Czech Literature: East Or West?

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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 conclusion 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 traditions: 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. I found M. A. Simacek's novel, Eager Hearts (Lacna srdce) 1904, which is supposed to be a good imitation of The Brothers Karamazov, completely unreadable. The very general similarities of Czech realistic novels of the early twentieth century - those of F. X. Svoboda, Vilem Mrstik (who was a particular admirer of Pisemsky), or K. M. Capek-Chod (not to be confused with the younger Karel Capek) to the Russian novels - seem hardly pro- Czech Literature: East or West 897 found. The contacts are largely ideological: novelists debate Tolstoy's views on marriage or his doctrine of non-resistance to evil, but the novels as works of art are simply in the general tradition and style of the French and German social novel and show no deep affinity with the two great Russian masters. Dostoevsky was Masaryk's lifelong pre- occupation. He served as a kind of touchstone on which Masaryk whetted his ideas about Russia. His great work, Russia and Europe (1914), called in English translation The Spirit of Russia, was to cul- minate in a third volume on Dostoevsky. But only fragments of this plan have been preserved; they will, at last, be published in this country under the editorship of Professor George Gibian of Cornell University. Masaryk, however, felt Dostoevsky rather as a great adversary, a mystic and conservative who stood for everything his own religious rationalism and political liberalism disapproved of. After 1918 the impact of Soviet literature began to be felt. But it was again ideological rather than literary or poetic. It would be difficult to identify concrete Russian literary influences on the most eminent proletarian poet, Jin Wolker. Vitezslav Nezval, too reminds one of Apollinaire rather than any Russian poet. Only Josef Hora was a close student of Russian poetry; he translated Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin into melodious verse and studied the poetry of Yesenin and the early Pasternak. Stanislav K. Neumann, in his Red Hymns (Rude zpevy) 1923, often sounds like a cruder Mayakovsky: bombastic, grandilo- quent, and shrill. Since 1948, Russian influence has increased greatly. The dispropor- tionate weight of Russian literature is illustrated by the statistics of translations (in all subjects): in 1950, 303 items from Russian, com- pared with 4 from English; in 1952, 1050 from Russian and 30 from English. In 1960, the situation changed; a mere 295 Russian titles are followed by 83 from German, 79 from English, and 58 from French (see Jiff Levy, "Translation in Czechoslovakia", in Babel X, 1964, p. 74, and Pistorius, loc. cit. pp. 188-9). But one must always distinguish ideological orientation, or even political solidarity, from actual influence on living literature: Russia was visited, discussed, and debated by Czechs throughout the nineteenth century, and Russian authors, particularly the novelists, were widely read in translation or sometimes, in the original. But I do not think that even a passably good case can be made out for the view that Czech literature as reconstituted in the nineteenth century became a part of a special East European group of literatures. 898 René Wellek Rather, Czech literature, since its rise in the fourteenth century, has been part and parcel of Western literature. Its exact relationship to the main Western literatures has varied considerably in the course of history, with the political, religious, and social constellation, but the basic geographical factor has remained necessarily the same: the Czechs are surrounded by German-speaking countries on three sides, while their neighbors, Poland and Hungary on the fourth side, the East, were for a long time also passive recipients of Western influences without stronger radiating power. This geographical situation and the more or less close political de- pendence, during many periods of its history, on the Holy Roman Empire and, later, on its successor, the Austrian Empire, suggest that Czech literature was mainly influenced by German literary and cultural developments. It would be folly to deny the impact of German civilization, especially in view of the influx of German colonists in the thir- teenth century, during the Reformation in the sixteenth century, and still later during the Enlightenment and the Romantic Age. Late in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth century, German nationalism and German worship of folklore and popular poetry provided important stimuli to the Czech Revival, as Herder, who had prophesied the great future of the Slavs and glorified their peaceful past, and Goethe, who late in his life even learned a little Czech, loomed extremely large on the literary horizon of the time. But it would be an error to think that Czech literature did not develop in its own independent way, often in explicit opposition to German literature, and that the Czechs did not seek and find ways of establishing contacts with the other European literatures, sometimes - at least at first - through German inter- mediaries. Their role must not be minimized, because the Germans themselves have absorbed, interpreted, and translated foreign literatures perhaps more than any other major nation. To give examples from eighteenth and nineteenth century Czech literature: in the late eighteenth century, the first translations of Shakespeare into Czech were from the German; Macha