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In addition to their own literature, the Czech Republic has a very active translation scene. A professor told me recently that his friend was asked to translate F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night-- the third Czech translation in fifty years. Similarly, as I was browsing books in a second-hand shop, I saw Czech translations of Hemingway, Dreisler and Ferlinghetti.

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A history of Soviet-era Czech literature, part 2

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A history of Soviet-era Czech literature, part 2

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A history of Soviet-era Czech literature, part 1

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A history of Soviet-era Czech literature, part 1

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A story of love, revenge and hatred, flavored with gushing blood.

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A story of love, revenge and hatred, flavored with gushing blood.

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The description on the back of Miloš Urban's latest book, "Kar."

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Popular Authors According to Booksellers

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Popular Authors According to Booksellers

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Leo Boček
Patrik Hartl
Alena Mornstajnova
Jaroslav Rudiš
Tiche Roky
Petra Soukupova
Miloš Urban
Michal Veiwegh

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Ladislav Klima’s novel, Glorious Nemesis was published in 1932 after his death. However, it was banned by the communist party, leading to its distribution as a samizdat. It gained such importance that the punk band, The Plastic People of the Universe, made an album based on the book.

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Klíma's intense inner life and complex mental state are reflected in his peculiar writings. His eccentricity of style and often volatile prose were intended to convey the deep conflicts attending his thought processes, and this is perhaps best exemplified in the novella Glorious Nemesis. Set in the Tyrol, it is a balladic ghost story that explores the metaphysics of love and death, crime and reincarnation. Sider, a man of twenty-eight, is confronted by a giant mountain named Stag's Head and an ancient hovel standing under a high, black cliff. Out one day on a hike, he encounters two women who will mark his fate: the elder Errata, dressed in red, and the younger Orea, dressed in blue (the two colors of the Virgin Mary). From this point on Sider is on a quest for the All, the Absolute, and to achieve eternity by atoning for the misdeeds of a past life. Willing to risk his entire fortune and sanity, he succumbs to his dreams and hallucinations as Orea, or her doppelgänger, becomes for him a representation of the goddess Nemesis who initiates him into the mysteries of divine retribution.

Last revised by Klíma in 1926, Glorious Nemesis was published posthumously in 1932. This is the first English translation and includes illustrations from celebrated Czech book designer Pavel Rut, who produced a samizdat edition of the text (with an earlier set of illustrations) during the 1980s when the Communist regime prohibited publication of Klima's work. In the 1970s, The Plastic People of the Universe set the novella to music.

Place: Praha

Year: 2011

Pages: 123

Genre: Prose

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Klíma's intense inner life and complex mental state are reflected in his peculiar writings. His eccentricity of style and often volatile prose were intended to convey the deep conflicts attending his thought processes, and this is perhaps best exemplified in the novella Glorious Nemesis.

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The lyrics of The Plastic People of the Universe’s first album were based on a banned Czech poet, Egon Bondy. The 1974 album was named, in a parody of the Beatles’ album, Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned.

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The Plastics helped engineer the ultimate rock 'n' roll rebellion by playing music that infuriated the authorities, staging clandestine concerts and giving a loud and raucous voice to disgruntled youth. For their defiance, their music was banned, concerts were crushed by the state police and some band members were jailed for up to eight years.

It is perhaps a sign of this post-Communist age of Big Macs and Britney Spears that 20 years after the Velvet Revolution, the Plastic People - whose lives were feted in the play "Rock 'n' Roll" by Tom Stoppard, which was staged in London and New York - remain underappreciated here. Many members of the younger generation have no idea who they are. While other rock stars tour the world and drive flashy cars, Mr. Janicek makes a living by delivering hot meals to a nursery school where the children know him as "Mr. Lunch."

In the former Communist bloc, rock music played a special role for the generation that included Mr. Havel and the Plastic People. In the prevideo, predigital media era, records gave the young of the East their longed-for taste of forbidden fruit and the whiff of another world.

The Plastic People were formed in September 1968, one month after roughly 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress a short-lived period of artistic freedom known as the Prague Spring. Rock music, including the Beatles and the droning nihilism of the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa 's the Mothers of Invention, had blared its way through the Iron Curtain and helped transform Prague into Eastern Europe's San Francisco.

In the early morning of Aug. 21, 1968, however, flower power was overcome by Soviet tanks. In protest, Jan Palach, a philosophy student, doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire in Prague's Wenceslas Square. It was, Mr. Janicek recalled, an inauspicious time to form a rock band.

The band - founded by bassist Milan Hlavsa - was initially made up of several schoolmates who covered songs by the Velvet Underground, the Doors and their beloved Zappa. Their manager was Ivan Jirous, an eccentric art critic, who became their muse in the same manner that Andy Warhol had been to the Velvet Underground. Further infuriating the Czechoslovak Communists, they sang their first songs in English, with the help of Paul Wilson, a Canadian translator.

Mr. Jirous, who was also known as Magor, roughly translated as "loony" in Czech, kept the band on a steady course of nonconformity. The band's first studio album - recorded in 1974 and based on lyrics by the outlawed Czech poet Egon Bondy - was satirically titled "Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned."

Jan Brabec, the band's former drummer, argued that the Plastics were part of a longstanding Czech tradition of cultural rebellion. After 1968, the government's repression of personal freedom was both so strong and so unpredictable that laughing in a darkened cinema or listening to rock 'n' roll could become an unintentional political act. Fans who attended Plastic People performances potentially risked expulsion from college, arrest and even jail.

