In 1948 and again in 1969 we discovered that we were isolated in individual fears and integrated in the tacit solidarity of other isolated human beings, endangered by the totalitarian system. There was no other freedom than this solidarity. Whatever could be written was the poetry of Solidarity Against. In one respect, this was a great time for poetry.
After the 'liberation' of 1989 we discovered that we were isolated in a general tendency of individuals to express in poetry their disjunction and disintegration. Poetry of collective complaint was replaced by poetry of individual complaint. And that without any reason comparable to the dangers of totality. No For has replaced that Against.
Miroslav Holub, The Poet and Human Solidarity
Among the changes which the collapse of Communism in Czechoslovakia in November 1989 brought about, was a change in the role and position of Czech literature. In historical terms it happened almost overnight. For a thousand years, apart from a few exceptional and brief periods, writers had been the spokesmen of the nation and its aspirations: the early 14th century Dalimil's Chronicle contains lines asserting Czech identity against the influential Germans at a time when the notion of a language-based nationality hardly existed elsewhere. Writers and scholars were at the forefront of the early 19th-century National Revival in which translations from world literature played a particularly important role: they proved that the Czech language could once again cope with a full range of artistic expression. In the 1960s liberal writers' pressure for reforms in the Communist system led to the Prague Spring of 1968 and after its suppression by Soviet tanks, many of them became dissidents harassed and persecuted for the next twenty years by the secret police, while others sought asylum in the West.
When that era came to an ignominious end, it was one of the dissident writers, Václav Havel, who was elected the country's President. The intellectual community, however, was not to reap a reward for having been for many years the main defenders of human rights and cultural values and for having resisted an oppressive régime. The first free elections swept away with only a few exceptions the former dissidents and replaced them with hard-nosed right-wing monetarist politicians who, like the majority of the population, had survived Communism by carefully avoiding any involvement either way.
In the hitherto strictly state-controlled economy, the cultural field, previously heavily subsidized, proved to be the one where changes could most speedily be introduced. In many would-be entrepreneurs' eyes it was also one that seemed to offer a quick profit: years of censorship had starved the public for forbidden fruit. Within months, two thousand new private publishers clogged up book distribution channels with a production consisting to a large degree of trash and nearly brought to ruin the thirty-six long-established publishers. Beautiful editions of Elizabethan drama or the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Czech translation suddenly became a thing of the past together with the collected works of Lenin.
The hopes of Czech writers banned in the past for political reasons and published only abroad that at long last their chance arrived to address en masse the native public, were also severely undermined by the ruthless forces of the market. The hundred-thousand print runs that they had expected quickly dwindled to a few thousand and soon many of them were lucky to find a publisher at all. By 1993, some of the recent work of such prominent exile writers as Josef Škvorecký or Milan Kundera was still unavailable in their homeland, as the authors and their publishers were treading with caution and carefully considering the general situation on the book market. A lesson may have been learned from the case of the previously banned Ivan Klíma who agreed to have seven books published within the first two years of freedom and thereby came near to committing a publishing suicide.
Apart from the avalanche of literary garbage that threatened to push them into a second oblivion, failed expectations made uneasy the comeback of banned and exiled writers. Critics were disappointed to find that their work, bearing an aura of the suppressed, was not in each case of world-shattering standard and importance. Readers' taste and perception, too, had been affected by a strict twenty-year diet of universal mediocrity that shunned anything out of the ordinary whether in thought or in form. It took much longer than expected for the various streams of Czech writing to come together again in one national literature.
The present picture of Czech literature is therefore one of an unaccustomed coexistence of the previously unmentionable and banned with the previously recognized and officially rewarded, both joined by writers mostly of the younger generation who have little in common with either the upholders of Freedom and Truth or the former pillars of the Communist establishment. All of them have to cope with the fact that over the past few years art has been pushed to a far less prominent position in social life and that the role of the Czech writer has been reduced to that of his colleague in the West: to be an intelligent entertainer of a select audience in a highly competitive market place.
Of the older writers returning from exile after twenty years, Josef Škvorecký (b.1924) is respresented by a selection from his as yet unpublished Neuilly. Written not long after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia which drove him to seek a new home in Canada, it reflects his experience with the first twenty years of Communism. The middle one of the three excerpts provides an especially rare insight into human relationships in a system based on general distrust and goes a long way to explain how easy it was even for a wary intellectual to get ensnared in the game of people informing on each other. Writing this autobiographical piece in 1974, Škvorecký could not have foreseen that it would acquire unexpected poignancy less than twenty years later when his wife, the writer Zdena Salivarová, was accused that in 1958, while interviewed by the secret police, she had signed a statement that could be interpreted as a promise of collaboration. Like hundreds of other people similarly affected, she was deeply hurt by this time bomb left by the old régime and had to spend a lto of effort to clear her name.