Assessing contemporary Czech literature

How have Czechs responded to the changes brought by the Velvet Revolution, and how are these responses reflected in the nation's literature?

Judging from the panel at "How Is Literature in East-Central Europe and Russia Faring After 1989?", a March 19 conference sponsored by New York University and Forum 2000, such questions are more easily posed than answered.

The midday panel focused on Czech literature and featured translator, editor and professor Clarice Cloutier; political analyst Jiří Pehe; journalist, editor and Charta 77 signatory Tomáš Vrba; and Czech and German literature scholar Peter Zusi. Each attempted to describe the development of Czech literature since 1989, or what Zusi called "the state of the union."

Cloutier immediately identified the difficulty of a formulaic assessment of post-revolution Czech literature by saying, "Czech writers are asking more questions than they are answering."

"There is a disconnect between the various regions of Central Europe, and people's psyches are still recovering from being abused by power. People are waiting to be restored, and writers are making astute guesses at how that might happen," she added.

Pehe was more definitive - and pessimistic - in his diagnosis, pointing out that the dissolution of communism effectively took away the only literary authority the general reading public possessed.

Under communism, there was a "negative selection" of certain authors who were allowed to be read, but, according to Pehe, the contemporary Czech reading public is faced with "haphazard criticism," making it more difficult to know which authors are worth reading.

"Now, we have no mirrors to define what is good and what is bad," he said. "It is the same with literary prizes: A group of friends get together and award people they like. It's ridiculous."

The sudden flood of publications after 1989 may have made it more difficult to discern the best Czech writers from the dross, but, as Vrba noted, many of the country's most vital writers have only been commercially available since the fall of communism.

'Fragmented hobby'

"In the official encyclopedia of Czech literature published under communism, there were 185 writers listed. In the underground version, there were 560 writers. Such a polarization did not happen in Hungary or Poland," he said.

But Czech writers have lost their privileged position as "supreme moral authorities" in Czech society since the fall of communism, according to Vrba.

"After 1989, literature stepped aside and kept silent in the chaos of modernization and is now little more than a fragmented private hobby," he said. "Poetry is living, and that's always good news, but it has become epigrammatic, bitter commentary."

By far the most optimistic description of contemporary Czech literature came from Zusi, who, tellingly, admitted his specialty is early 20th-century, rather than contemporary, Czech and German literature. Zusi pointed out that an "inordinate amount" of high-quality books are published in the Czech Republic each year, considering the size of the country. He went on to describe the two directions Czech literature has taken since 1989.

"At first, there was a move toward literary language and textuality - a more postmodern style. But now more writers seem to feel that literature needs to return to the reader and return to narration," he said.

The contemporary writer whose name was most often mentioned at the discussion was Petra Hůlová, the young Czech novelist who has won a bevy of prestigious literary prizes, including the Magnesia Litera Award in 2003 for her novel set in Mongolia, Paměť mojí babičce (Memory for My Grandmother). [See The Prague Post article "Telling a foreign tale in a foreign tongue" from Sept. 30, 2009].

Zusi made the most telling statement about the direction of contemporary Czech literature in an anecdote about another conference that he and Hůlová attended in London.

"Everyone was asking her why she doesn't write about the Velvet Revolution, because people in other countries all want a 'Czech' novel to match their ideas," he said. "She just laughed, because, in 1989, she was only 8 years old!"

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com