Czech Literature: East Or West?

Czech Literature: East or West? RENÉ WELLEK When I was a student at the University of Prague in the early twenties, a lively debate about the cultural orientation, past, present, and future, of the Czech nation went on in newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets. Some writers recommended a turn toward France, others exalted the virtues of the Anglo-Saxon tradition as a model for the Czechs, and still others emphasized the kinship with the Slavic nations, while a group of writers began to extol the new Soviet experiment. Even then, I found these debates extremely crude and oversimplified and I wrote two rather harshly phrased reviews of such pamphlets for the periodical, Kritika, then newly founded by F. X. Salda and Otokar Fischer, who were my teachers at the University. I took particular exception to a pamphlet by Otakar Vocadlo, In Babylonian Captivity (V Zajeti baby- lonskem) 1924, which condemned German civilization in a sweeping manner and ascribed even drinking and swearing to German influence, as if Scotchmen, Negroes, or Mexicans did not drink and swear without the German model. Vocadlo's wholesale dismissal of German literature, philosophy, music, and scholarship was simply ignorant, and his con- clusion that German influence on Czech civilization is a fiction was patently mistaken. But a more serious book, F. V. Krejci, Czech Culture (Ceske vzdelani) 1924, which sensitively described the para- doxical relationship of the Czechs to German civilization, also aroused my misgivings about easy generalizations on nations and their literatures. "I am convinced", I wrote then (in Kritika II, 1925, p. 159) "that we cannot choose one nation for our cultural orientation, as we then would choose everything and nothing. We may debate concrete cultural phenomena, styles, tendencies, points of views, etc., and I know the result beforehand: in every great nation there are figures and tendencies which favor or thwart our own demands, as we want to pick and choose, and the concept of 'we' will also break up into groups and individualities. Every person makes his choice in literature from many nations. The endless debates about the value of whole cultures, about 894 René Wellek the respective greatness of this or that literature, demonstrate a lack of genuine thinking, an easy satisfaction with cheap formulas, an ignorance of the fullness of life, of the diversity and complexity of the historical process." I still can subcribe to these sentences written more than forty years ago in a context totally different from that of today. In 1924 I could not foresee that what seemed to me a slightly absurd debate about the respective debts of Czech literature to the different nations of Europe would, in the next decades, become a very real and practical matter of political power. While, in the interval between the two wars - a period which has been aptly called "The Age of Illusion" - one could peaceably, even though excitedly, debate the respective merits of the French, Russian, and English novel, or discuss the issues raised by surrealism in Paris or proletarian poetry in Moscow, the Nazi occupation suddenly stifled all free discussion. Just before these tragic events, a large volume synthesizing the results of many studies on the radiation of Czech culture abroad, entitled What Our Country Con- tributed to Europe and Mankind {Ço daly nase zemé Evropë a lidstvu) edited by Vilém Mathesius, was published in 1939 in the nick of time. Then the first Iron Curtain descended; an artificial tradition supposedly derived from St. Wenceslas in the tenth century was manufactured by the Nazis to make Bohemia and Moravia appear a mere appendix, also in the past, to German culture. After the liberation in 1945, the debate of East versus West was resumed, but now with harshly practical political overtones. The second, longer-lasting Iron Curtain descended in February 1948, and the Czechs became, officially, a part of Eastern Europe. Very real, concrete, and effective measures were taken to destroy all cultural ties with the West. George Pistorius (now Professor at Williams College) described in a fully documented monograph, Destin de la culture française dans une démocracie populaire (Paris, 1957), how French cultural and, particularly, literary influence was systematically strangled and how, even in literary history, the past was reinterpreted and often consciously falsified. Similar studies could de- scribe the suppression of English and American cultural imports and contacts. Professor Jan Mukarovsky, who was justly esteemed as an eminent student of Czech literary history and of aesthetics in general, declared solemnly that "Russian influences on Czech literature were greater than those of all other literatures combined" (Z ceskej literatury, 1961, p. 230), and in October 1962, a Conference of Comparative Literature, held at Budapest, was treated to a discourse by Julius Dolansky (a well-known professor of Slavic literatures at the University Czech Literature: East or West 895 of Prague), in