Introduction THE RETURN OF KRÁL MAJÁLES … the beautiful engineers are all dead, the secret technicians conspire for their own glamour in the Future … —Allen Ginsberg, “Král Majáles,” 7 May, 1965 There are cities in the world that exercise a particular influence over the minds of writers, artists and historians because they seem to manifest a type of spirit, a genius loci, through which an intellectual vitalism is channelled or communicated. Cities galvanized, in their very substance, by a cultural electricity—a vortex—their names imbued with powers of conjuration—Paris, | Berlin, New York, Prague. Such is the mystique of the mind’s geography, that thought and poetry find their location in a given place and time which nevertheless appear transcendent. Equally, there is a question of pragmatics: culture, wherever it is conspicuous, happens by implication and association, like a political crime. The end of “the Empire of Stalinist tyranny”1 signalled by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution, not only projected Prague into the centre of a new Europe and a new European consciousness, it also reignited—however briefly—the libertarianism with which the city, ever since the “thaw” of the 1960s and the Prague Spring, had been symbolically associated. Following the communist putsch of 1948, Prague—once the heart of Mitteleuropa—became an annex of that historical and cultural fiction known as Eastern Europe. As Michael March noted in his preface to Description of a Struggle, this pseudo-territory had been “a lost continent for over forty years.” The cultural landscape which emerged in Prague during the Soviet Union’s collapse was thus one both newly central and yet fundamentally decentred; both singular and radically plural. “In the twentieth century,” as poet Tim Rogers observed, “it was possible to be born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, enter grammar school in Czechoslovakia, go to high school in Germany, work in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, 1 Ivan Klíma, Introduction, Description of a Struggle (London: Picador, 1994) xix. 2 Michael March, Preface, Description of a Struggle, xvii. then retire in Czechoslovakia and die in the Czech Republic—all without ever leaving Prague.” Writing in a special issue of the New Orleans Review—“Ten Years After the Velvet Revolution”—Petr Bílek noted that Czechoslovak poetry in the early 1990s exhibited a type of historical schizophrenia. Most of the work being published in the immediate aftermath of the revolution “had been written in the seventies and eighties, but repressed by the old order.”4 A similar view was expressed by Alexandra Büchler in her editorial to an issue of Transcript devoted to “Iron and Velvet: A Decade of New Czech Writing.” Büchler: “Haste and indiscriminate publication of what had been banned and censored until 1989 made for a chaotic scene.” This was evident even at the time. “Czech literature of the 1990s,” wrote Daniela Drazanová in a 1993 issue of Prognosis, “exists in fast-forward and reverse. Publishers are printing the formerly banned works of “dissident” authors, previously censored Czech classics, and the efforts of fresh and relatively unknown writers.”6 Such an outpouring produced a sense of hyper-anachronism (“time exploded”), and a cultural disconnect with a younger generation, which often found itself alienated from the historical revision in progress and with more affinity for contemporary literature from elsewhere. Some, like Ewald Murrer and Jakub Rosen, established their own journals, such as Iniciály, | devoted to publishing writers under thirty.8 At the same time, the picture of “Czech” poetry after the revolution was complicated by at least three other factors: the competing claims of newly returned émigrés; the ethnic and political divisions which would lead to the partitioning of Czechoslovakia in 1993; as well as by conflicting East/West representations of the Prague literary scene inherited from the Cold War and transformed by the rapid growth of an international literary community within the city itself. What this meant in reality was something like Brion Gysin’s dictum: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”9 Jaromír Slomek, a critic at Literární Noviny, summed the situation up when he wrote that “Czech literature of the nineties is something completely different from the books being published in the nineties.”10 3 Tim Rogers, “The Metamorphosis of Prague,” Book Magazine 9 (March/April, 2000). 4 Petr Bílek, “Czech Poetry of the Nineties,” New Orleans Review 26.1/2 (2000): 16. 5 Alexandra Büchler, Editorial, “Iron and Velvet: A Decade of New Czech Writing, Transcript 6 (2003): www.transcipt-review.org. 6 Daniela Drazanová, “Transitional Literature,” Prognosis, 25 June-8 July, 1993: 2B. 7 Jáchym Topol, qtd in Rogers, “The Metamorphosis of Prague.” 8 See Tom Burkett, “After Big Brother, Unchained Writing,” Prognosis, 21 August-3 September, 1992: 3B. 9 The last words of Hassan i Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain, quoted in John Geiger, Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin (New York: The Disinformation Company, 2005). 