Notions of Identity in the Work of Egon Hostovsky
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Notions of Identity in the Work of Egon Hostovsky RADOJKA MILJEVIC School of Slavonic and East European Studies Submission for PhD Degree ProQuest Number: 10014386 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10014386 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract This thesis is an examination of personal identity in the work of the Czech writer Egon Hostovsky (1908-73), a major exponent of the twentieth-century psychological ‘analytical’ novel in Czech. Traditional readings of his oeuvre have been marred by the failure to separate his biography from his fiction. In the pre-Second World War period he has often been labelled as a ‘Jewish’ writer because of his Jewish background; the post-war reception of Hostovsky has tended either to sentimentalize him or treat his work politically because of his exile from Czechoslovakia both during and after the Second World War. This thesis aims to challenge many of these readings by a disinterested evaluation of his work. This thesis also attempts to demonstrate the consistency of Hostovsky’s thematic concerns across his oeuvre both by studying unified blocks of his work chronologically and by discrete studies of important themes. Chapters include Hostovsky’s treatment of Jewish identity against the background of Jewish consciousness in Central Europe; Hostovsky’s use of the double within the parameters of conventional literary treatments of this device; and Hostovsky’s examination of power. Those chapters organized according to a chronological principle break down Hostovsky’s work into three periods: the early work (up to the Second World War, although a distinction is drawn between his work prior to the 1930s and thereafter); his wartime and immediate post-war work; and the work of his ‘second exile’ from the 1950s onwards. The main concerns of this study are Hostovsky’s treatment of the Romantic outsider; of social and personal disintegration; and of the individual’s struggle for authenticity. This thesis includes criticism of Hostovsky’s earliest work published in journals, which has been entirely ignored in the critical reception of his work, and important personal correspondence from the archives of the Museum of National Literature in Prague. Contents Preface 4 Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 6 Chapter 1 Jewish Identity and the Relationship between Jewishness and Outsiderdom 16 Chapter 2 Hostovsky’s Early Work: The Prison of the Self 42 Chapter 3 The Double in Hostovsky’s Fiction 89 Chapter 4 The Relationship between Power and Identity 115 Chapter 5 Days of Judgement: Hostovsky’s Exile, 1939-47 147 Chapter 6 The Last Refuge of the Self: Hostovsky’s Post-War Work 184 Bibliography 221 Preface Hostovsky’S works (other than those published in journals) are referenced in the main body of the thesis in brackets rather than in footnotes. Anyone seeking publication details of Hostovsky’s novels and collections of short stories is referred to the bibliography. I have adopted the most obvious abbreviations of the titles of Hostovsky’s works: Ztraceny stm, for example, is referenced as ZS, Dûm bez pana as DBP, Listy z vyhnanstvi as LZV. No two titles contract to the same abbreviation. I have in nearly all instances referred to the third person as ‘he’, partly because Hostovsky is mainly concerned with male protagonists, but also not to encumber the text unduly with ‘he/she’. Acknowledgements I wish to thank Professor Robert Fynsent for acting as my supervisor for this thesis, and for his efforts in reading Hostovsky’s work and mine. I would also like to thank Dr David Chirico for supporting me through many anxious moments throughout my academic life, and I must mention Graham Amer for giving me the time I needed to complete this work. Most of all, I would like to thank John Andrew for his total support and encouragement of me, and his assistance in reading and commenting on my work: without my thesis, I would never have met John, and correspondingly, without John, I would never have finished my thesis. Introduction Hostovsky is a moral, even didactic, writer. His oeuvre constitutes a portrait of phenomenal social and personal disintegration deriving from the loss of a quasi-mystical metaphysical unity. It is unlikely that any other Czech writer has demonstrated across such a large body of work so consistent a study of self- consciousness and concentration on philosophical-ethical problems concerning selfhood, such as guilt and self-deception. Put simply, Hostovsky’s work concerns the individual’s struggle to develop an authentic existence in the world. As early as the 1930s, prominent critics championed Hostovsky as a major exponent, and modernizer, of the Czech psychological ‘analytical’ prose novel. Karel Sezima, for example, deemed Hostovsky the ‘heir’ of the psychological ‘analytical’ novel,^ and Pavel Fraenkl considered him to be the continuer and inheritor of a nineteenth-century tradition of analytical prose and of the interior monologue.