"To be playing music was to be free, to say you are doing what you believe and that you are willing to live with the consequences," Mr. Brabec said.

In 1970, the Communist government revoked the license for the Plastics to perform in public, forcing the band to go underground. In February 1976, the Plastic People organized a music festival in the small town of Bojanovice - dubbed "Magor's Wedding" - featuring 13 other bands. One month later, the police set out to silence the musical rebels, arresting dozens. Mr. Janicek was jailed for six months; Mr. Jirous and other band members got longer sentences.

Mr. Havel, already a leading dissident, was irate. The trial of the Plastic People that soon followed became a cause célèbre.

Looking back on the Velvet Revolution they helped inspire, however indirectly, Mr. Janicek recalled that on Nov. 17, 1989, the day of mass demonstrations, he was in a pub nursing a beer. He argued that the revolution had been an evolution, fomented by the loosening of Communism's grip under Mikhail Gorbachev and the overwhelming frustration of ordinary people with their grim, everyday lives. "The Bolsheviks knew the game was up," he said, "when the sons of the Communists themselves wanted to become capitalists and entrepreneurs."

The Plastic People, who reunited in 1997 at the urging of Mr. Havel, still play gigs to rapturous audiences of aging hippies. Mr. Janicek laughed at the fact that many of the affluent, tie-wearing members of the audience at a production of "Rock 'n' Roll," currently being staged in Prague's National Theater, are the same people who once sneered at the band as deliberately oddball members of the great unwashed.

While hardly nostalgic for Communism, he acknowledged that the repression of the government had inadvertently bred a certain creative purity, immortalized in the lyrics of some Plastic People songs.

"They are afraid of old people for their memories," he began to hum. "They are afraid of young people for their innocence. They are afraid of typewriters. So why are we afraid of them?"

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Czechs' Velvet Revolution Paved by Plastic People

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The Plastics helped engineer the ultimate rock 'n' roll rebellion by playing music that infuriated the authorities, staging clandestine concerts and giving a loud and raucous voice to disgruntled youth. For their defiance, their music was banned, concerts were crushed by the state police and some band members were jailed for up to eight years.

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I wrote during the period when the censor held sway. It was not as bad as it sounds. Although one could not exactly write from the heart, it made writing quite good fun. I twas a matter of tightening the string and waiting for it to break. Quite often it would, but even when It did, the consequences were not particularly serious. I also wrote during the period when censorship had been removed. At that time every word you wrote was taken terribly seriously and you felt a burden of responsibility at the back of your mind all the time. I write in fear of how it would be received and what effect it would have. Now I have so such fears. I have no intention of submitting this work to the censor and I am not bold enough to believe in the return of a censor-free era in the foreseeable future. I maintain that there is no better time for writing. What a contradictory notion freedom is!

(from "The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia")

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has a surprisingly large collection of Czech authors in translation. However, in talking with bookstore clerks, the authors are rarely mentioned, and more than once, a clerk said that they did not recognize the author I was asking about, even after being shown the name.

Related, I have now had four people recommend Michal Viewegh to me, each with the caveat, "He's not literary, but everyone here reads him."

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Less than a block from the National Museum, there is a two story bookstore filled with books. In the front of the store, there are sections of best-sellers based on genre. However, most best-sellers are not Czech. The very first section included Michael Crichton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Orhan Pamuk, Daniel Kelmann, Michael Houellebecq, Mario Vargas Llosa, etc.... The action/thriller section prominently displayed Stephen King, John Le Carre and James Paterson. The most prominent biography was Michelle Obama.

The Czech Republic has a lot of good writers, and they're glad to talk about them. However, they also recognize that literature comes from everywhere, and they value foreign authors as much as their own. Perhaps appropriately, one of the best-selling Czech novels right now is Anna Cima's "Probudím se na Šibuji," about a Czech student living in Tokyo.

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The bookseller at Knihkupectvi Kanzelberger said many Czechs read Jiří Hájíček, whose book Rustic Baroque has been translated into English. From the description and the first couple of pages, it comes across as a very gritty, working class look at life.

Getting a feel for this book, which is apparently very popular, I see a connection to the current political climate in the Czech Republic. It reminds me of the world discussed in Hillbilly Elegy, the forgotten and dilapidated farmland that feel disenfranchised from the big cities and urban(e) culture.

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Visited Knihkupectví Kanzelsberger in Wenceslaus Square. Some great recommendations of living Czech and Slovak writers from one clerk. The other clerk, when asked (in Czech) if she spoke English, looked me up and down, then said, "No, sorry."

At Books Dobrovsky, less than a block away, two clerks were excited to talk about living Czech authors, but when I asked them if these writers had been translated into English, the excitement died and they sent me downstairs to their English section. Some of the authors they mentioned had been translated, but I feel that my lack of Czech skills insulted them. There is a clear sense that, while many Czech people speak English, they want people to speak Czech. I can certainly respect that.

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Jana Beňová

Jana Beňová graduated from the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Bratislava with a degree in theatre dramaturgy. She first wrote for Slovak publications, including Dotyky, Fragment, Slovenské Pohľady, and the daily newspaper SME. Beňová also published a collection of poems that featured her observations on interpersonal relationships, love, and life in general.