which the unity of East European literatures was pro- claimed. Czech, in company with the other Slavic literatures, plus Hungarian, Rumanian, and even East German literature, was con- trasted with the totally different literatures of the West, which were dubbed as having been capitalist, imperialist, and expansionist even in the remote past. All this, however, will not withstand serious examination. Czech literature cannot be assigned to the East European sphere, however highly we might value the common Slavic heritage in poetic diction, metrics, and possibly folkloristic motifs. There were and are fruitful literary relations with the other Slavic nations which I do not intend to disparage or minimize, but a judgment such as Mukarovsky's is ob- viously mistaken, for the simple reason that Russian literary influences on the Czechs were non-existent before the end of the eighteenth century. The Hussite movement strongly affected all surrounding countries, particularly Hungary. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Czech literature influenced the beginnings of Polish literature especially the formation of its literary language. There was a historian, Bartolomej Paprocky z Hlohol (1540-1614), a Pole by birth, who wrote in both Polish and Czech. Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky) was, in his time, a world figure who had the ear of all Protestant Europe: Polish, Ger- man, English, and Dutch. But one cannot speak of significant literary influences exerted on Czech literature by the other Slavic nations before Antonin Jaroslav Puchmajer, who, in the 1790's, imitated Polish rococo poetry. Russian literary influences become important with the pious forgeries of Czech medieval poetry by Václav Hanka and others who imitated the style of the Russian folk epics and songs; and in 1829 Frantisek Ladislav Celakovsky, probably the first genuine modern poet in Czech, published his Echoes of Russian Songs (Ohlas písní ruskych). William E. Harkins, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University, has made a close study of this relationship (The Russian Folk Epos in Czech Literature, 1800-1900, New York, 1951). It was fostered not only by the awakened Panslavic feelings of the time, the new authority of Russia, after 1812, as the protector (or longed-for protector) of all Slavs and by the illusion that there is only one Slavic language, with Czech one of its dialects, but also by the romantic worship of folklore, of the people, of nationality; for this the Czechs sought support in the other Slavic literatures, since they lacked an old epic tradition of their own. With the rise of the great romantic poetry of Russia and Poland, 896 René Wellek their influence, particularly that of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Mickie- wicz, became tangible in Czech poetry. The details have been studied by Marian Szyjkowski, Julius Dolansky, and others, often by methods which today would be considered obsolete. Parallels and similarities in motifs, phrases, etc., have been compiled which may well have been derived from Byron, Schiller, or Heine, or, for that matter, from the stock of the Czech poetic tradition or simply from the minds of the poets themselves. But there is no doubt of this general influence, as, for instance, that of Mickiewicz on Macha and Erben. Still, it is difficult to see that it amounted to more than details or to the use of general romantic forms such as ballads or themes of Slavic folklore. It seems significant that neither Evgeny Onegin nor Pan Tadeusz left any per- ceptible mark on important Czech poems. Furthermore the influence of the great Russian nineteenth century novelists came late and was comparatively slight. I know that Havlicek translated Gogol, and that later Turgenev, Goncharov, Pisemsky, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky were widely translated and read and intensely admired, but their actual influence on writers of any importance was small, at least in the early stages of the Czech novel. The nineteenth century Czech novel belonged to very different tradi- tions: it was either the historical novel, initiated by Walter Scott, with his many heirs in France and Germany, or the village novel, which was dominated by the models of George Sand and the now-forgotten Berthold Auerbach. One may guess that Turgenev must have provided the model for Halek's village stories, and that he must have impressed Bozena Nemcova, though I have Seen no study of these relationships. The master of the nineteenth century Slovak novel, Svetozar Hurban Vajansky, modeled his novels consciously on those of Turgenev. I cannot discover among Czech writers any significant relationship to Tol- stoy as a novelist, though of course, Tolstoy as a religious thinker ex- cited lively discussion among Czechs and Slovaks. A Slovak whom we must not forget, Dr. Dusan Makovicky, was Tolstoy's only companion on his last flight from home. I have tried to follow the traces of Dos- toevsky's influence on the Czech novel.

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