by Peter Demetz
Lubossa has a difficult time, as is not surprising, when she subsequently warns her people of the dangers of a male ruler; although she proclaims that under male law the new division of labor will change people into those who pay and those who collect taxes, into executioners, cooks, bakers, workers in vineyards and on the fields, furriers and cobblers (to name but a few), they want their duke, whom Lubossa, submitting, provides. Her prophecy of the glories of Prague does not lack a touch of Virgil, provided by the learned chronicler—“Behold, I see a great city whose fame will touch the stars” (“urbem conspicio, fama que sydera tanget,” I,7; Aeneid, I, 287: “ … famam qui terminet astris”)—and her topography of the future castle has remarkable precision. On the west bank of the Vltava River, there is a place protected by the Brusnice brook on the north, while on the south a rocky hill, the Petn, rises above the land and spins around, as if it were a dolphin, turning toward the brook. That is the place where a man hewing a threshold (prah) will be found and the castle of Praga should be built. Paradoxically, Lubossa, the pagan phitonissa, continues her prediction by saying that from that castle, one day, two golden olive trees will grow: St. Wenceslas and St. Vojtch, the famous missionary and first Czech bishop of Prague (she hides the names in a riddle), who will illuminate the entire world by their wonders and miracles. Cosmas enhances the paradox by saying that she would have continued to speak if the hellish spirit of prophecy (spiritus pestilens et prophetans, I,9) had not left her body, created by God.
Even in our century of suspicion, old romantic ideas about Lubossa have surprisingly survived, and the cultural policies of the Communist Party insisted that Dean Cosmas carefully preserved the oral traditions of the toiling masses. More independent scholars, who were averse to simplistic, linear, and strictly national ideas of transmitting narratives, were long unable to publish their arguments. After emigrating to West Germany in 1968, the Czech scholar Vladimír Karbusický, with great learning and astonishing tenacity, radically affected, if not destroyed, the ancient dreams about the simple folk and what they told the scribe Cosmas. Karbusický’s hypothesis, fully informed by international scholarship, does away with the strictly Czech qualities of the early stories and shows that they consist of wandering motifs well known from the sagas of other peoples. From the romantic debris a new image of Cosmas emerges—a cosmopolitan littérateur easily conversant with the literary canon of his time who takes his cue from the wandering singers, artists, “kitharists” (about whom he speaks himself), and joculatores gathered at the contemporary Prague court; the scene shifts from the wretched huts of the illiterate peasants to the court of duke and king, as a splendid place for transmitting what the poets recite; art combines with art, and Cosmas reflects the consciousness of the feudal elite.
In such a view, even Lubossa and Pemysl are deprived of their strongly national character (after all, the plowman as ruler appears in the traditions of many societies, including that of Rome, Hungary, and the Goths); Cosmas particularly is seen to have strengthened and at the same time undermined fictive Lubossa by relating her narrative to that of the historical Mathilda of Toscana (1046-1115), a remarkable woman of his own time, who by her diplomatic negotiations between pope and emperor adversely affected Czech dynastic interests, then allied to the emperor. Both Lubossa and Mathilda were women of extraordinary power, both of them ruled and judged, and both, provoking the male world by their energy and competence, invited courtly Klatsch and revealing anecdotes which gave a chance to men of lesser power to take their revenge; it is, indeed, difficult to ignore that, in the entire Chronica Boëmorum, they are the only women about whom Cosmas tells risqué stories. Disorderly Lubossa arguing a legal case from her unmade bed has her counterpart, and not only structurally, in Mathilda, who, at forty-four years of age, marries a seventeen-year-old duke and has great trouble, on her wedding night, in arousing the appetites of the suddenly impotent young man. Cosmas coyly regrets that he has to tell the story, and yet he comes up with a good deal of lip-smacking detail; for three nights, the newlyweds strive for happiness and the duke fears that a magic object has been hidden in the bed that makes it impossible for him to perform as the occasion warrants. The enraged Mathilda puts a stool on a table, takes off her nightgown, climbs up, shows herself all naked to the young man, and, as the learned dean says, “wiggled her ass like a goose who wanted to build a nest” (II,32), telling the duke to search her thoroughly for any hidden magic object. (The young man flees the scene.) The marriage was dissolved, historians tell us, only four years later.
