My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  I can imagine the embarrassment this advice must have aroused. The ruling rabble wanted to punish, discredit, and humiliate their opponents and cast them into poverty. But exile them to lands of abundance and unlimited opportunities? Send them somewhere they would be welcomed as heroes? Where the rulers themselves would like to live if they hadn’t gotten mixed up with the current regime?

  But, as usual, they were obedient. During an interrogation, an offer would be proposed, which usually went like this: If you feel so oppressed here, you can move to that free world of yours. Submit a request and it will be approved. When Václav Havel was in prison in the summer of 1979, two seemingly pleasant envoys paid him a visit and suggested it would be possible for him to move to New York. All he had to do was submit a request. He refused and remained in prison for an additional three years.

  The regime tried to force others to emigrate. One of its most outspoken opponents was Pavel Kohout. Once, to the surprise of us all, he was allowed to leave in order to direct one of his plays. He left knowing full well that they didn’t have to let him back into the country. Therefore, he refused to give any politically colored interviews while abroad—this was at least one way to keep him quiet. When they let him out a second time with his wife, he was detained on his return trip at the Austrian border and informed that his citizenship had been revoked. He spent the rest of his life in Austria.

  *

  Writers and artists in general have a proclivity to form personal and professional associations on the basis of generational affinities, personal friendships, or artistic tendencies. Often they consider everyone who does not share their opinions as mistaken, blind, or at least ignorant. There are few environments in which you will find more competitive emulation than an artistic one. In its vindictiveness, contemptuous disdain for values and national culture, and subservience to the occupying power, the collaborationist regime succeeded in doing something that no democratic society ever could: It unified everyone who had been harmed or silenced, everyone who had refused to acquiesce to its demands without regard to artistic or political convictions.

  None of my friends belonged to the classic underground (even though Václav Havel knew those authors well), but when the current government was preparing to sentence the underground musical group the Plastic People of the Universe to prison, most of us signed the petition against the trial.

  When my friends, under the leadership of “the guard of the Loreta treasure,” Jiří Brabec, were preparing their Dictionary of Czech Writers, perhaps the most remarkable book in our typewritten Padlock series, they included, without differentiation, all authors whose works between 1948 and 1979 had been banned, at least for a time. In all there were several hundred, many more than those who had been allowed to publish the entire time; it was a unique collection of authors who at some time in their lives had managed to resist the felonious power.

  At the end of the ’70s, society was much more heterogeneous than it seemed at first sight. Not everyone preferred open resistance, but at the same time many young people were looking for a way to demonstrate their dislike of the prevailing conditions of society. The current leaders were always announcing that they cared about the youth. They even tried to make it clear they were willing to put up with some things—long hair, jazz, and even songs that demonstratively ignored official ideology.

  Whereas the censors had destroyed the repertories of the large theaters, a few small stages were allowed to continue. Contemporary life—albeit only via a few allusions—managed to make its way into the Semafor Theater, which had been established at the end of the 1950s. The Jára Cimrman Theater also survived from the end of the 1960s. It was primarily this second theater that I took a liking to. It defiantly ignored present-day politics and the demands the regime made of art. It brought into existence its own special world set somewhere in the idyllic time of the early twentieth century and created wonderful unique parodies, sometimes just for the laughter itself, at other times in order to grasp the absurdity of contemporary life.

  The young evangelical minister Svát’a Karásek wrote protest songs, usually based on the melodies of famous Negro spirituals.

  Man cannot rule

  he gets drunk on his own power

  the truth is firmly in his hands

  instead of above himself.

  Ruler, what are you saying to the crowds

  what if you fell silent for once

  what if you knelt down for once

  with your head in your hands.

  Our family visited him at Houska Castle, where he worked as a caretaker (he was not allowed to preach), and he sang his entire repertoire for Michal into our primitive tape recorder. Michal made copies of the songs for his friends.

  There was also an entire group of protest singers who joined together under the name of Šafrán. I used to invite the singers over to my house along with my friends.

  Several times I drove Jaroslav Hutka, with whom I had become close, to various places in Bohemia where he was performing. It was an extraordinarily powerful experience when the entire auditorium, filled with young spectators, enthusiastically greeted their singer. In 1979, Václav Havel was arrested again. Hutka made use of the similarity of names and composed a song about Havlíček, whom the Bach regime had not imprisoned but rather exiled to Brixen. There was no doubt as to the real meaning of his lyrics.

  Now sitting behind walls, they’ve placed you in a cell

  The angels of Brixen, exhorting death’s knell.

  A tale for young children, a puppet ballet,

  They pull on the strings without coming out into day.

  By the letter of the law of the gavel,

  Now think about justice, Havlíček, Havel.

  The ovation that followed exceeded all measure. The fact that such songs could be sung led one to suspect that the occupying regime was losing some of its capricious vigilance.

  Paradoxically for singers, as well as artists who refused to bow to the people in charge, these times brought a certain satisfaction. The public was waiting for any kind of rebellious gestures and vehemently accepted them.

  At the beginning of the ’80s, more and more groups were springing up that, unlike the charter, were not political. They strove only for independent thought and action.

  I was invited by a group of young evangelicals from a congregation in Vinohrady to say something about samizdat literature. After my lecture, they showed me a thick typewritten volume. They were publishing it four times a year. Every three months, each member of the congregation had to write or translate an article from his field and bring several copies to their meeting. There the contributions were compiled and bound. I liked this idea so much that I told my friends about it, and we started putting together our own monthly typewritten journal. Because publishing any sort of periodical (even a typewritten one) was still against the law, we listed the individual contributions on the first page beneath the word “Contents.” And thus our journal became known simply as Contents.

  *

  More and more often I was visited by strangers, sometimes even students (there was also a young teaching assistant of Czech literature who came around once a month all the way from Olomouc), to ask if they could borrow some of our samizdat texts. They usually returned the books after about a month and then asked to borrow others. I soon realized that each of them had his own circle of friends to whom he was lending the books. These were not groups of rebels but simply people who saw the current regime as baleful, hampering freedom, and therefore worthy of contempt.

  Of course we had to keep everything secret—what we were doing, where we met, what we talked about. Originally, there were eight of us who put together Contents, but the number of regular contributors soon grew to around twenty. We usually gathered at one of our apartments, but we alternated and never said aloud where the following meeting would be. We would finish our work and then pass around a piece of paper with the date and place of the next one.

  These meetin
gs were important. A person expelled from normal everyday life, shut out everywhere, and forbidden to work among people with whom he shared common values, or at least professional interests, needed to feel some sort of acceptance among friends. Therefore we met in private. These meetings were in no way conspiratorial. I sometimes organized evenings and we would play different games. Ludvík Vaculík hosted gatherings that regularly occurred during a weekend nearest an equinox or solstice—these meetings usually attracted more of us. Among those who came from Prague, in addition to those most persecuted by the police, were the theater critic of the banned Literární noviny, Sergej Machonin, Milan Jungmann, the prose writer Lenka Procházková (banned most likely because she was the daughter of Jan Procházka, a writer who was currently despised by the regime), Eda Kriseová (banned simply because she refused to join in passive assent), and the poet Petr Kabeš for whom it was unimaginable to publish work alongside the official versifiers. Friends also came from Slovakia: Milan Šimečka and Miro Kusý, sometimes even Ivan Kadlečík. From Brno, the prose writer Honza Trefulka, the dramatist Milan Uhde, Mr. and Mrs. Kotrlý, and sometimes the Catholic poet Zdeněk Roztrekl (he had barely escaped execution in one of the first show trials).

  These get-togethers required much caution. We rarely met at home; preferably, either we went to someone’s country house (if possible, one belonging to a nonmember of our group), or we rented a few cottages at the Brno Dam. The meeting always began with an encouraging evaluation of the political situation by our colleague, a congenital optimist and the author of many exceptional political essays, Milan Šimečka. He sensed our need to hear something hopeful and managed to find in Czech and foreign politics clear signs of approaching radical changes. He usually concluded: The occupying regime is in its final days and will be gone before our next meeting.

  Then Milan Uhde would read his skeptical supplementary report in which he would overturn most of what his predecessor had said; he would reel off all the depressing and retrograde signs of contemporary societal development as too many people accepted the policies of those in power. (Unfortunately, for many years, he was correct.) Then Ludvík Vaculík usually read a feuilleton he had prepared for the new issue of Contents. Of course we also used these meetings to drink beer, grill food, and revel in the feeling that we were free people living in a society of other free people.

  It was heartening how this solidarity helped us overcome the absurd situation in which, as writers and literary critics, we could not publish or even appear in public. On the other hand, there emerged a ridiculous and harmful professional divide between banned and unbanned. We had definitely been locked up in some sort of ghetto, but we were also locking ourselves in. (During this entire time, I never met with a single officially published colleague, with the exception of Jaroslav Dietl, whom I regularly visited to play Mariáš, and I think some of my friends held even this friendship against me.)

  To our surprise, the secret police never once interrupted our meetings. I think they were unaware of them. They hadn’t been able to secure a single informer among us, and we told no one, not even our closest friends, about our gatherings.

  *

  I no longer remember who lent me the samizdat edition of The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows. It summarized the findings of a team of scientists who had been studying the effects on the environment of our speedy industrial development and the finitude of natural resources. Few texts spoke to me so forcefully, and its message stuck in my mind. I realized that we were all so wrapped up in our own everyday affairs and struggles with the discreditable regime that we couldn’t think about anything else. In the meantime, however, another specter was emerging that did not differentiate between the free and unfree parts of the world. It was engendered by the same selfishness, the same careless relationship to nature, something that we could not live without but that our greed was destroying. For Contents, I wrote a short essay on a rather unusual subject (unusual at least for us at the time) called “The End of Civilization.”

  People now have a life-and-death connection with our civilization, and if it dies, they must die with it. They will die by the thousands and the millions, perhaps in famines or epidemics that can no longer be conquered, perhaps in a desperate and unwinnable war that will destroy everything.

