‘The Bells Are at Fault, Let Them Shut Up’

The night was cold, but the jazz was hot at a benefit held in New York two weeks ago. Literary luminaries from Arthur Miller to Kurt Vonnegut showed up to pay homage to a small emigre press named for a calendar year that some people would like to forget. Sixty-Eight Publishers has brought out about 200 books since its inception in 1971, Czech-language editions of works by such prominent Czech authors as Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Vaclav Havel and others whose writing has been banned in their native country.

Jazz was the perfect accompaniment, for jazz was the music that fired up these writers 20 years ago during the “Prague Spring,” an uncharacteristically sunny blip in Czechoslovakia’s wintry history. It was 1968, and under the tolerant eye of the new Czech Communist Party head, Alexander Dubcek, writers were permitted the greatest freedom of speech they had enjoyed in decades.

But this made Czechoslovakia’s larger and more powerful neighbors nervous. In August of that same year, half-a-million troops from Warsaw Pact countries surged through the small nation to put down any “Western imperialist” attempt at “counterrevolution.” Writers were arrested and imprisoned for being subversive. Many of those who eluded detention slipped into exile.

Within three years, writers Josef Skvorecky and his wife, Zdena Salivarova, had set up their Czech-language press in Toronto. Their goal was unabashedly lofty: “To save Czech literature,” Salivarova says simply today. “To publish manuscripts which would have been lost in the desk drawers of authors. Once you publish it, whether a thousand copies or a hundred-thousand copies, it won’t disappear.”

Fighting disappearance--of their culture, of their language, and of their history itself--is nothing new to the Czech people. And the writers of Czechoslovakia are very self-conscious about their role in the fight. The Czech literary heritage is more than 1,000 years old. For centuries, while this small nation was encroached upon, invaded and occupied by one hostile neighbor or another (the Habsburgs, the Nazis, and now the Soviets), the language was preserved. During a particularly bleak period of occupation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it looked as if the nation was going to be irrevocably absorbed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a handful of writers rallied to reinstate their language, and thus keep the nation from perishing.

Czech writers always have been public figures--spokespersons for the national conscience. Under autocratic and usually foreign rule, they have been, to borrow a phrase from Tolstoy, “the alternative state.” Today, however, much of that state is a government in exile.

The Czech authors who have chosen exile are free of government intervention but now face a fresh set of problems. One difficulty is that they write in a “minor” language about which the Western world knows little. Certainly many of them are fluent in a second tongue. Kundera teaches at the university level in Paris and Skvorecky is a professor of English in Toronto. But thinking in a second language is not the same as feeling it--knowing from birth both its cadences and the informing social context. The Czech language, filled with susurrus buzzes and warm burrs, is the codification in sensuous sound of the Czech national experience. Take away those sounds and you take away the writer’s tools.

To write in exile is to write in deprivation. The songs and sights and smells of one’s native land can be as essential to the human spirit as daily bread is to the body. But in another sense, the writers still living within Czechoslovakia’s borders are in exile too. In Havel’s “Letters to Olga,” written while he was in prison, the author dreams of what he will do when he is released: He’ll take walks, he’ll barbecue chicken, and he’ll sleep in his own bed. Deprived of these simple comforts simply for being a writer, Havel could surely also be considered in exile.

Poet Jaroslav Seifert has spoken of “the wretched aviary that is Bohemia,” a country in which the government has attempted to clip writers’ wings so that they cannot soar. Government harassment of writers takes a variety of forms, from brazen to insidious. In addition to yanking Havel in and out of prison, the state has built a chalet on a hill overlooking his house in the country--and chopped down the intervening woods--in order to maintain unimpeded round-the-clock surveillance of his activities.

And until the venerable Seifert won the Nobel Prize in 1984, none of his 30 published volumes could be found in Prague’s nearly 300 bookstores. It isn’t that Czechs didn’t know of their foremost poet: Carbon-duplicated copies called petlice (“padlock”) editions received widespread circulation. But it was covert, for the state considered possession of such documents a punishable offense.

Especially now, at a time when the Czech government believes that it can simply disavow and deny past mistakes, its writers have taken it upon themselves to remind their readers that, as Kundera put it, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Czech authors contend that the lives and even the dreams of their ancestors are an integral part of themselves, that they have a right and a duty to examine the past, for the study of humanity over time reveals that there can be many truths. This is what the government finds untenable. The state does not want an exploration of alternatives but reinforcement of its own vision.

The writers refuse to comply. They insist on having the right to see what they see, not what they’re supposed to see. And they take that one step further: They want to write about it. “If an ordinary person is silent about the truth, it may be a tactical maneuver. If a writer is silent, he is lying,” Seifert has said.

In spite of government attempts to quash these varying versions of the truth, literary derring-do has prevailed as Czech manuscripts have been smuggled out of the country to be published by Sixty-Eight Publishers and other emigre presses located in Western Europe.

Czech writing, whatever the form, has a distinctively bitter tinge. This is not to say that the country’s literature is humorless. To the contrary, on the night of the benefit, many of the excerpted readings elicited genuine laughter. But always, there is an unshirking awareness of the ironies of life, of jokes where the punch line is tragic, of compromises that play out in ever-widening rings--from personal to social and political arenas.

In one of the poems in “The Casting of Bells,” Seifert wrote:

Not too long ago I read in the news

that somewhere they’re about to order

the bells to be quiet.

They will lower the decibels

in the bustling pandemonium of the city.

The bells are at fault.

Let them shut up.

In an effort to keep the bells ringing--perhaps seeking a harbinger of spring once again--Sixty-Eight Publishers keeps on with its work.