She is most famous for her book Plán odprevádzania (Seeing People Off), subtitled Café Hyena. This book is a novel that combines a collection of observations, perceptions, and memories. Beňová was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2012 for her work on this novel. It's possible to read an excerpt in English on the European Union Prize for Literature website; the novel is set in Bratislava and provides some intriguing insights about life in the borough of Petržalka. Beňová will soon present her work to an English-speaking audience at the Brooklyn Book Festival, being held September 11-17, 2017.

Michal Hvorecký

Michal Hvorecký is a fiction writer who has published many short stories that have been translated and printed in English, German, Polish, Czech, and Italian. Unfortunately, his novels are not yet available in English. Hvorecký also regularly contributes to Slovak newspapers. Some of his short stories and articles, such as Transylvania on a slippery slope, are available to read in English on the Salon website.

In Transylvania on a slippery slope, Hvorecký writes his opinion that, "The Slovaks and Czechs are mostly not keen on their minorities. Perhaps they ought to remember that there are parts of the world where they, too, are a minority." Hvorecký is an author who is not afraid to share his views, both positive and critical of his homeland. Reading through his opinionated short stories will give you a glimpse into current events and issues related to literary arts in Slovakia.

Ivana Dobrakovová

Ivana Dobrakovová has published two major works in the English language; a novel, Bellevue (2010), and a collection of short stories, Toxo (2013). The main characters of her short stories in Toxo are mostly young Slovak women who are searching for their place in the world, often via relationships with foreigners abroad. Each of the women encounters different challenges and difficult situations. The primary conclusion of the stories is a story of self-redemption; that the women are ultimately the only ones who are able to help themselves.

In , Dobrakovová tells the story of a nineteen-year-old girl who works as a volunteer for physically disabled residents in a medical center. As the story progresses, her observations begin to be impacted by her own struggle with depression, and she eventually loses the ability to confront others' pain and suffering and loses touch with reality. The book has been praised for its attempt at understanding the thought process of people who are affected by depression, and is certainly interesting from a psychological perspective.

Juraj Kuniak

Juraj Kuniak is a Slovak poet and writer from Košice, in the eastern part of Slovakia. He has published several books in English, including Mister Cernovsky (2004), Man in the Wind (2005), A Bit of the World's Space (2006), Cor Cordi (2007), The Line of the Horizon (2008), Notebook of a Lyrical Correspondent (2008), and Lamium Album (2012). Kuniak also works as a translator and has translated Walt Whitman 's Song of Myself into the Slovak language. Although it is difficult to buy a copy of Kuniak's work outside of Slovakia (with most copies now being sold at second-hand bookshops), he is one of the most productive poets and writers in the country, with a writing career spanning more than three decades.

Celeste Buckingham

Celeste Buckingham is a pop singer based in Slovakia, who has also competed on Cesko Slovensko Superstar and served as a judge on Czech-Slovak X Factor. Her top-10 single entitled "Run, Run, Run" earned her the recognition of "Best Czech & Slovak Act" at the MTV Europe Music Awards. Buckingham is not a native Slovak, but was raised by multicultural parents in Borinka, a village close to Bratislava. She is quite possibly the youngest writer working in Slovakia to ever be published, as she co-authored The Lost Princess with her younger sister Carmen, when they were 11 and 9 years old. The children's book was published in 2007, and there are still a few copies available on Amazon.

Vladimír Balla

VladimírBalla recently published In the Name of the Father, a combination of his award-winning Slovak novella and three additional short stories, in May 2017. The book is also available as an audio book in English. In the Name of the Father is a story about a narrator who reflects about the challenges of his life and looks to place blame on others for his failed relationship with his parents, his serial adultery, the dissolution of his marriage, and his wife's descent into mental illness. Originally published in 2011, the novella won several awards in Slovakia and solidified Balla's reputation as "the Slovak Kafka" due to his unique use of dark humor. If you enjoy satire, you've got to order a copy of Balla's In the Name of the Father.

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6 Unknown and Underrated Slovak Writers You Need to Read

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Jana Beňová Jana Beňová graduated from the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Bratislava with a degree in theatre dramaturgy. She first wrote for Slovak publications, including Dotyky, Fragment, Slovenské Pohľady, and the daily newspaper SME. Beňová also published a collection of poems that featured her observations on interpersonal relationships, love, and life in general.

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On the limitations of understanding other cultures:

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On the limitations of understanding other cultures:

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"With only ten books of fiction by Slovak authors published in English translation over the last 15 years, Slovakia has yet to make a real mark on the English-speaking literary market."

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With only ten books of fiction by Slovak authors published in English translation over the last 15 years, Slovakia has yet to make a real mark on the English-speaking literary market. On the bright side, half of these books are by women writers (although the same cannot be said of some dozen anthologies published over the same period, in which women are shamefully underrepresented). Nevertheless, this is just the tip of the iceberg of a vibrant literature, where women writers have gradually become a major force. The authors that we-a group of translators and literature scholars-have selected for this list represent a range of generations and their works reflect experiences past and present, from Slovakia and abroad, some originally written in languages other than Slovak.

We decided to start with a pioneering work from the 1960s by Jaroslava Blažková. Sadly, she passed away at the age of 83 on February 20, 2017, before this list was completed so, in a way, it has turned into a tribute to an author who inspired generations of women writers and whose life epitomizes the upheavals of the 20th century. After she fled to Canada following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Blažková was erased from Slovak literature and her books were banned. In a 1997 interview, she said: "Certain stages of life are irretrievable. 1989 came too late for me. When I received a letter from Bratislava asking how I envisaged my rehabilitation, I found it absurd. All I wanted was for my books to be reissued." ASPEKT publishing house stepped up to the plate, reissuing several of her 1960s books as well as publishing two new ones, written after 2000.
Jaroslava Blažková, Nylonový mesiac (The Nylon Moon)
Slovenský spisovateľ, 1961
Jaroslava Blažková is often called the Slovak Françoise Sagan. Her writings include almost lyrical depictions, similar to Sagan's, of the fragile and elusive, paradoxical nature of closeness and loneliness, the reluctunce of young women to submit to authority and settle into a mundane and humdrum marriage. Her novel The Nylon Moon tells the story of the exotic blonde Vanda and her brief relationship with the fickle and immature Andrej. It was turned into a feature film in 1968, shortly before the author left the country and before her works were banned.
Why translate it?

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-Aňa Ostrihoňová Irena Brežná, Die beste aller Welten (The Best of All Worlds)Ebersbach & Simon, 2008
A novel of growing up in the 1960s, a time when the 20th century was also growing up and rebelling, The Nylon Moon highlights the absurdity of conservative, petty bourgeois conventions and expectations and is imbued with an intoxicating whiff of freedom, which at the time of publication stirred up controversy similar to that caused by the writing of Françoise Sagan.
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-Charles Sabatos Jana Bodnárová, Náhrdelník/Obojok (Necklace/Choker)
Trio, 2016 Why translate it?
This autobiographical novel depicts Slovakia in the early 1950s through the perspective of a young girl whose family has been persecuted as "class enemies" under Soviet-imposed ideology. Brežná expresses her criticism of the Communist regime with characteristically East Central European irony, referring obliquely to the different languages and cultural backgrounds of the characters, and she reveals the absurdity of the society through her protagonist's genuinely naïve reactions to events. Although she emigrated to Switzerland in 1968, Brežná has only emerged as a major novelist over the past decade. She writes primarily in German, but has received several awards in Slovakia and was recently the subject of a documentary film.
-Aňa Ostrihoňová Zuzana Cigánová, Špaky v tŕní (Cigarette Butts in the Brambles)
VSSS, 2012 Why translate it? -Magdalena Mullek
Like most of Brežná's work, The Best of All Worlds was translated into Slovak (under the title Na slepačích krídlach / On Chicken Wings); it has also been published in Czech, French, and Belarusian. An excerpt from the already-completed English translation appeared in the online journal BODY, but it deserves to be published in full, so that a wider readership can experience her distinctive mix of empathy, humor, and barely concealed rage at political injustice in both the former Eastern bloc and the West.
Why translate it?
With her latest novel the poet and fiction writer Jana Bodnárová proves that the powerful storyline has not vanished from Slovak literature. The book's present-day protagonist Sára revisits the time of World War II as she tries to decide what to do with the house in which her family had spent most of their lives. Composed of fragments from the life of a painter, Imrich, the novel depicts not just wartime and the postwar period but also the subtle distinction between the pleasant and choking sensations aroused by a necklace, showing how closely interlinked and interdependent they are.
-Julia Sherwood
Fragments of Sara's family history and those of her friends, inhabitants of a small town in northern Slovakia, reflect the history, paradoxes and paranoias of the 1950s, the tightening noose of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain, which was every bit as savage as the war they managed to survive.

Pipina is an ugly woman in a world where ugliness is worse than a death sentence. Alone with a baby, she lives amid the thousand cruelties of everyday life and her beautiful, cinematic dreams. She creates a rich inner world, and her razor-sharp observations leavened with a good dose of self-deprecating humor and inventive language produce a revealing narrative of contemporary society.
Why translate it?
You don't have to be ugly to experience the everyday prejudices of the world around you. Cigánová pulls back the veil on people's most private thoughts and presents them so matter-of-factly you won't even notice they could be your own.
-Charles Sabatos
Ivana Dobrakovová, Bellevue
Marenčin PT, 2010

Blanka is a Slovak student who travels to the south of France for a summer job at a home for the disabled. As her initial idealism gives way to irritation and repulsion, and we gradually discover that her sometimes shocking, attitude is not caused by lack of empathy but is a symptom of her mental breakdown. Blanka struggles to hold on to her sanity without medication, turning to her fellow volunteers for help but finds herself as helpless as her former patients and ends up hospitalized. This gripping novel offers an unflinching portrayal of mental illness, still regarded as a taboo.
Why translate it?
Because of the skillful way the author shifts the registers and alternates between the narrative styles reflecting her narrator's mounting paranoia and increasingly tenuous grip on reality, she is able to create a chilling yet ultimately compassionate portrayal of a frightening condition.
-Magdalena Mullek
Irena Eliášová, Naše osada (Our Settlement)
KVK Liberec, 2009
Why publish it?*
Irena Eliášová is another writer of Slovak origin who does not write in Slovak; her native language is Romany and her works are mainly in Czech (though often with some dialogue in Slovak and Romany). While the episodic narrative is a fictionalized version of the author's own childhood in a Slovak osada (Roma or "gypsy" settlement) in the early 1960s, it presents an affectionate but unsentimental view of Roma culture. Eliášová's story reveals a minority deeply connected to its traditions, yet confronted with ideological and technological change under state socialism. However, the heart of the text is provided by the friendship between the endearing narrator Guzka and her best friend, a non-Roma Slovak boy, filtering social problems through the innocent perspective of childhood in a way similar to classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird.
-Janet Livingstone
The Roma minority of former Czechoslovakia remains culturally marginalized, and there are very few literary depictions of contemporary Roma life, even fewer by authors of Roma origin themselves. Eliášová is little-known in the Czech Republic, where her books have been printed by obscure publishers in small print runs, and she is almost unknown in Slovakia. However, her vivid characterizations, her lively story-telling, and her unique insights into the vanishing traditions of Slovak Roma culture make her work a worthy candidate for translation into English and other European languages.

