Samizdat Past+Present

Tomáš Glanc, Melvyn Clarke, Tomáš Glanc

• Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9788024640655
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Much of what we now consider the canon of twentieth-century Czech literature—the work of authors like Bohumil Hrabal, Ludvík Vaculík, and Jáchym Topol, among many others—has, in fact, just recently become widely available to readers. Long published only in censored form or in secret among political dissidents, this body of underground literature is collectively known as samizdat. Samizdat Past and Present provides an expert introduction to these writings and their history, offering insight into both the current wave of literary rediscovery and translation and contemporary debates over censorship. In a diverse array of chapters, Tomáš Glanc gathers together texts from representative figures of Czech samizdat and underground culture of the 1960s to '80s and provides a useful comparison of Czech, Polish, and Russian samizdat. From literary historians to former samizdat publishers and writers with firsthand experience of communist censorship, secret police, fake trials, and imprisonment, the authors of Samizdat Past and Present illuminate the complexities of a literature written under censorship and the struggle for freedom of thought in a totalitarian regime.

Independent Literature and Freedom of Thought 1970–1989¹

Tomáš Vrba

TERMINOLOGICAL HESITATION

The definition of the topic itself is fraught with considerable terminological difficulties. After long reflection I have decided in most cases to reject the term samizdat for summary descriptions of independent literary output, both because it is a Russism and hence unintendedly tainted, and because of its weak denotative capacity, not to mention the misleading historical context.² The term undoubtedly has the advantage of being a single word that is easy to decline in Czech, and above all, its meaning is directly associated with publication. The entire issue of publishing and publication is central to free literature. When an author puts a work into circulation either himself or with other people, taking all risks into account to present it to the public, he is publicizing both himself and his work. He is placing both himself and his work at the mercy of criticism and appraisal. He is emerging from his privacy even if the text preparation and book production processes do not entail the ‘usual’ thoroughness. Official ‘bricks and mortar’ publishers over the last half century have for the most part had a long way to go before attaining truly free output, but they maintained and cultivated a traditional and almost invisible art or craft, namely that of the editor. Many a grey state employee by day turned into a free editor of independent books by night. The high quality of editorial work at the old Odeon³ is a thing of the past. Many book entrepreneurs these days find that working with texts is something quite alien to them.

Rather than using such semantic miscarriages as ‘unpublished publication’, which are all the buzz among the portals of academe, when I speak of publication then I am thinking of publication at an established or clearly declared, albeit unofficial, publishers. While fully aware that doubt can also be cast on this concept, I do not consider authors’ texts at the manuscript stage to be ‘publications’. Of course, manuscripts usually came in the form of typescript, and in special cases two works, one a manuscript and one a publisher’s title that has already been brought out, might only differ by the single word that indicates the publisher. Then again, the deletion of another two words, i.e. the author’s first name and surname, can turn a manuscript into anonymous material for study or informative purposes. Presumably, this has occasionally happened on security grounds, and the author’s name was only given orally to a reliable reader. The various forms that an ‘unpublished’ text can take include the author’s unedited manuscripts, anonymous typescripts and unauthorized, unedited transcripts of a text already published in a different form by someone else, as well as hectographic and duplicated copies. This kind of independent literature with no particularly prominent subdivision might appropriately be described as samizdat, which in this meaning would keep to the original attributes of self-service and namelessness.

Hence while remaining fully aware of the disadvantages involved, I tend to use the looser term independent literature, which some may find rather too elevated. The somewhat archaic term písemnictví has the advantage for our purposes that it overlaps to a large extent not only with the semantic field of the English arts, but also with the French lettres, and so includes not only literature itself, but also the humanities, literary studies and art, as well as philosophy in a broad sense; for independent philosophical activity is indeed one of our concerns here.

Like other ‘fields’ of alternative culture, independent literary output in the 1970s and 1980s can be seen in two different ways: as a cultural phenomenon, i.e. more in terms of cultural history – and here we can refer to the fairly extensive compilations, catalogues, libraries and literature – and as a social, indeed a sociological, phenomenon. Hence any future attempt at description from this standpoint will take into account the environment that gave rise to independent publications, its internal relations and its interactions with the surroundings.

The heyday of independent book and magazine output was characterized both by its long duration and by its multidisciplinary nature, two factors that turned the original network of practical contacts into substantial interhuman relations.

I only refer to the actual content of independent book output during those decades on occasion, and I only set out a specific typology of the genres that appear in publishing plans as an example of several publishers at home and in exile.

Particularly noteworthy are those authors who did not give their permission to publish samizdats at home (e.g. Milan Kundera), and the exceptional cases of double publication, both in typescript and ‘official’ (Bohumil Hrabal, Jaroslav Seifert, and in the translation sphere Jiří Pechar)⁴. (Such ambiguity was not that exceptional in the case of artists like Olbram Zoubek, or photographers like Jaroslav Bárta. In any case it was cases like these that revealed the absurdity of the situation even more tellingly than a monotonous series of clear prohibitions.)

[…]

RAPPROCHEMENT WITH EXILE

One, two or three? Cautious disputes were waged at the end of the 1980s, even in the official literary weekly Kmen [Stem], over how many Czech cultures and Czech literatures there were. It was not until then that people dared in positive contexts to occasionally mention the now world-famous Milan Kundera, not a line of whose was allowed in print at home, of course.

Quite unimaginable by both sides for entire decades, a unique meeting took place in summer 1989 between delegations of the official Union of Writers and participants in an open forum arranged regularly under the auspices of the lay organization Opus bonum by the former (and future) abbot of the Břevnov Benedictine Monastery in Bavaria (Franken), Jan Anastáz Opasek. The good work of literary diplomacy at this time opened the door ever so slightly to the possibility of substantial words being uttered both from home and abroad, but we did not achieve a catharsis: events then took too rapid a turn and there was no time left for missed debates once the regime had fallen.

Relations between Czech exiles and their homeland were never too close or cordial. Before 1968, their poverty and frostiness were reinforced by generational, world-view and psychological barriers, and after the shock of the Russian invasion the new emigrants spent their first few years primarily engaged in efforts to establish or reconstruct their lives. The decades of demonization had their effect on the émigrés, and anyone who moved away appeared to have never existed. (Efforts made by the regime’s media to hush up sports results were tragicomic: the more successful tennis players Martina Navrátilová and Ivan Lendl became, the more the boycott became obdurate). The latest wave of émigrés, albeit in six figures, were strongly individualistic, never formed any politically relevant representation, and although they were quite well-educated and economically successful, they did not show any willingness to support the few elements that could have associated them with with the post-1948 emigration, i.e. émigré magazines and publishers.⁵ An unsentimentally grotesque typology of Czech émigrés, as well as an unheroic herbarium of the quasi-intellectual community at home, was collected by Josef Škvorecký in his novel Příběh inženýra lidských duší [The Engineer of Human Souls, 1984], simultaneously disturbing several wasps’ nests.

During the early 1970s the one link between the older and more recent waves of émigrés and the Czechoslovak public, which for a long time was one-way only, was radio broadcasting. While the BBC and Voice of America stations provided mostly reliable news reporting in both languages, Radio Free Europe was the chief target throughout its existence of regime propaganda and more or less effective signal jammers, but also provided a strong emotional connection, whether in the form of commentaries by Sláva Volný or songs by Karel Kryl. The need for foreign broadcasting remained, and indeed grew, but three or four years after the occupation, publishing activity gradually increased in importance, both as the first wave of domestic samizdats and as the activities of Czechs and Slovaks abroad.

After 1945 hundreds of Czech and Slovak magazines were published in exile. A catalogue of them that was commendably compiled and published from available sources by Libri prohibiti has a respectable 1093 items, though naturally with highly varied specific weights.⁶

Most émigré magazines arose out of, and were sustained by, the natural need of individual groups for communication within the local community (even if it covered an entire continent as in the case of Australia). Only a small proportion aspired to intercontinental coverage and even fewer attempted to make direct contact with home. Journalistic and technical professionalism were very much the exception, as most of the émigré periodicals looked more like utilitarian samizdats, and many titles were merely hectographed typescripts.