  But even if they manage to avoid war, people will die just the same. They will die of despair or because they have lost the ability to earn their daily bread or because they will have destroyed nature, which sustained them from time immemorial. Entire regions of the world will be depopulated and places that had recently radiated light will reek of the plague. At the end, I stepped back from my impassioned tone and pessimism and concluded with a belief that our machine-age civilization would perish, but after a while mankind will return to human space and time from a world of planetary dimensions. People will enjoy silence and hear birdsong. Of course their lives will be more difficult and precarious. The foolish dream of utopians who believed that man would be made happy by being freed from the need to work will be forgotten, as will refrigerators, air-conditioning, aircraft, nuclear reactors, printing presses, artificial lungs, automatic washing-machines, television sets, rockets, and bugging devices. This crazy century, when man, in a meaningless effort, raised himself so high that he managed to escape the planet, will increasingly blend with legends and fables from an earlier time. One day, future scholars or priests will declare it to have been a mirage, a fiction perpetrated by ancient poets, or one of the many illusions shared by vast numbers of people. Perhaps scholarly debates on the subject will take place, but it will not affect most people because it will not touch their lives, their potentials, their goals, or their happiness.

  And what about their happiness? I see no reason why they should be any less happy than we who have lived in this singular and crazy century.

  *

  State Security had apparently agreed with the party bigwigs that it was necessary to expel from the country everyone who was disturbing the image of a contented society. During his interrogation the rock singer and artist Vlastimil Třesňák was burned with a cigarette and became so frightened that he asked for permission to emigrate. Michal and I visited him the day before his departure. He was taking all his things in a single suitcase he had found in a scrap yard—three meters of canvas, nine half-squeezed tubes of oil paints, a camera, a guitar, and a typewriter. No clothes, no valuables, just an extra shirt and three pairs of new socks.

  One of my friends, the talented author Karol Sidon, did not consider political activity an important part of his life. Immediately after the occupation, Karol wasn’t even forbidden to publish. At the time, he wrote mainly dramas; one about coal miners was broadcast by Czech Television. Then the small Rubín Theater took up his new play, The Latrines. At the time, every play had to have official approval. A whole group of party members came to the preview, led by the head of the ideological department himself. Karol later told us how he had been overcome with the sense that he had suddenly found himself in the times of Nazi occupation and that the gestapo had come to the theater. In a sudden panic, he couldn’t wait for the end of the performance and, although it was pouring outside, fled from the theater without even picking up his coat from the cloakroom.

  This play and his disdain of the authorities exiled him among the banned authors. He secured a job, however, at a tobacconist’s at a lucrative spot on Jindřišská Street.

  One Saturday, a defamatory article about Ludvík was published in the illustrated magazine Ahoj along with intimate photographs the State Security had confiscated. Karol carried out what I would call a unique and, at the same time, touching act of nonviolent protest: From each issue of the magazine in his shop, he cut out the article with the disgraceful photographs.

  He was interrogated, but it was such an odd act of resistance that they couldn’t find anything in the law to charge him with, so they just arranged for him to be fired from his job, and he couldn’t find another one. They even made it impossible
for him to work at water resources near Mníšek or as a grave digger. Finally they forced him to emigrate.

  *

  Czech writers to L. Brezhnev

  The chairman of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union sent a congratulatory letter to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Chairman of the Highest Soviet of the USSR, L. Brezhnev, for receiving the Lenin Prize for Literature. The letter states: It was with great joy that we learned you had been awarded the Lenin Prize for your trilogy The Small Land, Rebirth, and Virgin Lands. We hold your books in high esteem. They are an outstanding contribution to the history of the present time as well as a shining example of a party approach to the calling of literature. In Czechoslovakia, your titles have met with extraordinary interest not only among writers, but throughout our society, as can be seen by the print run of book and magazine editions of your books—around two million copies. Your books have indeed become the subject of tens of thousands of conferences, seminars, and discussions, which are still continuing and in which millions of our citizens are participating.

  Czechoslovak News Agency

  *

  In our day and age book-writing has become so poor, and people write about matters [to] which they have never given any real thought, let alone experienced. I therefore have decided to read only the writings of men who have been executed or have risked their lives in some way.

  Søren Kierkegaard, Diary, 1844

  *

  I don’t remember exactly when I started working as a mailman.

  Because my plays and books were being published and performed abroad, I was often invited to meet various diplomats. When I got to know them a little, I sometimes asked them to carry out a manuscript, whether it belonged to me or one of my colleagues. Usually they were happy to oblige, even though they were breaking the rules and risking their careers. I will not name names, but we were assisted by Swedish, American, and Canadian diplomats. The English cultural attaché was prepared to bring in any sort of literature but opposed taking anything out. He was most likely afraid that I’d foist some espionage material on him. There is one man whose name I must mention, however. At the beginning of the 1980s, I met a councilor in the West German embassy named Wolfgang Scheur. He was a remarkable person with willingness to assist those who, in his opinion, needed help. Thanks to strangers, he himself had managed to escape Hitler to Palestine, where he spent more than a year in a refugee camp. Later he ended up fighting against Hitler as a volunteer.