In his radical reinterpretation of Cosmas as a writer preserving the poems and narratives of artists, restlessly traveling all over Europe from court to court in search of noble patrons, Karbusický delivers a blow to sentimental traditionalists, including those of the Stalinist nomenklatura, but he also suggests the productive idea that it is much more important to know what happens to Libussa (to use her traditional English name) in the rich historiographic and artistic material that came after Cosmas than to ask whether there was ever a real person of her name. Her life in history and the arts, to which different nations in different circumstances contributed, should be more important than the shadow of the phitonissa, if there ever was one. Yet intellectual tradition is highly selective, as Karbusický’s more conservative colleague František Graus has shown; it forgets, and remembers, whatever it needs. After Cosmas, Libussa asserted her fundamental place as mother of the Pemyslids in the castle of Prague and, as the dynasty died out, assumed a more independent position. The line between the myth and the historical events was increasingly blurred. She was lifted from myth into history; the fourteenth-century Italian Franciscan Giovanni dei Marignolli, who was called to Prague in 1355 (after fourteen years in the Far East) by the Emperor Charles IV to write a world history for him, actually related her to Eliška, of the Pemyslids, that is, to the emperor’s mother; in other chronicles, e.g., that of the so-called Dalimil, who wrote earlier in the fourteenth century (c. 1315), she became clearly a woman of the times, keeping her head high at the council of Czech nobility (because Dalimil wanted to stress the importance of Czech barons) and speaking up against the foreigners, Germans, who were flooding the land.
The Renaissance and the Baroque age revived interest in wondrous women of magic powers. The Czech Catholic chronicler Hájek of Liboany, an imaginative sixteenth-century master of poetic inventions, in his own way completed Libussa’s historicization by defining abstruse chronologies, and he also followed Dalimil’s narrative in offering melodramatic and gory detail about the “Maidens’ War,” fighting body to body, blood and treachery, eros and thanatos (Cosmos had written about the ancient love game [ludus] of Whitsuntide, using the metaphors of war for wooing and submitting). Hájek is responsible for bringing Libussa closer to Czech and German readers of his age (his book was published in 1541) and of successive centuries. His popular book was adorned with expressive woodcuts, and its translation into German, for the first time as early as 1596, gave Libussa an important place in the Central European imagination. In Dresden, a German play about her was staged in 1666, and Italian opera in Prague, performing mostly for aristocratic audiences, provided La Libussa (1703). Czech rationalists, however, were definitely not enchanted by her or her forebears, and they tried to explain away her myth by the discourse of reason; while Gelasius Dobner, a scholarly Prague abbé, succeeded in totally discrediting Ur-father Czech, he could not prevent Libussa, surviving the myth and the dynasty, from attracting more attention to herself. She was loved by Czech and German romantics; the Czechs were eager for greatness to compete with German history, and the Germans were charmed by the Bohemian forests and their secrets. In Germany, Johann Gottfried Herder wrote a ballad on Pfemysl (1779), which was followed by J. K. A. Musäus’s finely wrought and sophisticated rococo fairy tales (1782-86), which spread Libussa’s fame among imaginative German and Austrian readers of the 1820s and 1830s. In Bohemia, an old narrative entitled “Libussa’s Judgment,” in ancient Czech, con
veniently emerged in 1818 to provide patriots with a fragment of the epics long missing from Czech literary tradition (unfortunately, these fragments were an ingenious fake).