^ Hostovsky’s exploration of the (often murky) interior of the self was the characteristic which had first drawn the attention of critics such as F.X. Saida, Karel Sezima, Frantisek Gotz, A.M. Pisa and Vaclav Cemy to the author’s works of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Indeed critics recognized Hostovsky’s developing talent as a serious novelist long before he attained any popularity with his reading public. The critical reception of Hostovsky’s work has too often interwoven the author’s identity with analyses of his texts. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, a highpoint of Hostovsky criticism in so far as his work was extensively reviewed (with acuity) by the leading critics of the time, his Jewish identity led critics astray from disinterested evaluations (one thinks particularly of Sezima in this regard). Hostovsky’s occasional use of Jewish protagonists and his Czech-Jewish background meant that he was erroneously considered to be a mouthpiece for Jewish problems: as late as 1963, René Wellek misrepresents 1 See Karel Sezima, ‘Z nové tvorby românové’ in Lumir, 64, 1937-38, p. 160. 2 Pavel Fraenkl, K problematice sebecitu v dUe Egona Hostovského, Prague, 1936, p. 4. Fraenkl’s work on Hostovsky was also published in the fifty-sixth volume of the Kalendaf. For reviews of this edition, see ‘amp.’ [A.M. Pi§a] in Pràvo lidu, 45, no. 167, 19 July 1936, p. 7 and ‘m.n.’ [Miloslav Novotny] in Lidové noviny, 40, no. 410, 14 August 1932, p. 9. Hostovsky as ‘a specialist in the Jewish problem’ who has written ‘novels of horror and crime’.^ Since the 1920s and 1930s Hostovsky’s subsequent status as an exile — from 1939 and until his death in 1973 — has muddied assessments of his work. His position as persona non grata under the Czechoslovak Communist regime, which he alleges derived as much from his publication of the novel Nezvéstny^ as from his exile, meant that critics were forbidden from writing about him and were unable to obtain access to his work through conventional means (libraries stored his works in the archives for forbidden books, though his pre-war works were available in second-hand bookshops), and publishers were unable to publish his work within Czechoslovakia; naturally this led to a serious dearth of critical scholarship on Hostovsky — although one might suggest that Milos Pohorsky was a notable exception. The first attempt to publish Hostovsky’s work in post-war Czechoslovakia was made in 1959, with the novel Pülnocm pacient, but in the final stages of publication the novel was prevented by the Communist authorities from being distributed.^ What criticism there has been from within Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech Republic, has sometimes been marred by the sentimentalization of Hostovsky’s various ‘returns’ to Czech literature, namely in 1945, 1967-69 (when the relaxation of censorship meant that Hostovsky was suddenly hailed as a representative of Czech literature in the world),^ and >ince|l989.sinct^ Consequently, the thematic progression in Hostovsky’s work has been neglected and his work in general inadequately assessed. The Changes of 1989 have resulted in a remedying of this situation in so far as two short monographs 3 René Wellek, Essays on Czech Literature, The Hague, 1963, p. 41. 4 Franti§ek Kautman, in an interview with Jiff PenâS, asserts that Nezvéstny was originally translated into English and published in America as a propaganda tool for soldiers because it was mistakenly understood as a ‘tendenônf, agitaCnf, protikomunisticky roman’ (‘Hostovsky na cestë domû. S FrantiSkem Kautmanem o velkém autorovi’ in Lidova demokracie, 49, no. 133, 10 June 1993, p. 6). In Kautman’s view, this politicized reception o f the novel assisted Hostovsky in finding a readership in America. 5 See ‘voj’ in Prdce, 53, no. 69, 22 March 1997, p. 9. 6 See Vëra Karfïkovâ, ‘Egon Hostovsky v ëeské literature’, Literarni listy, 1, no. 9, 25 April 1968, p. 9. In this period the collection o f novels Cizinci hledajî byt (Prague, 1967) was published, and Zhdf republished; an exhibition devoted to Jan Cep and Egon Hostovsky was held in May and June o f 1969 (see the pamphlet of the exhibition, Ndvraty: Jan Cep a Egon Hostovsky, Prague-Strahov, May-June 1969; and Josef Trâger selected and published extracts o f Hostovsky’s work in Divadelnl noviny in 1968.