Zuska Kepplová, Buchty švabachom (Rolls in Blackletter) KK Bagala, 2011

Petra, Anka, Mika, Natália, Juliana-Paris, London, Helsinki, Budapest-a series of stories about present-day nomads, young people who go out into the world in search of a better life, or maybe just a different one. While they have the freedom to study anywhere in the world and work in countries their parents could not even visit, the reality of that "freedom" is often nothing more than menial work, poor living conditions, and Tesco value products. Kepplová's light touch makes this an easy read if you're willing to discard all expectations and allow yourself to be carried along on their journeys towards their own ideas of freedom.
Why translate it?
A millennials' odyssey-a search for self by the post-Cold-War generation, which has lived its entire life in the rapidly changing global economy-this book has been called a pocket Baedeker for the world of young Slovaks, but they could equally be Polish, Slovene, or any other Central European nationality.
-Ivana Taranenková

Monika K ompaníková, Piata loď (Boat Number Five)
KK Bagala, 2012

This short novel follows a young girl desperately and sometimes humorously fashioning a life for herself. Emotionally neglected by her immature, promiscuous mother and made to care for her witch-like, dying grandmother, 12-year-old Eva is left to fend for herself in the social vacuum of a post-communist concrete apartment block jungle in Bratislava. She spends her days roaming the streets and daydreaming in the only place where she feels safe-a small garden inherited from her grandfather. One day, on her way to the garden, she stops at a suburban railway station and impulsively abducts twin babies. Eva teeters on the edge of disaster, struggling to care for them, while discovering herself.

With a vivid and unapologetic eye Kompaníková captures the emptiness and ache of the post-communist environment. Even in a society where city neighborhoods were built as communities, socialist ideology not only "equalized" people, but also equally humiliated them. This book is about the aftermath of that experience and one girl's quest for genuine human relationships.
-Tünde Mészáros
* An extract of Boat Number Five appeared in Words without Borders and the complete book is available in Janet Livingstone's English translation. Little Harbour, a film based on the novel, won a Crystal Bear at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival.

Vanda Rozenbergová, Slobodu bažantom (Freedom for Pheasants)
Slovart, 2015

The central theme of the 15 short stories in this collection is freedom. However, this is not freedom understood as a theatrical gesture, as Rozenbergová's protagonists opt for an unflashy, maybe even eccentric, kind of revolt. Ordinary at first sight, these are unconventional adventurers rebelling against mortifying, preordained existence. Their compassion or solidarity with those who are weaker turns them into quiet avengers who take on animal abusers, domestic tyrants and cruel partners, helping their victims to find the strength to live a free and contented life.

The stories' plots are filled with small miracles and playful imaginings, all the while remaining plausible and convincing. Rozenbergová has the courage to let her characters engage with the world passionately, to embrace it and be a force for good. Even when they fail, her protagonists keep trying to win the affection of others and never lose hope of achieving something more. Freedom for Pheasants shows that Rozenbergová is one of the most original and promising figures on the contemporary Slovak literary scene.

Veronika Šikulová, Miesta v sieti (Places in the Net)
Slovart, 2011

This strongly autobiographical novel is set mainly in Bernolákovo, a small country town in the south of present-day Slovakia (and home to Slovaks, Hungarians and Germans, known at various times as Cseklész, Čeklís and Landschütz) that has been claimed, in turn, by Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The three protagonists-grandmother Jolana, mother Alica and daughter Verona (Šikulová herself)-speak in turn, their monologues gradually revealing their family history and through it the 20th-century history of Central Europe. Places in the Net is a novel of reminiscences and memories, of personal and national tragedies, of joys, colors and scents, but above all a novel of three strong women, who somehow manage to find the courage and strength to keep going-regardless of what history and fate throw at them.

Why translate it? Šikulová's writing smartly recreates her protagonists' world, alternating their distinct voices, reflecting the characters' social standing, education and personality. In addition to the wealth of historical and factual detail, the bilingual setting that permeates the monologues and the narration presents a formidable challenge to a translator. However, having translated the book into Hungarian I can affirm that this is a challenge a resourceful English translator would ultimately find rewarding, as the book provides original insights into this unique borderland area, as well as a chance to see it through Šikulová's very personal, and feral yet tender, unequivocally feminine filter.

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10 Slovak Women Writers We'd Love to Read in English

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With only ten books of fiction by Slovak authors published in English translation over the last 15 years, Slovakia has yet to make a real mark on the English-speaking literary market. On the bright side, half of these books are by women writers (although the same cannot be said of some dozen anthologies published over the same period, in which women are shamefully underrepresented).

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The days when men dominated the literary limelight are long gone. Gone too are the days when to most people the idea of “literature written by women” meant opening the floodgates to a world of romantic and usually unrequited love.

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The days when men dominated the literary limelight are long gone. Gone too are the days when to most people the idea of "literature written by women" meant opening the floodgates to a world of romantic and usually unrequited love. The benches have disappeared under a blanket of wild roses, the pink umbrellas from Monet's paintings have been put away, the heart pierced by an arrow on the birch tree beyond the field has been devoured by time.

Dusk falls and a once chaste, naïve girl from high society takes off her elegant chemise the colour of innocence. She is naked. In the morning she awakes as a new woman. The morning coffee tastes just as it should. She lights her first cigarette, throws a satin gown round her shoulders and sits down to a blank sheet of paper. She begins to write. She writes about modern women's literature from the present, which with every word is becoming the past. She is thoughtful, bright and every inch a woman. She has matured from a naïve, sighingly romantic girl and has plunged headlong into the mysterious world of literature, which remains closed off to women lacking in courage. She opens the gate, whose handle gleams from the touch of predominantly male hands, and starts to write the first paragraph on modern female literature.

The archetypal modern female writer is a woman who is talented, educated, open-minded and knows herself. She is not worried that she might shock with themes that go beyond the boundaries, because there are no boundaries. She doesn't even mind offering up (though not on a silver platter) part of her intimate life to readers and critics who read between the lines. On the contrary, she is able to use her individuality as a selling point and thus extend a helping hand to those who have experienced something similar but haven't found the courage to speak or write about it for fear of criticism.

The modern Czech female novelist writes about Czech history and the lives of those who have been psychologically scarred by it. She is interested in far-off countries with different cultures and she writes about the local people as though they were our neighbours. The modern Czech female novelist writes about the love of a woman for a man and about the love of a woman for a woman. She opens up what is still a sensitive topic for many people: sexuality and sexual orientation. The modern Czech female writer does not know the meaning of the word taboo. She enjoys controversy, but she does not deliberately court it. She knows her worth. She likes openness and digs deep down to its very core. In her writing she draws you in with the verisimilitude of the main characters' feelings, while also masterfully handling the plot. The modern Czech female writer seems to pull hitherto invisible (or rather unseen) themes out of her hat, and yet even she likes to return home, to be a little girl again, hiding behind her mother's skirts. A little girl who can believe anything that comes into her head. At least until that moment when she wakes up to a new morning and everything has suddenly changed.

The twenty-first-century publishing industry has been churning out book after book. Some are swept away by time while others endure. The most successful ones also usher their author into the spotlight, and from that point on critics and readers will expect one miracle after another from them to stir up the stagnant literary waters. And then there are all the different literary prizes as indicators of the quality of new publications. If a Czech book is widely read, is interesting and has won a literary prize, then translators will soon set their sights on it. And thus the modern Czech book leaves its native land.

Which modern Czech female writers (and books written by them) now form part of the contemporary Czech literature scene? First of all, we'll look at the stand-out names. These are: Zuzana Brabcová, Daniela Hodrová, Radka Denemarková, Petra Hůlová, Kateřina Tučková, Jakuba Katalpa and Irena Dousková. It is worth adding that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to create a kind of league table of writers, where individual authors would be ranked according to how widely read and translated they were and how many awards they had won. Therefore, we are only going to look at those women writers who appear on CzechLit. This is a kind of showcase for high-quality works of modern Czech literature that have been adorned with various literary prizes, which has led to them being translated into many different languages.

The first to emerge onto the scene was Zuzana Brabcová (1959 - 2015), who was the first ever recipient of the Jiří Orten Prize in 1987. As with several other female writers who we will look at, Zuzana Brabcová was endowed with a love of literature by her family. She was the daughter of the literary critic and historian Jiří Brabec and the literary historian, editor and translator Zina Trochová. Zuzana Brabcová was the author of six novels and at the same time worked as a publishing editor at Český spisovatel, Hynek and Garamond. She received the Jiří Orten Prize for her second novel, Daleko od stromu [Chip off the Old Block], from 1984. It looks at the metaphorical floods of the 1970s and early 1980s, when Prague was submerged by the hungry waves of socialism. Her lesbian novel Rok Perel [Year of Pearls] from 2000 received a particularly stormy reception; during the launch of the book she openly stated that she shared a household with her daughter, her husband and her girlfriend. She then received a Magnesia Litera in 2013 for her fifth novel, Stropy [Ceilings]. In this novel the writer dealt with the subject of people trapped in psychiatric clinics, and this paved the way for all kinds of inner dialogues. She shifts from reality to dreams and back again, blurring the borders between fantasy and what is real. The Egyptian translator Khalid Biltagi was so impressed by Stropy that he chose to translate it into Arabic. He commented that "I enjoyed Ceilings tremendously. It is an amazing novel and very challenging to translate. The narration is so magical that as soon as my Arabic translation came out various reviews immediately appeared, and so the book made its way into academic circles."

Zuzana Brabcová's novels have been translated into a number of foreign languages including German, Swedish, Italian, Danish, Slovenian and Hungarian.

Another woman on the modern Czech literature scene is the novelist, poet, translator and literary theorist Daniela Hodrová (*1946), who is the recipient of the State Award for Literature, the Franz Kafka Prize and most recently the Magnesia Litera. She is the daughter of the theatre and film actor Zdeněk Hodr, and her husband was the poet, novelist and translator Karel Milota. Daniela Hodrová worked as an editor at the Odeon publishing house, and then for several years was head of the department of literary theory at the Institute for Czech Literature.

Daniela Hodrová's works have been characterized as postmodern and due to the abundance of metaphors and allegories require a more sophisticated reader. With her fondness for describing the psychological states of her characters, her style suggests the influence of Ladislav Fuks, a writer of psychological prose with an undertone of anxiety. Her most important works include the trilogy Trýznivé město: Podobojí, Kukly, Théta [City of Torment: A Kingdom of Souls, Chrysalides, Theta], published in 1991, and Román zasvěcení [The Novel of Initiation] from 1993. In her trilogy of novels, the author wanders around a mysterious Prague and tries to come to terms with the death of those close to her through her written and unwritten life. She inquires into the spiritual meaning of existence and blurs the line between terrestrial and extraterrestrial life. On the other hand, The Novel of Initiation is a journey charting the metamorphosis of the novel of initiation as it was known in the ancient world and the Middle Ages and as we know it today in the modern age. This year the author was awarded the Magnesia Litera Book of the Year for her most recent novel, Točité věty [Spiral Sentences]. Here too Daniela Hodrová raises the half-forgotten dead from the other side to meet with the living. She layers memories into sentences which spiral in a cycle. "A word longs for a word, a sentence winds into a sentence, sentences of words are the victims of an unknown prophecy, between words a sentence, to branch out, to prophesy..." Her apparently endless sentences have the feel of an experimental stream of consciousness with elements of poetry. This style gives her book a certain musical melody, where Munch's Scream occasionally intrudes with all of its vital urgency. Today it is possible to read Daniela Hodrová's works in English, German, French, Italian, Polish and Bulgarian.

Radka Denemarková (*1968) has enjoyed even greater success abroad and is one of the most widely translated modern Czech female authors. She has not only found success as a novelist, but also as a literary historian, screenwriter, dramaturge and translator of German prose and plays. She has also worked as a researcher at the Academy of Science's Institute for Czech Literature. Radka Denemarková's books have been translated into fifteen languages. She is also the recipient of numerous important literary and drama awards. Her novel Peníze od Hitlera. Letní mozaika [Money from Hitler: A Summer Mosaic] from 2006 won the Magnesia Litera for prose. Two women in two different time lines, a hunger for freedom and a desire for justice. Lawlessness, violence, the lifelong trauma of innocents and the shadow of revenge - these are the central ingredients in the dark story of a series of events stretching back to 1945 which have tarnished Czech history forever. The book is a powerful, raw story which bears out Franz Kafka's quote that "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

Another important writer on the modern Czech literary scene is Petra Hůlová (*1979), whose work also received several literary prizes. Her debut novel, Paměť mojí babičce [All This Belongs to Me], from 2002 was awarded the Magnesia Litera in the category Discovery of the Year. The novel is mainly set in Mongolia, where the writer had found inspiration during her travels. Her book tells the stories of Mongolian women growing up in a traditional society with all its advantages and pitfalls. Her fourth novel, Umělohmotný třípokoj [Plastic-furnished, Three-bedroom], was also a success and won the Jiří Orten Prize. This thematically and stylistically bold novel is also indirectly related to Alice in Wonderland, though written for adults. It is filled with erotica and the long-harboured desires of all those who long to throw off their inhibitions but do not have access to the world beyond the mirror.

The final award in the trio was the Josef Škvorecký Prize for the adventure novel Stanice Tajga [Tajga Station] in 2008. In the novel Petra Hůlová heads to post-Soviet Russia, specifically the Siberian taiga, as pictured on the ice-white cover of the book. She heads to " an infinitely wide and sparsely populated area, which we see reduced to local labour camps, a railway and the remains of the original tribal societies with their rich mythology. The writer included all of this in her book. Her fifth novel unfolds between the years immediately following the war and the present - and the Siberian village of Charyn, which reflects the 'old' world with room for the 'spirit of the taiga', is contrasted with the 'new', modern and developed world, which is synecdochially represented by Denmark. "

Petra Hůlová's books have been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Polish and Hungarian. The important Egyptian Bohemist Khalid Biltagi selected Hůlová's Strážci občanského dobra [Guardians of the Civic Good] to translate into Arabic.

The writer and art historian Kateřina Tučková (*1980) first entered the public consciousness through her second book Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch [The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch] from 2009. The book was based on real-life events and tells the story of a German girl who is expelled from her home in May 1945 as part of the Brno march of death. The book has been reprinted several times and was nominated for the Jiří Orten Prize. Even more popular with readers, however, was Kateřina Tučková's second novel, entitled Žítkovské bohyně [The Žítková Goddesses], which was published in 2012. Before writing the novel, the author carried out thorough research and conducted interviews with people who lived in the area at the time. The novel is set in the White Carpathians, specifically in a region known as Žítková. It was home to witches and herbalists who had been persecuted by the Catholic Church and were later completely eradicated by the communist regime. The Žítková Goddesses is the story of the female soul and the art of magic. Like the author's previous work, it refers to events buried in Czech history. For The Žítková Goddesses Kateřina Tučková received the Josef Škvorecký Prize, the Czech Bestseller Award, the Readers' Award in the Magnesia Litera competition and the Czech Book Readers' Award. The novel became the most frequently borrowed book by a Czech author from Czech libraries in 2013, and by 2014 had sold more than 100,000 copies. It has been translated into eight languages including German, Polish and Arabic.