10 Qtd in Drazanová, “Transitional Literature,” 2B. David Horák, Ewald Murrer, Ivan Brezina and David Černý. | Out of this complex genealogy, no clear sense of what inaugurated the “Prague moment” can really be gained. Throughout the “Normalization” period of the 1980s, the Prague intelligentsia had been systematically suppressed. Much of the writing to appear in print during the early 90s had first circulated in samizdat, using typed carbon copy. Prague writers experienced their own cultural milieu as a series of arbitrary discontinuities, mediated (according to changeable State policy) by the official publishing apparatus, access to educational institutions, and the availability of exit visas. The 1984 awarding of the Nobel Prize to the Prague poet Jaroslav Seifert (one of the original signatories of Charter 77)—and the consequent accessibility of his work in translation—created a type of parallel universe outside communist Czechoslovakia (ČSSR), shaping a literary consciousness entirely at odds with prevailing realities within the country. One of the “greats” of modern Czechoslovak poetry, Seifert’s writings brought with them evocations of Prague as the city equally of Vítězlav Nezval, Karel Teige, Toyen, and of Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, and Marina Tsvetaeva. During the same period, apparently apolitical writers such as Miroslav Holub were also becoming well-known abroad. Holub was a frequent contributor to British journals like Encounter (founded by Stephen Spender) and the Times Literary Supplement. Alongside Seifert, Holub was widely regarded by many outside the ČSSR to be a major defining figure of the Prague literary scene. British poet laureate, Ted Hughes, famously described him as “one of the half-dozen most important poets writing anywhere.”11 This was starkly at odds with the reception of Holub’s work among the mainstream of Czech academics and critics. In her introduction to the Arc anthology, Six Czech Poets, Alexandra Büchler writes—as late as 2007: That Miroslav Holub is by far the most widely-known Czech poet is symptomatic of the ready acceptance of cerebral poetry of linear thought, “universal” ideas and easy-to-decipher allegories on the one hand, and a reluctance to engage with poetry referring to an unfamiliar culture and literary context on the other. Even Seifert, whose work received a brief flicker of attention following the Nobel Prize award, did not merit as prominent a place in English-language publishing as Holub, whose work was brought out by Penguin and Faber, and later by Bloodaxe.1 This typecasting of Holub as somehow exemplary of a failing—on the one hand, of a “universal” poetics and, on the other, of the English-speaking literary establishment (as culturally myopic)—masks, behind a facile ethnographic binary and an undeclared aesthetic ideology, a set of more fundamental issues that have continued to inform how the various cultural dialogues that make up the contemporary Prague scene are reported. Holub, an accomplished immunologist, maintained—against this kind of | parochialism—a sense of the artist’s moral duty to enquire about the state of the world at large.1 For Holub there was no room after the revolution for the perpetuation of the “ghetto mentality” that had gown up within the mainstream of Czechoslovak literature—in many respects “a typical minor literature,” in Bílek’s words, which “preferred to dwell on specific domestic issues rather than be part of an international exchange.”14 In the early nineties, in the face of war in former Yugoslavia, history indeed appeared to cast a long shadow over the future of a re-unified “Europe.” Holub, who steadfastly rejected the victim-culture that cast the Czechs as the butt of Austro-Hungarian, Nazi and Soviet oppression, insisted that 11 Qtd in Sarah Boxer, “Miroslav Holub is Dead at 74; Czech Poet and Immunologist,” The New York Times, 22 July, 1998, A17. 12 Six Czech Poets, ed. Alexandra Büchler (Todmorden: Arc, 2007). Cf. “A Conversation with Arnošt Lustig and Miroslav Holub,” Trafika1 (1993): 157. Holub: “I was told by some important people at the American embassy: ‘You are only protected here by being published abroad.’ So I learned in the 1970s to write with the view of the English translation in my mind. And nowadays I write almost immediately both language versions.” 13 In the inaugural issue of International Quarterly, he insisted that concerns such as global ecology must not simply be ignored by retreating, for example, into a type of arcadia of national identity. Responsibility for the state of the world is a shared burden, one that cannot be eschewed by glib assertions that history, in the abstract, is to blame. This was a long-held view, dating back to his collaboration with poets like Jiří Šotola, Miroslav Florian and Karel Šiktanc, and their collective rejection of “abstract ideological proclamations.” See Miroslav Holub, “Náš všední den je pevnina,” Květen 2 (September, 1956): 2.