Master of Frozen Moments : ON THE SKY’S CLAYEY BOTTOM, <i> By Zdenek Urbanek</i> ; <i> Translated from the Czech by William Harkins</i> ; <i> Foreword by Vaclav Havel (Four Walls Eight Windows Press: $17.95 cloth; 232 pp.) </i>

To the browsing eye, only the bold legend “Foreword by Vaclav Havel” makes this volume stand out among countless others with equally undistinguished covers and unfamiliar authors. That is enough. During the two euphoric years when we knew him as the president of Czechoslovakia, Havel brought out the best in us. In an infanticidal age, he reminded us of the child within. His name on the dust jacket is reason enough to reach for the book.

Yet this is not just another book about Havel, about Czechoslovakia or about that tediously overworked topic, “My Life Under Communism.” It is a brooch of finely polished literary garnets, to be relished for its sheer virtuosity--the art of the short short story at its finest, universally human in its appeal.

Calling these “short stories” is actually inaccurate, though in conventional terms some of the longer pieces in this collection would qualify as such. Still, Urbanek’s texts seem far more reminiscent of still lifes, moments frozen in time. The art of the storyteller is different. A story presents an event, absurd in itself, meaningful in a context--a before and after. Stoppard’s “After Maigret” is a bare-bones example, though film buffs prefer to cite the 1943 British film “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.”

The art of the still life freezes the story in one still frame, at most hinting at it but never recounting it. It presents a fragment of reality in its absolute presence, as an irreducible surd--literally, as ab-surd, since meaning is a relational reality and the still-life brackets off all relations. In the hands of the third-rate writers who abound in any age, the result is a theatrical proclamation that “life is absurd”--though most often only the text in question is that. In the hands of the truly great craftsmen of the literary still life, of an H. H. Munro or a Eudora Welty, a miracle happens: The profound, intrinsic meaning life bears within it, elsewhere overshadowed by history, stands out.

Zdenek Urbanek is one of the rare great masters of the literary still life. By far most of the texts in this collection are less than two typescript pages, medallions framing a moment. In the title story, an aging woman grieves a long lost dog. The writer has not cut her off from all past and future: Life itself did that. The trivial furniture of daily life--”Should I bring your soup out here, then?”--appears in its mundane absurdity. That absurdity, though, is not the ultimate truth. It’s just a way of letting what really matters in life seep through.

That is Urbanek’s art. Bracketing away the distraction of a story,sketching the moment in its unmediated presence, he lets life’s integrity stand out without ever lecturing the reader. In his still lifes, reality speaks for itself. Most of his protagonists are the sun-bright young men of Czechoslovakia’s first republic, afire with the heritage of Masaryk, who lived the heartbreak of Munich and the struggles of the second World War. They went off to fight in Allied armies all over the globe, for Czechoslovakia, for the freedom and humanity for which it stood. Some returned.

The dream they fought for lasted all of two flawed years. The communists had no use for the men who had tempered their integrity in the skies over Britain. The pilots, the soldiers, the idealists passed through labor camps on to marginal survival, condemned to impotent meaninglessness. They could have their soup, here or on the porch.

Their story, though, is not what Urbanek tells. He presents them in a frozen moment after some 10 years of Communist rule, foreigners in a land dominated by mindless masses, a community “of exile soldiers, of Jews, of pilots wearing royal insignia, of people thinking in a humane way, thoughtlessly divided.” With the grand meaning of their life story reduced to absurdity, Urbanek lets a deeper meaning stand out. Only once in the entire collection does he speak overtly of “Masaryk’s humanism.” He does not need to. That humanity--the integrity Masaryk represented--stands out. One of his narrators, an RAF navigator who now sells raincoats, recalls a pilot who did not survive and with whom one could always feel at ease. “But that wasn’t due to his false modesty--there actually was no modesty. He simply supposed that other people had the very same value as he did.” Urbanek’s protagonists, in their frozen moments, testify to that humanity, either by what they are or by the shabbiness of what they fail to be.

Urbanek seldom speaks overtly of the mindless, manipulated mass that is the stifling, all-pervasive reality of totalitarian regimes. They are not believing communists or believing democrats, just masses, ready to read their leaders’ lips and change their coloring accordingly, as Jan and Otylka in “The Sources of History.” That gray mass is the background against which Urbanek draws his still lifes. It is the people who preserve a spark of integrity who stand out.

That is what justifies the link with Havel on the dust jacket. More than aught else, Havel was the voice of that integrity, of the long-obscured heritage of Masaryk which gave rise to Czechoslovakia’s minuscule, audacious human-rights movement, Charta 77. For 12 years they bore witness, then for two euphoric years they set the tone of post-communist Czechoslovakia. They soon found out that integrity does not make a very popular political program: “Heroism is actually a terribly unpleasant thing,” says one of Urbanek’s protagonists. The many in Czechoslovakia today prefer the promise of mouth-watering affluence or the exhilaration of nationalism, even at the cost of breaking up the country. As the hostile comments at a recent exhibit of former dissident writings testify, dissent makes them uncomfortable. They prefer to close ranks and crush the enemy. Perhaps it is Havel’s fate to be the spokesman of the few--and Urbanek’s to bear them witness.

Is that, though, something distinctively Czechoslovak? Is personal integrity any more popular elsewhere in the world? Would Urbanek’s book be any less relevant if a translator were to give the protagonists English or Spanish names and were to shift the scene to Chicago or to Buenos Aires? I think not, just as the Argentine “Tango Bar” would work perfect with Czech names and dialogue, only perhaps substituting polka. Great works of art are human, not national. This is a universally human book, to be relished and cherished in any language.

William Harkins’ translation helps. It is not free of some awkwardness and some chuckles, as when the bridge named for Svatopluk Cech becomes “the Czech bridge,” or Vienna’s Ferris wheel inexplicably becomes a giant Russian ring. Likewise, especially to American readers, the word Legionnaires is not likely to evoke an image of the exile army that fought its way through Siberia in the first World War. What matters, though, is that the text does not “read foreign.” That is a great achievement.

And finally, for the curious: Yes, there is a preface by Vaclav Havel. Just don’t blink; you might miss it. It is half a page long and it says that Havel likes his friend Urbanek a lot. Though, come to think of it, why say more? Urbanek speaks for himself.