Quiverings in a ‘Dead’ System : A prize-winning Slovak novelist warns of resurgent communism

Last Friday “The Year of the Frog,” by a young Slovak novelist, Martin Simecka, was awarded The Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction. The work had been published serially and under- ground before the so-called Velvet Revolution toppled the communists from power in Czechoslovakia. After that revolution, it appeared in book form with a foreword by Vaclav Havel, free Czechoslovakia’s first president and, since the breakup of the federation, president of the Czech Republic.

Simecka told the Book Prize audience that the experience of being published in translation and winning an American literary award was “abnormal.” Of course, many a modest winner has made an equivalent statement. Simecka went on, however: It was not just being published abroad that was an experience of the abnormal, it was being published at all for a real readership rather than just for “one’s friends and the police.” But there was no need to be alarmed, he said with the irony for which Czechs and Slovaks are famous: “Normality” would soon be restored.

Clearly Simecka was alluding to Vladimir Meciar, the unrepentant Stalinist who since the alleged final defeat of communism has twice been elected prime minister of Slovakia. Just weeks ago, though he fell short of winning a third election, Meciar returned to effective power. Controlling a majority in the Slovak Parliament, he was able to undo, virtually overnight, crucial agreements that the outgoing government had made to foster the transition to a market economy. In a move surely of keen interest to any writer, Meciar put a hard-line crony in charge of internal security. Worst of all, perhaps, he has begun whipping up Slovak chauvinism against Hungary and ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia.

The Cold War as a standoff of superpowers may be over, but communism is not dead. There are many who pine for its return, and soft- or hard-line communists now lead Poland and Lithuania as well as Slovakia. Simecka’s mock resignation to the return of communist “normality” can and should be heard as a quiet warning.