It would be easy to say that the Great German romantic poet Clemens Brentano experienced Prague through the visions of Libussa when he wrote his “romantic historical” play about the origins of the city, but the workings of his imagination were not so simple. In 1810 he went from Frankfurt, his home, to Bukovany, a Bohemian estate owned by his brother, but he felt ill at ease there. Bukovany was not Arcadia, and the “ugly” Czech peasants were ready “to steal the wheels off the carts.” Frustrated, he went to Prague and took long walks under the stars, trying to bring order to the “conglomerate” of Bohemian and Prague images in his mind. He had seen Bohemian glass merchants at fairs in Frankfurt, had heard about the many students at the old university, and had learned of the true “Kabbalah,” studied in the Jewish Town more energetically than elsewhere. He had also read about the death of St. Nepomuk, statues of whom he had encountered “on all the bridges of Catholic Germany,” about the Hussites and the beginnings of the Thirty Years’ War, and he was, being a true lyrical poet, oddly affected by the spectral sounds of the word “Hradschin.” To him, Prague was “strangely dark,” “adventurously crammed full,” “inaccessibly girded,” “bridged over and armored”; the intimation of claustrophobia is difficult to ignore. It was the image of Libussa, found in the chronicle of that old (if dubious) storyteller Hájek of Liboany, that fortunately brought serenity, light, and clarity to his mind and prompted him to study the Bohemian past more systematically, in the writings of “lively” Cosmas, whose irony and elegant Latin he admired, and, he claimed, in conversations with the Czech philologist Josef Dobrovský, whose books he bought for his own library. One fine evening in the early spring of 1812 he went up the Petn Hill, looked over the churches and the river, suddenly felt deeply moved by the vision of Libussa and her city emerging from the forest, and resolved to celebrate her and her prophecy in a play, or rather in an entire series of plays, reaching deeply into the past. He was ready to yield to an image of a magic Prague of his own making, and yet in his notes he continued to see the realities of the provincial Biedermeier town of his time, and she, “the modern,” responded to him, the “modem” traveler. People made small talk about the theater, which he abhorred; the many minor civil servants were hardly like Pemysl; and though he toyed with the notion that a few of the Czech girls and women he saw in the street were reminiscent of Libussa and her maidens, his lasting and unfortunate impression was of a Prague mannequin in a millinery shop, “affected, stiff, cold, and ugly.”
While living in Prague, Brentano untiringly worked on four versions of his grand drama, The Founding of Prague (1815), and the result renders his interpreters, if they remember the play, either speechless or enthusiastic about something unique and strange. It is certainly not a play to be measured by Aristotelian norms of order, plot, and character but, rather, a text that actually feels impoverished by using mere words rather than music, for there are many songs, martial melodies, lyrical moments, trumpet fanfares; in its desire for musicality and its monumental conception, Brentano’s text longs for fulfillment in an opera. Libussa’s story is set in the context of a mythological spectacle; lacking an orchestra, Brentano uses an abundance of diverse poetic structures and modes, from the solemn to the grotesque, to show how the dark and devilish forces of the past confront the first stirrings of Christianity anachronistically brought to the Bohemian forest from Byzantium. In Brentano’s view, Libussa is a plantlike maiden, aware of the divine ground of all being; and though she can be as cold as steel in turning down uncouth suitors, she is graceful and tender when yielding to tradition and her spouse. There is plenty of melodramatic action, which would challenge a postmodern producer to take the play apart and stage, in the creative spirit of romantic irony, a Brentano collage: the Avars are attacking, and the belligerent maidens in the Bohemian forest (with whom the playwright does not really sympathize) occasionally resemble a distaff version of Friedrich Schiller’s Robbers . Libussa’s prophecy about the glories of Prague concludes the play, but the conflict of evil and good will clearly continue; she takes her cue about the name of the place from the people working on a threshold in the woods, and she sees a city slowly emerging on the banks of the river, “the golden city / in the mantle of a king / glides down from throne and promontory” (V,9341-42), and “like a starry cincture / around her solemnly the river Moldau [Vltava] flows.” Yet it is a highly ambivalent finale; Libussa collapses in agony, and while Pemysl dryly remarks that he will duly define the borders of the new settlement, his people, unaware of future vicissitudes, automatically repeat what they are asked to repeat by their duke: “Prague! Prague! Thou threshold of our deliverance and faith!” (V,9360).
