by Peter Demetz
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 Vank, 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 Fuík, 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), Vc 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 Devtsil (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 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 Devtsil 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 surprising poems, as did Jií 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:
Prague of a hundred towers
with the fingers of all the saints
with the fingers of perjury …
with the burning fingers of women lying on their backs
with the fingers that touch the stars …
with the fingers of a windmill and a lilac bush …
with the fingers of the rain, cut off, and the Týn cathedral
on the glove of the dawns …
Karel Teige, who in the late 1920s taught at the Dessau Bauhaus, the institutional headquarters of the German avant-garde, and Nezval, a voracious reader with a photographic memory, were perfectly qualified to make fine distinctions between what was going on among avant-garde writers in west and east, and they provided poeticism with a program that was fully if critically aware of its early links to Italian futurism and European Dadaism. They had a more difficult time separating the Czech poeticists from the French surrealists who came, they said, only after Prague poeticists had articulated their views. Both Teige in his discussions (among them an early and remarkable analysis of the art of photography and the cinema) and Nezval in his lively essay entitled “The Parrot on the Motorcycle” (1925) believed that the poem should emancipate itself, asserting its independence as poem against philosophies and ideologies. The magnificent practitioner Nezval was particularly eloquent in praising the process of untrammeled association, “a woman-alchemist quicker than the radio,” and the creative principle of assonance and rhyme; he was frank enough to admit that the French surrealists who had studied Freud (still unknown in Prague, Nezval wrongly believe
d) knew more about the subconscious sources of the imagination than their Czech colleagues, but he defended the Czech belief that the music of poetry triggered free association against the surrealist disdain for rhyme, which was understandable only in the context of the French tradition. The poeticists, it became increasingly clear, were but surrealists in statu nascendi, and when their group had run out of collective steam and the ideological cohabitation with the revolutionary left had turned difficult, Nezval established a Czech Group of surrealists and invited the French masters to come to Prague.
It was a great and much remembered moment when André Breton and Paul Eluard arrived in Prague in the earliest spring days of 1935. Breton, the prince of surrealism, before lecturing on the “surrealist object” (on March 31) and the political situation of the arts (on April 1) glorified Prague, a city “of legendary seductions,” saying that among cities which he had never visited, it was perhaps the least foreign to him. Pushing aside geographical, historical, and economic considerations, and seeing it from a distance, it was la capital magique de la vieille Europe, the magic capital of old Europe. For decades Czech surrealists and their later friends misquoted Breton by simply ignoring his qualifying adjective vieille, telling us that Breton declared magic Prague to be the capital of Europe; even Angelo Maria Ripellino, who should know better, sustains that self-congratulatory myth. To Breton, Prague was the capital of old Europe and Paris the first city of European modernity.
Breton wrote home about his triumphs in Prague, where he addressed hundreds of “comrades” (his term) and stayed longer than planned; it is interesting to speculate about what the Czech and the French expected from each other in political terms. Paradoxically, as Mark Polizzotti has shown in his recent biography of Breton, both expected better grades in the books of the Communist Party (the French being able to refer to their famous revolutionary comrades Teige and Nezval, and the Czechs, not untouched by the commands of socialist realism, hoping that an alliance with the French masters would give them more elbowroom). The left avant-garde in Czechoslovakia, as all over Europe, had to confront the question of how to reconcile aesthetic choice with the stern discipline demanded by increasingly Stalinist party organizations; these factions of the 1930s immediately reemerged at the end of World War II. Those who had been critical of the Moscow show trials in 1936 or flirted with cultural policies as defined by Trotsky were later driven to silence and suicide or were, like Záviš Kalandra, sentenced in Prague show trials and executed. Others who adjusted to party requirements more readily were rewarded with important positions in the cultural apparat and rose from honor to honor. Teige (who died in 1951) was condemned to silence after the war, only to be rediscovered by the generation of the 1960s; Nezval, who had broken with the Paris surrealists before it was too late, especially in view of Breton’s admiration for Trotsky, in 1949 wrote a submissive lyrical-epic poem “Stalin,” to repent his sins, and was appointed chief of the nationalized Czech film industry.
After sixty years or more, it has become clear that the Prague Devtsil created an ingenious and witty art of imagination and charm, and while some of its achievements, in particular those not bound to the printed page—for instance, the paintings by Jindfich Štýrský and Toyen (Marie ermínková)—are becoming more widely known, Czech poeticist poetry still constitutes one of the most astonishing and wonderful secrets of Prague, precisely because it is so difficult to translate. Nevertheless, in their own way, Nezval’s vicissitudes and literary achievements raise radical questions about imagination and politics in the service of a party.
Jií Voskovec and Jan Werich, two students at the elite Kemencárna school, located just opposite the famous U Flek brewery, were also often found among the habitués of Kino Konvikt, where Charlie Chaplin films were shown regularly. These young men were to create an avant-garde theater of Devtsil inspiration, unique in Prague and in Europe; though Voskovec was later sent to Dijon (France) to study, Werich remained in Prague, and the inseparable friends met again when they entered law school, though there is little evidence that they were serious about training to become lawyers. Voskovec was early involved in the ideas of the European avant-garde, and in his essays (which he must have written when he was seventeen or eighteen) he defended futurism and expressionism against Czech traditionalists who still believed in the charms of “fragrant meadows,” rather than in the “mechanical beauty” professed by the younger generation everywhere. In 1926, the two for the first time performed at a student matinee, and a year later, scribbling away at the Národní Kavárna and at the family dacha, completed their West Pocket Revue, a witty sequence of satire and parody, which created a theatrical sensation.
In 1928 Voskovec and Werich, known as V&W forthwith, consolidated their Osvobozené Divadlo (Theater Unchained, using Tairov’s expression) in a 1,000-seat auditorium on Vodikova Street, in the center of Prague, hired the comic Ferenc Futurista, he of the enormous buck teeth, to play minor parts, and were immediately excommunicated by the avant-garde community for having capitalist aspirations. They were fortunate to work with gifted Jaroslav Ježek, half a nervous George Gershwin, half Kurt Weill, who took over the orchestra, strong in the saxophone section, and composed, apart from concerti, V&W songs and haunting blues that have not been forgotten. (Theater history has less to say about the six vivacious if rather muscular Janík girls who provided the ballet.) In the early 1930s, Voskovec and Werich were able to attract František Zelenka, a functionalist architect of note, who did sets and posters for them (he later organized the theater at Theresienstadt and died, together with his son and his wife, in Auschwitz). The team of V&W, Ježek, and Zelenka created an extraordinary moment for Prague theater, resuscitating the tradition of the commedia dell’arte, as the Soviet producer Meyerhold noted when he came to visit, and combining it with Dada’s disruptive wit, surrealist imagination, linguistic intelligence, and, increasingly, a joyous defense of beleaguered Prague democracy—though, they had, like many others, considerable illusions about the policies of the Soviet Union.
Their most effective plays and films were produced in the mid-1930s, including the anti-Nazi Osel a Stín (The Donkey and the Shadow, 1933, against which the German ambassador protested), Balada z hadr (A Ballad of Rags, 1935), and Rub a lic (Heads or Tails, 1936), which became the film Svt pati nám (The World Is Ours, 1937). By that time, fights between rightist and leftist students often erupted in the auditorium, and in the fall of 1938, after the Munich conference, a new Czech minister of the interior ordered the theater closed. The V&W team left for New York, where unfortunate Jaroslav Ježek (now totally blind) died in a hospital; the two friends worked for the Czech section of the Voice of America. They both returned to Prague in 1945, Werich first and Voskovec later, a little hesitatingly, but times had changed, and the Communist Party knew all too well what it wanted to tolerate and what to exploit. Werich stayed on and became a popular television personality; Voskovec left again and made his way as a serious actor in Chekhov and Shakespearean plays and in Hollywood. Werich died in Prague in 1980 and his friend Voskovec of cancer in California a year later. In Prague, CDs of their original repertory, edited in six installments, are among the hot items on the electronic market.
It is deplorable that we have to satisfy our nostalgia for the avant-garde of the past, certainly more exciting than that of the present, by listening to CDs and by reading in libraries. But the old glory places are gone: the Café Union at Perštýn Corner, lovingly called Unionka, in a shabby building marked by a strange edge-stone (with a grinning flat face, which I feared when I walked by it as a boy), was long the principal home for artists and intellectuals. Here Pan Dávidek, the owner, played his gramophone, mostly for his own entertainment, and the headwaiter, Patera, a mythical baldhead, provided newspapers (he had to pay for them out of his own pocket), remembered for years who owed him for a cup of coffee, and benevolently functioned as a kind of one-man credit institute, lending money to young painters, chess players, and anarchists. Architects
, editors, and critics sat here in the warrenlike little rooms or went from table to table—from the architect Goár to the brothers Karel and Josef Capek, from Jaroslav Hašek (who had his headquarters at the Zvina Pub) to Richard Weiner, interested in all things French. The German counterpart to the Unionka was the Arco, between the stock exchange and the old railway station, which was mostly frequented by traveling salesman, businesspeople, and bank clerks yet, for reasons difficult to fathom, attracted the most important German-writing authors and their artist friends; the headwaiter was weaselly Pan Pota. Kafka, Brod, and Franz Werfel, whenever he was in town, as well as the painters Friedrich Feigl and Willy Novak met here in a convenient extra room; occasionally, a Czech leftist turned up to demonstrate for Socialist solidarity; and, among the few women, Milena Jesenská was seen, to be close not to Kafka but to Ernst Pollak, a minor bank manager of a shrewdly critical mind, one of her future husbands. Hanging out at the Arco, she at least had a good chance to spite her father, an upright Czech nationalist who heartily disliked her German and Jewish acquaintances.
