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Czechoslovakia Writers and Artists
The country's creative intelligentsia played a pivotal role
in the nationalist movements of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries; their manifestos spoke for the aspirations
of Czechs and Slovaks within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Their
opposition to foreign domination was almost a defining feature of
the literature of the period, just as Soviet hegemony and the
paralyzing rigidity of party rule have fueled a growing body of
dissident literature in recent times.
Intellectual and artistic endeavor flourished during the
First Republic. There was, of course, The Good Soldier
Svejk, published at the end of World War I. The presence of
Czech Karel Capek, Slovak Laco Novomesky, and German Franz Kafka,
Rainer Maria Rilke, and Edmund Husserl, to name only the most
prominent writers, gives some sense of how prolific the era was.
Sigmund Freud came from the Czech lands, as did Gustav Mahler.
Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein taught at the Charles-Ferdinand
University in Prague.
The KSC takeover ushered in the era of Stalinist socialist
realism in Czechoslovakia's arts. It was a movement with strong
overtones of Russian chauvinism and a deep anti-Western bias
evident in a readiness to denounce anything remotely cosmopolitan
as bourgeois, decadent, or both. One suspects that the country
that had given world literature Svejk was particularly
unpromising ground for Socialist Realism. A blind optimism
coupled with revolutionary fervor are the key components of this
"aesthetic," portraying life as it should be according to Marxist
theory, rather than as it actually is.
Soon after taking power, the the KSC at its Ninth Party
Congress issued "directives for new socialist culture." The
congress declared that "literary and artistic production is an
important agent of the ideological and cultural rebirth in our
country, and it is destined to play a great role in the socialist
education of the masses." Some arts maintained their tradition of
excellence throughout the era. Theater productions relied on the
classics for their repertoire. Czech filmmakers relied on
anti-Nazi, World War II plots to produce works of world renown in
the 1960s. This was and has continued to be a safe topic. But
writers were a perennial source of consternation for the
authorities. Officials of the Novotny regime periodically
denounced them for "unprincipled liberalism." Those placed under
interdict wrote, as the phrase went, "for the drawer"; some, like
Novomesky, were sentenced to long prison terms.
In the 1970s, the regime's policies toward the creative
intelligentsia were characterized by a compulsion to control
creative activity, coupled with an active paranoia. These
policies continued into the 1980s. What motivated censors in
ferreting out antisocialist sentiments was sometimes difficult to
fathom. Karel Gott, a popular male singer, recorded a song
portraying a conversation between a casual lover and his
sweetheart that was banned from radio and television. Officialdom
found the lyrics "I'll flip a coin when you ask if I'm sincere or
not when I say I love you" to be insulting to Czechoslovak
currency.
Artists and writers belonged to their own professional
organizations. Nonmembers could practice their art as long as
they were loyal to the regime, although earning a living outside
the major organizations was easier in some fields than others.
Actors, as long as they did not aspire to major roles, did not
need to join. Artists who were nonmembers effectively limited
themselves to ornamental or industrial art. Musicians and singers
faced further constraints. In particular, the regime found the
personal habits of many members of popular musical groups too
divergent from socialist ideals and subjected them to
considerable harassment. In fact, it was the arrest and trial of
The Plastic People of the Universe, a group active in the musical
underground in the 1970s, that precipitated the drafting and
signing of Charter 77
(see Popular Political Expression
, ch. 4).
Writers endured the greatest repression. For the purged, with
limited exceptions, official publishing outlets were closed. In
the meantime, the three writers' unions (Czechoslovak, Czech, and
Slovak), and especially the Czech Writers' Union, set about
grooming a younger generation of writers who, if not
overwhelmingly devoted to socialism, were at least assiduously
apolitical. In the middle to late 1970s, there was a semithaw:
the authorities permitted purged writers to recant and, after a
proper measure of self-criticism, publish again. For those who
did not avail themselves of this chance, options were indeed
limited. By the end of the decade, the government had stepped up
efforts to keep Czechoslovak authors from publishing abroad.
Those writers who wished to publish successfully at home kept to
safe territory--science fiction, World War II novels, fantasy,
and children's literature--all noncontroversial, basically
apolitical genres that dominated literary output in the 1980s.
A complicated bureaucratic apparatus governed censorship at
home. The most critical variable was whether a writer had been
expelled from the KSC or simply dropped from its membership lists
(see The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
, ch. 4). There were
various kinds and degrees of interdiction: some writers could
translate but not write, others could write plays but nothing
else, and so forth. Banned writers could sometimes publish their
work if a "cover person" assumed authorship. The author might
lose from one-third to one-half of the contract fee for the work
and might have to permit the cover person to make substantial
(and often unacceptable) changes in the work. The cover person
faced stiff penalties if discovered by the authorities. Because
"normalization" was characteristically milder in Slovakia,
writers were sometimes able to publish works in Bratislava that
the Prague censors found unacceptable. This was also partly due
to the fact that the Slovak minister of culture was himself a
writer.
Data as of August 1987
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