Some émigré magazines were carefully edited to a high standard (e.g. Studie [Papers] in Rome and Rozmluvy [Conversations] in London); the broadest distribution, reception and influence in Czechoslovakia was enjoyed by the quarterly Svědectví [Testimony], published from 1956 by Pavel Tigrid, first in New York, then in Paris, and by Listy [Sheets], a bimonthly established in 1971 by Jiří Pelikán in Rome and moved in 1989 to Prague, where it has been published ever since. (Svědectví stopped production in 1992.) These two magazines succeeded to a large extent in achieving what Czech political émigrés had never hitherto been able to, namely to create a social space both for the liberal and the socialist-inclined opposition, both at home and abroad. Contributions from home were accompanied for some time (until about 1986) by the protective formula ‘Published without the author’s knowledge’, and this publication space was subsequently considered quite correctly to be permanently acquired territory. It was the removal of this two-way taboo and the lively exchange of texts over the previously impervious border that allowed not only for ‘peaceful coexistence’, but also for collaboration between circles around such different people as Tigrid and Pelikán. During the 1980s the two magazines even provided each other with texts. At home collaboration between different opinion groups assumed the form of Charter 77, so both cases were temporary victories over the seemingly innate patterns of Czech small-mindedness, which were to make a comeback, of course, soon after freedom was restored. As for the end of the 1970s and the 1980s, both magazines were collaborating and the two most important émigré publishers – Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto and Index in Cologne were collaborating with authors who were ‘forbidden’ at home to such an extent that émigré literature began to organically knit together with free literature at home. Neither branch could have existed without the other, at least not in the form we know it today, and in many respects the differences between the two began to disappear entirely.

Of course, the fortunes of the authors both at home and in exile had always been and still remained varied.⁷ Some of them merged in perfectly with the new cultural milieu, adopted the language and assimilated, e.g. Gabriel Laub and Ota Filip in Germany, Viktor Fischl (Avigdor Dagan) in Israel, Pavel Kohout in Austria, František Listopad in Portugal (though in his case things were more complicated: he acts on stage in Portuguese as Jorge Listopad, but writes poetry in Czech as František). Some stopped writing, while others suffered constantly and never settled down in their new home.

Most of those émigrés with a background in underground or alternative culture took up ordinary occupations in civil life and only engaged semi-privately in occasional concerts (e.g. the Nachtasyl club in Vienna was well-known) or publication work (see also the underground quarterly Paternoster edited by Zbyněk Benýšek in Vienna, while Jaroslav Hutka, a musician, operated his one-man music publication house Fosil in Rotterdam).

Michael Konůpek, who for a short time before his departure had provided the dissident and alternative music community with great assistance as a driver, distributor and organizer, became a successful Norwegian writer five years later. Libuše Moníková did not start writing and publishing until she got to Germany, while the bilingual Czech-American writer Jan Novák lives in Chicago.

But Fate was preparing a rather unfair test for the Czech émigrés. Although they had all been looking forward to the fall of the Communist regime at home, they could not have known that making the decision to go back would be as practically difficult as the decision to leave. Choosing your homeland again and again is all too much for one human life. Some returned for good, while others remained abroad, and most come and go quite freely.

Publishers came back along with their authors. Alexander Tomský continued work on his Rozmluvy for a short time in Prague, while the last issue of Tigrid’s Svědectví came out at Melantrich in Prague. Jiří Pelikán died, but Listy carries on to this day.⁸

Josef and Zdena Škvorecký decided to stay in Canada. They wound up the publishing house Sixty-Eight Publishers in early 1994 after the final ‘farewell volume’ publication came out. The 227 titles which they left behind are a cultural achievement that could not have come about without the marvellous melancholic quixoticism with which Josef Škvorecký provided a connection to world literature in his talks on Voice of America.

The émigrés themselves did not have enough weight to provide the opposition at home with sufficient moral support. Fortunately, western politicians and intellectuals started to get far more openly involved after 1975. For many years collections made at the instigation of Czech émigrés in Swiss Protestant parishes served humanitarian and cultural ends at home. However, credit also undoubtedly goes to the cultural émigrés, who played a protective role at a time when nobody believed they might live to see the fall of Communism. Sixty-Eight Publishers, Index, Rozmluvy, Arkýř, Listy, Studie, Svědectví and a number of other publishers and magazines in exile published literary manuscripts, political analyses and testimonies of police repression. Thanks to them nobody would ever again be able to say that they did not know what was going on in Czechoslovakia. Some of the print...