read Byron first in German and then in Polish translation; HavlKek translated Voltaire's philosophical tales from German; and Vrchlick^, as Professor Harkins has shown, translated Walt Whit- man first from German. I noticed long ago [Kritika II (1925), p. 160] that Vrchlicky's translation of Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi" was made from the German, since it has the same lacunae and the same mistakes. Even the medieval Czechs were in constant touch with the more distant West and South; and the influence of general Latin civilization Czech Literature: East or West 899 - ecclestiastical, erudite, didactic - was stronger than anything that might be considered specifically German. It would be difficult to ad- judge the exact share of the principal nations in this general European- Latin civilization, but the immediate source of the Czech Alexandreis, for instance, a Latin poem by Gualterus Castillionis, was the work of a native of Lille. "Kunhuta's Song", one of the earliest and finest Czech poems, dating from about 1310, uses the sequences of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who came from the environs of Naples; Thomas of Stítné translated Saint Bonaventure and Hugh of St. Victor, an Italian and a Frenchman, both active at the University of Paris. Czech courtly-love poetry, which must ultimately have been derived from the troubadours in Provence, came to Bohemia via Italy and Austria through the early Minnesang, but even here there were direct contacts with Italian verna- cular literature: the "Song of Závis", as Vaclav Cerny has shown, was composed by a Czech canon who studied at the University of Padua. The poem shows a knowledge of Italian poetry of the so-called dolce stil nuovo - the style of the precursors and contemporaries of Dante. Immediately after the Hussite Wars, the son of King George of Bo- hemia, Hynek of Podébrady, translated parts of Boccaccio's Decameron into Czech. But in spite of these foreign influences, Czech poetic diction, Czech metrics, and Czech terminology during the Middle Ages were strikingly different from analogous developments in Germany and in the West. The linguistic peculiarities enforced a different prosody, diction, and terminology, which can be explained only by the tradition of popular poetry common to the Slavic nations. But there were no parallels to this courtly or devotional poetry in the other Slavic countries. Recognition of the great flowering of Czech literature in the fourteenth century, of its historical and documentary value and even its occasional aesthetic charm, must not allow us to forget its limitations: the Czechs did not produce a great medieval poet who still speaks to our time, such as Dante, Chaucer, Villon, or Walther von der Vogelweide. There was no great oral poetry, like that which flourished in Yugoslavia, Russia, Iceland, and Spain, because Bohemia had become, for a short period, the center of a brilliant court, of a feudal and ecclestiastical culture. The forged MSS of the early nineteenth century tried to create the illusion of a faraway, romantic Czech antiquity and thus for many decades prevented a proper understanding and appreciation of the genuine Czech literature. The same effort to reach out beyond the immediate surrounding 900 René Wellek German sea is also a leitmotif of the Czech literary revival early in the nineteenth century. The literary nationalism of the Romantic Age did not preclude a concept of universal poetry. On the contrary, Herder's concept of folk poetry assumed a universal, basically similar "natural" poetry of all nations, as opposed to the artificial Latin and French traditions. The Czechs shared fully in this romantic universalism. Josef Jungmann translated Milton's Paradise Lost and Chateaubriand's Atala, as well as Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. Shakespeare became the idolized god of the drama. Petrarch and Dante provided formal and thematic inspiration for Kollár's great cycle of sonnets, The Daughter of Sláva. France and Italy, however, became, in the history of Czech nineteenth century literature, the decisive liberators from German dominance. Neruda and his generation were still mainly under the influence of German poetry, mostly that of Goethe and Heine. Jaroslav Vrchlicky had the good fortune to become tutor in an Italian family in 1875-6; there he caught his enthusiasm for Carducci, Dante, and Italian literature in general. It passes belief when we think of the extent of Vrchlicky's translations. They include the whole of Dante's Divine Comedy in terza rima, all of Ariosto and Tasso in ottava rima, much of Calderón, practically all of Hugo, Vigny, Lamartine, Baudelaire, etc. Vrchlicky constitutes something of an analogue to Hugo, Carducci, and Tennyson, combined: he wrote with dazzling virtuosity in all styles, on all subjects, though today we feel that this overproduction and haste often seduced him into derivative work. Many of his translations are shoddy and inaccurate. Still, Vrchlicky achieved what he wanted. He broke the German dominance in Czech poetry. The Czechs were then inundated with a flood of French and Italian poetry. "Inundated" seems the right word. Many of Vrchlicky's successors were mere imitators and, for a time, Paris became the cynosure of all Czech poets' eyes. Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Verhaeren, and, later, Apollinaire determined the general development of Czech poetry right up to the eve of the second World War. Karel Capek, early in his career (1920), published a brilliant collection of translations from modern French poetry. The impact of the French realistic and naturalistic novel came a little later. Zola in particular was widely influential around the turn of the century. K. M. Capek-Chod is, by intention, the Zola of the Czech bourgeoisie, and vaguely naturalistic assumptions underlie much of the social novel produced between the two World Wars. Czech Literature: East or West 901 Possibly even more important, however, was the influence of French criticism. F. X. Salda (1857-1937), the greatest Czech critic, began as an expounder of Hennequin and Taine before he elaborated his own personal view of literature. He was a great portraitist and essayist in the wake of Sainte-Beuve until he became a severe judge of Czech literature who immeasurably widened the perspectives of criticism and raised its level far beyond the earlier provincial limitations. While France attracted the sympathies of most intellectual Czechs, England and America, though further removed geographically and much less accessible, also exercised a great influence on the revival of Czech literature in the nineteenth century. I can only allude here to the cult of Scott and Shakespeare. Byronism, in different versions - German, Russian, and Polish - was a main strand in Czech nineteenth century poetry. In the second half of the nineteenth century, direct contact with the English-speaking world was established. That fine poet, J. V. Sladek, spent three crucial years (1868-70) in the United States, years which have been studied very carefully by Professor Rudolf Sturm of Skidmore College. Sladek brought back an excellent knowledge of English, which allowed him to translate almost the whole of Shakespeare and much of Burns and Coleridge, as well as Long- fellow's Hiawatha. Vrchlicky, a friend of his, also translated from Eng- lish: Shakespeare's Sonnets, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and many poems by Shelley, Byron, Swinburne, and others. But Julius Zeyer is, to my mind, the one Czech poet who is stylistically and spiritually nearest to the English, or, rather, to one strand in English nineteenth century poetry. Zeyer can be described as a Czech Pre-Raphaelite. Much of his narrative verse reminds one of William Morris. There are poems by Zeyer, such as Ossian's Return and The Chronicle of St. Brandan, which could even figure among the productions of the Irish Renaissance. The nature of the English influence changed in the twentieth century. The old, basically romantic tradition receded into comparative oblivion. Among poets, Walt Whitman was the most influential. Petr Bezruc, in his Silesian Songs (1903), writes his free verse wearing the mask of the bard of democracy. But, to a greater degree than English poetry, English prose affected Czech writers between the two World Wars profoundly. Karel Capek wrote a thesis on pragmatism, and his science fiction and sophisticated detective stories are modeled on H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton. There is something akin to the Anglo-Saxon temperament in Karel 902 René Wellek

Capek: something empirical, cheerful, optimistic, even obtrusively optimistic. The Letters from England (1924) show his slightly baffled sympathy with the English people and their habits, but the affinity is deeper than that little book suggests. But Capek, of course, knew not only English writers but also Voltaire, Anatole France, Gide, and Pirandello. He (and almost all other recent Czech authors) illustrate the thesis of this paper: the openness toward the world, the situation at the center, the encirclement by the Germans, the deliberate attempts to reach beyond it, mainly to France and England; the peculiar com- bination of independence and graceful adaptation achieved in Czech literature. All great literatures have nourished Czech literature, but each one was subjected to a choice - sometimes even a narrow choice - and something new, local, and indigenous was added. Analogies with the development of Russian literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exist, no doubt, not, primarily, because of Russian influences on Czech literature but rather because of the common effect of the Western literatures on both Russian and Czech literature. European Romanticism: German, French, and English had a similar impact in both Russia and Bohemia. The French realistic and naturalistic novel of Balzac and Zola was imported to both Russia and Bohemia. French symbolism affected Prague and St. Petersburg direct- ly. There is nothing mysterious about the parallelisms and they offer no argument that Czech literature is somehow synchronized with Rus- sian literature because Czech belongs to the Slavic literatures. A glance at modern Greek, Hungarian, and Rumanian, as well as Dutch, Portu- guese, and all the Scandinavian literatures, must convince us that they reacted in similar ways to the same general European phenomena as did Czech literature. We simply cannot escape the conclusion that Czech literature is a part of Western literature. During the Counter-Reformation, an attempt was made to isolate the Czechs culturally, to protect them from the winds of doctrine blowing from Western Europe, and the attempt, we must admit, was successful for a long time. Today, in totally changed circumstances, a similar attempt is being made by the Communists, who have put Czechoslovakia behind the Iron Curtain. But the present artificial isola- tion of the Czechs from the West cannot last. It has been visibly weakening in recent years. Czech literature will and must reassert its position as part of Western literature in lively exchange with the East.