Igor Hajek - an obituary

(Published in The Independent, April 1995.)

Igor Hajek was a member of that remarkable generation of Czech writers, artists and intellectuals who strove, from the early 1960s onwards, to bring freedom to communist Czechoslovakia by gradually liberalising it from the inside, using the arts as a weapon. After several years of extreme Stalinist repression, which followed after the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, the first cracks began to appear in the Czechoslovak totalitarian monolith after 1956. Czech intellectuals systematically worked at widening these cracks, by attempting, at the beginning against overwhelming odds, to open the country to Western thought, by publishing modern Western literature and by encouraging debate on the most important issues of the day.

Igor Hajek took an active part in this liberalising, cultural movement. After graduating from Charles University in English and Czech and receiving a doctorate for a thesis on Tobias Smollett, he worked for several years in a Prague literary agency. Soon after graduation from university, he started translating modern English and American authors. The role of an English-speaking translator was extremely important is this period, some might even say dangerous. The authorities regarded most modern Anglo-American writers and their Czech translators as subversive. The translated novels needed to be defended by carefully drafted, bogus 'literary' essays, printed together with the translations, which 'placed the work in the context of the Marxist struggle' and persuaded the censors that the Western author was 'progressive'.

The first work that Igor Hajek translated into Czech was John Steinbeck's The Pearl, published in Prague in 1958. Translations of works by Charles Beaumont, Graham Greene, John Updike, Harper Lee, Eudora Welty and David Riesman followed. Hajek also published a number of authoritative articles on leading British and American literary figures, mostly in Literarni noviny.

On leaving university, Igor Hajek first worked for seven years for a Prague literary agency, then briefly at the Ministry of Culture. Between 1964 and 1969 Igor Hajek was foreign literature editor for Literarni noviny [Literary Gazette], the official weekly of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union, which stood in the forefront of the Czech drive for freedom. The rebellion of Czech writers against the communist regime culminated in the autumn of 1967, at their 4th Congress. The authorities reacted with repercussions: the Literary Gazette was suppressed. The rebellion however accelerated events leading to the Prague Spring of 1968, during which the Literary Gazette was revived and reached, during those heady months, a weekly printrun of 300,000 copies (in a nation of 10 million Czechs).

In the late 1960s, Igor Hajek found himself inadvertently in the midst of a political scandal, connected with the visit of the American beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg to Prague. Hajek accompanied this anarchic poet on his journey through Prague's pubs and wine bars. In one of these, Ginsberg lost his notebook, which immediately fell into the hands of the Czech secret police. The communist authorities were astounded at Ginsberg's very unflattering remarks about communism, mixed in the notebook with various comments mostly on sexual matters. Not knowing what was in the notebook, Igor Hajek published an article about Ginsberg's visit to Prague. Later, the then Czech president Antonin Novotny mentioned Hajek in one of his public speeches as a person who conspired to camouflage the Prague activities of a 'representative of imperialism'.

In 1968, Igor Hajek received a prize from the American Ford Foundation for his Czech translation of John Updike's The Centaur. The prize was a grant for travel to Great Britain and America. During his stay in these countries, Czechoslovakia was invaded in August 1968 by the Warsaw Pact armies and the Prague Spring came to an end. The Literary Gazette was banned, as was everyone associated with it. Igor Hajek became one of approximately four hundred Czech writers whose name could not be mentioned in print in Czechoslovakia, not even in scholarly publications, from 1970 until November 1989.

In 1971, Hajek became Lecturer in Czechoslovak Studies in the Comenius Centre at the University of Lancaster, which was founded by Sir Cecil Parrott, former British Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, for the study and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. In Lancaster, Igor Hajek taught Czech literature and social and cultural developments in Czechoslovakia. When the Centre was closed as a result of Margaret Thatcher's university cuts in 1983, Hajek was transferred to Glasgow University. In 1985 - 1991, Hajek acted as Head of the Department of Slavonic Languages and Literatures in Glasgow. He also taught as a visiting professor at the University of Berkeley, California, and at the University of Austin, Texas.

In Britain, Igor Hajek strove to inform the Western public about the plight of his native country after the Soviet-led invasion and about modern Czech literary tradition which paradoxically became extraordinarily vibrant after 1968, producing major works of international reknown by authors such as Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, Ivan Klima, Bohumil Hrabal and Vaclav Havel. A close friend of Josef Skvorecky, Hajek became associated with his small Toronto-based publishing house 68 Publishers, which between 1971 and 1989 brought out more than 200 new titles of modern Czech literature, banned in Czechoslovakia. In the 1970s, Hajek translated into Czech Alan Levy's work Rowboat to Prague, for Skvorecky's 68 Publishers. The book is an account of the events of the Prague spring by an American journalist, who incidentally now again lives in Prague and edits the English language weekly The Prague Post there. Hajek also edited a Dictionary of Czech (banned) writers, based on a samizdat work, completed in Prague. The Dictionary was published in Toronto in 1982 and then again after the fall of communism in Prague. He edited, wrote the main article and the individual entries on Czech literature in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century (New York, 1975 and 1981 onwards).

At the same time, Igor Hajek analysed contemporary Czech literature in scholarly periodicals and other publications, including several literary encyclopaedias. From 1968 wrote regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.

Recently, Igor Hajek became slightly disillusioned with current developments in the Czech Republic, which seems to have been largely overtaken by consumerism and commercialism and where there now appears to be little inclination for informed critical debate in the media. He realised that it will probably take Czech society longer to become a normal, civilised democracy than was originally envisaged. I spoke to Igor Hajek on the telephone on Wednesday 19th April in the evening, telling him about some of the latest problems in Prague. He reacted: 'But in a week's time, these scandals will be overshadowed by other scandals. These things are never properly investigated and nobody draws any conclusions from them.' Ten minutes later he was dead.

Jan Culik