The first tale to include the Prague Jews in Libussa’s world appeared in print in 1847, only one year before the revolution that was to divide Czech and German interests and make life even more difficult for the Jews of Central Europe, who were asked to affirm their national allegiances. Salomon Kohn’s narrative The Jews in Bohemia’s Ancient History, published in German, argued implicitly that Jews were closer to Czechs than to Germans, at least those beyond the Bohemian borders, since before dying Libussa herself prophesies their appearance in Prague, and the narrative makes it clear that they come from the Slavic east rather than from the German west: she proclaims that a “foreign, homeless and endangered” people who believe in one God would seek protection in Bohemia; and when, a hundred and more years later, Duke Hostiwit succeeds to the throne, she appears to him in a dream and tells him about the foreign people who will appeal to him for help and protection. In the year 850, the narrative tells us, the Jews are driven out of Muscovy, for many years search for new homes, finally arrive in Bohemia, and, sending two of their elders to Hostiwit, explain that they are the children of Abraham and ask humbly for a place to stay. Hostiwit immediately recognizes that they are the people announced by his grandmother Libussa, consults his council, and grants their wish. In a formal audience, the Jews declare that they will be “loyal and obedient subjects” who will love their new “fatherland” as much as their forefathers loved the blessed land of Canaan, from which they were expelled because of their sins. Hostiwit gives them a place on the left bank of the Vltava River; it is perhaps of some importance to the message of Kohn’s story that the Jews arrive in Prague even before the first Pemyslid is baptized. Later, the Jews strongly support Duke Bofivoj financially and otherwise when he must drive inimical German invaders from the region. Clearly, though Salomon Kohn writes good German, his heart is on the side of a pre-1848 territorial patriotism celebrating the history of a shared ground.
The Viennese playwright Franz Grillparzer came to Prague for only a week on a trip to Germany in 1826, “with a kind of prejudice,” he confessed himself, against the town and the “narrow nationalism” (Nationalsinn ) of its inhabitants. Grillparzer knew much more about the history of the Czechs than Brentano did, and he kept his mind open to the “grandiose impression” of the town, “the advantageous contours, the broad river right through the middle, … strange towers and the excellent architecture, and the Hradschin crowning the whole.” He compared Prague to Venice in its fusion of ancient and modern, or to Florence, and felt, when he looked down from the Petn Hill as Brentano had done, something fantastic, “strangely consonant with the spirit of the old history of Bohemia.” He felt irritated in the Jewish Town (though a few young women there struck him as more beautiful than any he had ever seen), but Prague had all the marks of “the free creative power of the mind” (der freien schaffenden Geisteskraft); and when he left by uncomfortable stagecoach for the north, he felt surprisingly reconciled to the Czechs, whom “he had never really liked” because he had never before had an opportunity to see how they lived in their own ambience. Grillparzer worked on his Libussa play, off and on, hopefully and despairingly, for more than twenty years, from at l
east 1822, when he jotted down a few remarks about Libussa, to the prerevolutionary time of 1847-48. The first act was performed at a Viennese matinee in 1840, but the completed play did not appear on the stage of Vienna’s Burgtheater until 1874, two years after his death, and with indifferent results.
In Grillparzer’s play traditional forms uneasily sustain pessimistic views of marriage and the history of humanity; Libussa and Primislaus, as they are called here, after a few wondrous moments of tenderness and anticipation (he saves her from drowning in a swift river) have terrible difficulties relating to each other, man and woman, plowman and princess. He does not want to be at her mercy as humble husband and duke consort, and she (though she loves him) does not want to submit unthinkingly to his wishes and resolves; though she bears his child, they remain an irritated couple, confronting each other in a Strindbergian marriage in which moments of intense if silent love quickly and agonizingly alternate with those of near-hate. (Grillparzer rightly says himself that he endangered the play by an unnecessary intrigue concerning jewels and gold chains.) His Libussa, by loving Primislaus the ruler-to-be, alienates herself from her essential nature, which is, like that of her sisters, one of feeling, solitude, and meditation on a divinely ordered universe; and when she decides that she wants “to be human together with other human beings” (1,405), she takes an irreversible step away from the pure realm of her origins, even though she insists on a matriarchal society inspired by “childlike trust” (1,446) rather than by the “rights” asserted by fierce male litigants: