamy. His idea was to write a novel that would end all his struggles, and he withdrew to a Bohemian village, where he wrote, or rather dictated, the first volumes of his
Švejk
, slowly drinking himself to death. Members of the Sokol, whom he had always ridiculed, were honor guards at his lonely village funeral, and the novel, which his publisher issued in installments on bad paper, was the first book in the new republic to attract international attention.
Švejk
, slowly drinking himself to death. Members of the Sokol, whom he had always ridiculed, were honor guards at his lonely village funeral, and the novel, which his publisher issued in installments on bad paper, was the first book in the new republic to attract international attention.
Most Czech intellectuals of recent generations have been proud to be able to quote Svejk’s cunning folk wisdom in all possible and impossible situations, but few readers ever went beyond the third volume or the first part of the fourth to the continuations, written by Hašeks’s friend Karel Van
k, who tried his best to continue in Hašek’s way. In his own volumes, Hašek tends to repeat a few basic situations about Svejk versus the bureaucrats, and he offers a gallery of striking portraits rather than an unusual plot, as the picaresque genre requires. Svejk, “the little man,” makes a living selling dogs with false pedigrees, smokes his pipe, drinks his beer, and finds himself in constant trouble because he talks too much—and yet police officers, army doctors, and judges always send him back home or return him to his regiment because they believe that only a congenial idiot can show so much enthusiasm for the dynasty and the emperor. He is an artist of survival, serves as
pucflek
(orderly) to army chaplain Katz, a baptized
Jew, and to First Lieutenant Lukáš, a Czech and a ladies’ man, and is constantly picked up by the Austrian military police as a Russian spy. He is the master of “yes saying,” forcing his triumphant adversaries to reveal their foolishness, but the trouble is that it is rather difficult to say whether Švejk is cunning enough to offer his resistance without resistance or whether he is a simple moron. Hašek rarely intervenes as narrator and leaves it to the helpless reader to decide—except in the episode in military prison, where the narrator definitely suggests that the chief of guards is wrong to believe that Švejk is merely naive. Among Czech critics, responses to Švejk were less than unanimous; the left was generally in favor, the liberals preferred mixed enthusiasm and skepticism, and conservative patriots despised him as an egotist who was merely intent upon saving his “stinking skin from the world massacre” (as Arne Novák put it). Even Julius Fu
ík, a star Communist critic who was later killed by the Nazis, tried to find his own way out of the critical dilemma, saying in 1929 that Švejk was “the type of the soldier [one finds] in all imperialist armies” and in 1939, when political dangers were more acute, assuring Czech readers that Švejk unmasked the power of reaction, developing an intense “political consciousness” all the way (this is certainly not in Hašek’s text). It is another question entirely how many people during the Stalinist regime adopted Švejk’s way of resisting without resistance and whether, in doing so, they really sabotaged the authorities or simply made life easier for the new bureaucrats, who knew Hašek’s book as well as anybody else.
k, who tried his best to continue in Hašek’s way. In his own volumes, Hašek tends to repeat a few basic situations about Svejk versus the bureaucrats, and he offers a gallery of striking portraits rather than an unusual plot, as the picaresque genre requires. Svejk, “the little man,” makes a living selling dogs with false pedigrees, smokes his pipe, drinks his beer, and finds himself in constant trouble because he talks too much—and yet police officers, army doctors, and judges always send him back home or return him to his regiment because they believe that only a congenial idiot can show so much enthusiasm for the dynasty and the emperor. He is an artist of survival, serves aspucflek
(orderly) to army chaplain Katz, a baptized
Jew, and to First Lieutenant Lukáš, a Czech and a ladies’ man, and is constantly picked up by the Austrian military police as a Russian spy. He is the master of “yes saying,” forcing his triumphant adversaries to reveal their foolishness, but the trouble is that it is rather difficult to say whether Švejk is cunning enough to offer his resistance without resistance or whether he is a simple moron. Hašek rarely intervenes as narrator and leaves it to the helpless reader to decide—except in the episode in military prison, where the narrator definitely suggests that the chief of guards is wrong to believe that Švejk is merely naive. Among Czech critics, responses to Švejk were less than unanimous; the left was generally in favor, the liberals preferred mixed enthusiasm and skepticism, and conservative patriots despised him as an egotist who was merely intent upon saving his “stinking skin from the world massacre” (as Arne Novák put it). Even Julius Fu
ík, a star Communist critic who was later killed by the Nazis, tried to find his own way out of the critical dilemma, saying in 1929 that Švejk was “the type of the soldier [one finds] in all imperialist armies” and in 1939, when political dangers were more acute, assuring Czech readers that Švejk unmasked the power of reaction, developing an intense “political consciousness” all the way (this is certainly not in Hašek’s text). It is another question entirely how many people during the Stalinist regime adopted Švejk’s way of resisting without resistance and whether, in doing so, they really sabotaged the authorities or simply made life easier for the new bureaucrats, who knew Hašek’s book as well as anybody else.Only in schoolbooks do political and literary developments neatly coincide, but the history of the independent republic and the chronicle of the Czech avant-garde diverge only a little. In Prague in 1908-12, painters and architects moved first in perfect synchrony with developments in Milan, Paris, and Berlin; Czech writers followed at a distance of nearly ten years. It was not that voices of individual rebels, often of anarchist sympathies, were not heard but they too had to carry the burdens of tradition; although their language was that of daily use rather than a high and rare symbolist vocabulary, they still handled accepted forms and genres. They felt rebellious, but they lacked the new formal consciousness that emerged, elsewhere, from the radical social and technological transformations of Europe’s great capitals; the enormously gifted young poets of the young republic paradoxically had to learn more about the idiom of Guillaume Apollinaire and his contemporaries before they could speak in their own voice.
Karel
apek was well known beyond Prague as Masaryk’s friend (in
apek’s garden in Vinohrady, the president had a chance to meet younger
intellectuals on Friday for tea) and as the author of R.U.R. (1921),
V
c Makropulos (The Makropouios Secret
, 1922) and
Bílá Nemoc
(
The White Plague,
1937), much performed on European stages. But it was far less known that he worked for years on pioneering translations of modern French poetry; his version of Apollinaire’s
Zone
was a key text for the Czech avant-garde in 1918 and his anthology of recent French poetry in 1920 revealed a totally new world to a younger generation. Later critics assert that a Soviet orientation should be taken into account as well; the avant-garde was certainly inclined to the radical left in Prague as much as in Germany or France. However, a serious knowledge of early Soviet aesthetic developments was rare, and it is not impossible that the linguist Roman Jakobson (coming to Prague originally with a Soviet delegation) was one of the few witnesses qualified to tell young people what was going on in Soviet art and literature.
apek was well known beyond Prague as Masaryk’s friend (inapek’s garden in Vinohrady, the president had a chance to meet youngerintellectuals on Friday for tea) and as the author of R.U.R. (1921),
V
c Makropulos (The Makropouios Secret, 1922) and
Bílá Nemoc
(
The White Plague,
1937), much performed on European stages. But it was far less known that he worked for years on pioneering translations of modern French poetry; his version of Apollinaire’s
Zone
was a key text for the Czech avant-garde in 1918 and his anthology of recent French poetry in 1920 revealed a totally new world to a younger generation. Later critics assert that a Soviet orientation should be taken into account as well; the avant-garde was certainly inclined to the radical left in Prague as much as in Germany or France. However, a serious knowledge of early Soviet aesthetic developments was rare, and it is not impossible that the linguist Roman Jakobson (coming to Prague originally with a Soviet delegation) was one of the few witnesses qualified to tell young people what was going on in Soviet art and literature.
The avant-garde group that called itself Dev
tsil (the name of the butterbur plant tells little of the word’s Czech etymological force, combining the words “nine” and “strength”) first gathered in Prague in October 1920. Depending on the sources, it was made up either of talented bourgeois students of the elite K
emencárna school or of class-conscious writers (among them Jaroslav Seifert, a future Nobel laureate) ready to advance the cause of the revolutionary masses just preparing the first general strike against the young republic. A few years later, Dev
tsil’s attention shifted from
Proletkult
fever to a revolution of aesthetic sensibilities, taking its strength from Charlie Chaplin’s movies, from clowns, circus riders, and acrobats, from red stars in the sky, and from jazz; the young poets began to celebrate the rush of life as enjoyed in the great European and American cities (never London, perhaps thought to be too conservative). It was an intoxicating time of Dev
tsil poeticism, of which the proletarian poets were suspicious, but for a productive decade (1920-30) it was articulated by Karel Teige, its theoretician, and the expansive young poet Vit
zslav Nezval, who became the experimental master of Czech verse. Nezval once wrote that he and Teige had discovered poeticism, or whatever it was, just walking through Prague, “feeling the atmosphere of happiness, witnessed by spring fragrances, the stars, the rosary of street lanterns, vomiting drunks, begging old women, and the makeup of the prostitutes leaning against the railing of the quai.” Fortunately, Teige’s theory of poeticism, in itself a conglomerate of all the ideas of the European avant-garde, was wide open to new talent—a creed of joy, exhilaration, sensuality, and amplitude that appealed to most gifted writers. Even if they did not stay, they participated in the élan of creating surprising
poems, as did Ji
í Wolker, issuing manifestos, and disdaining the middle classes. (Milena Jesenská, Franz Kafka’s onetime friend, joined Dev
tsil by marrying Jaromír Krejcar, a functionalist architect close to Teige.) Nezval was the white magician of Prague who glorified its lights, clouds, bars,
parapluies,
and kisses:
tsil (the name of the butterbur plant tells little of the word’s Czech etymological force, combining the words “nine” and “strength”) first gathered in Prague in October 1920. Depending on the sources, it was made up either of talented bourgeois students of the elite Kemencárna school or of class-conscious writers (among them Jaroslav Seifert, a future Nobel laureate) ready to advance the cause of the revolutionary masses just preparing the first general strike against the young republic. A few years later, Devtsil’s attention shifted fromProletkult
fever to a revolution of aesthetic sensibilities, taking its strength from Charlie Chaplin’s movies, from clowns, circus riders, and acrobats, from red stars in the sky, and from jazz; the young poets began to celebrate the rush of life as enjoyed in the great European and American cities (never London, perhaps thought to be too conservative). It was an intoxicating time of Dev
tsil poeticism, of which the proletarian poets were suspicious, but for a productive decade (1920-30) it was articulated by Karel Teige, its theoretician, and the expansive young poet Vitzslav Nezval, who became the experimental master of Czech verse. Nezval once wrote that he and Teige had discovered poeticism, or whatever it was, just walking through Prague, “feeling the atmosphere of happiness, witnessed by spring fragrances, the stars, the rosary of street lanterns, vomiting drunks, begging old women, and the makeup of the prostitutes leaning against the railing of the quai.” Fortunately, Teige’s theory of poeticism, in itself a conglomerate of all the ideas of the European avant-garde, was wide open to new talent—a creed of joy, exhilaration, sensuality, and amplitude that appealed to most gifted writers. Even if they did not stay, they participated in the élan of creating surprisingpoems, as did Ji
í Wolker, issuing manifestos, and disdaining the middle classes. (Milena Jesenská, Franz Kafka’s onetime friend, joined Devtsil by marrying Jaromír Krejcar, a functionalist architect close to Teige.) Nezval was the white magician of Prague who glorified its lights, clouds, bars,parapluies,
and kisses:
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