Another important writer is Jakuba Katalpa, née Tereza Jandová (*1979). Her first novel, Je hlína k snědku? [Is Soil for Eating?], from 2006 immediately met with critical success. Here, amid all kinds of temptations, the author relates a powerfully erotic tale, which should, however, be seen only as a secondary storyline. Apart from its sensuality, the other main feature of the book is its sensuousness - the book is primarily a very artfully arranged mosaic of scents, smells, colours, sounds and orgasmic experiences. However, one of Jakuba Katalpa's major literary achievements was her historically themed novel Němci [Germans], which was published in 2013. In a traditionally written narrative the author returns to events from the Second World War. She follows the life of the main character, a German teacher who finds herself working in the Sudetenland during the war. Jakuba Katalpa treats this theme, which is popular with both writers and readers, with a genuine feeling for the personal story of the main character, which "which not only acts as an outline for a colouring book of history, but as a credible and important chronicle." The novel Germans deservedly won the Josef Škvorecký Prize as well as the Czech Book Award, which brought it to the attention of translators. Soon afterwards it was translated into German, Slovenian, Bulgarian and Macedonian.

The scriptwriter, journalist, novelist and poet Irena Dousková (*1964) is also among the most widely translated female writers. She entered the public consciousness primarily through the novel Hrdý Budžes [B. Proudew] from 1998, which was made famous by a stage version starring Bára Hrzánová. B. Proudew is about the life of a schoolgirl during the communist era with all its spontaneity and absurdity. The tragicomic treatment of the subject was a hit with readers and theatregoers alike. It is one of the best known works of Czech prose published after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Translations of the book have already come out in nine languages including English, German and Polish.

Children, something very sad has happened - your classmate Olinka Hlubinová has died, because she was very ill with heart troubles." So that gave us all a fright, and then we went home. And now I can't help thinking about it all the time. Olinka isn't from 2B like me, she's from 2A, but still. She has short black hair and she's awfully good at drawing. I don't really know her, but the teacher has shown us pictures that Olinka drew loads of times, because they're really good. Now she's dead, so I probably won't see her again, but the teacher can go right on showing everybody those pictures. It's kind of weird. When I got home I told my mum about it right away, and I asked her why Olinka had died when she was just a little girl, because I already know that somebody dies and then they never come home or go anywhere ever again, but usually when they're old. And I also asked what heart troubles are and it seems that heart troubles is the worst illness. If someone has heart troubles, then they almost always die. Then Mum gave me two biscuits, probably because I was really down in the dumps. So I'm happy and yet I'm still sad.

- B. Proudew (Hynek, 1998)

Irena Dousková's poetry is also worthy of attention. In a collection of poems from 2009 entitled Bez karkulky [Without the Riding Hood] she uses humour and self-irony to mask the anxiety in the world of a faltering soul. Don't expect a lyrical book of fairy tales, but rather some tough and bleak writing full of happy beginnings and macabre endings. The collection Without the Riding Hood is actually about what it would be like if well-known fairy tales unfolded in the way real life does, with all its cruelty and lack of happy endings.

A number of other female writers deserve a mention for their contribution to modern Czech literature. Foremost among them are Eva Hauserová, Kateřina Rudčenková, Lenka Lagronová, Petra Soukupová, Markéta Pilátová, Magdaléna Platzová, Magdalena Wagnerová, Lucie Lomová and two writers who share the same surname - Petra Procházková and Iva Procházková.

Eva Hauserová (*1954) is first and foremost one of the most important Czech feminists. However, she is also a writer, journalist and translator. She was employed at the magazines ABC and Story and the science-fiction magazine Ikarie. She then worked at Harlequin Publishers and also as an advertising copywriter. She has translated a wide range of novels for women and published several guides to feminism. She was behind the translation of the famous play The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler.

Another female writer whose work should not be overlooked is Kateřina Rudčenková (*1976), a poet and playwright. One play which stands out from her body of work for its quality is Niekur, for which she was awarded the 2006 Alfréd Radok Award. The play's unusual title comes from Lithuanian and translates as "nowhere". It refers to a chance love affair of restricted duration which takes place in a foreign land - i.e. "nowhere". Another captivating piece of work is her poetry collection Chůze po dunách [Walking on Dunes], which was awarded the 2014 Magnesia Litera.

Red Landscape
you go through a red landscape
through ferrous plains
with the truth lodged in your subconscious
beside the bulbs of poisonous meadow saffron
you go into the distance
all the way to the ochre sea
on which they bob
quite happily
towards a sea full of crimson strawberries
the size of windows
into the distance to red-hot infinity

- Walking on Dunes (Fra, 2013)

Another important woman on the Czech literary scene is the author of stage and radio plays Lenka Lagronová (*1963). Her play Terezka won the Alfréd Radok Award for play of the year in 1997. This work reflects the personal transformation of the author, who took monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience that same year. Lenka Lagronová's dramas have been staged both in the Czech Republic and abroad.

The novelist and scriptwriter Petra Soukupová (*1982) has won a number of major literary awards. She received the 2008 Jiří Orten Prize for her novel K moři [To the Seaside]. In it she examines an inability to communicate that can afflict even the closest family circle. In terms of style and ideas, the book has been compared to Virginia Woolf's classic work To the Lighthouse. In 2010 she won the Magnesia Litera Book of the Year prize for the novel Zmizet [To Disappear]. Once again, this deals with the issue of family relations and the way in which momentary closeness quickly gives way to the habitual distance. Petra Soukupová has a wonderful talent for storytelling, through which she is able to make the reader reflect upon ostensibly undramatic events in life.

The writer, journalist and Hispanist Markéta Pilátová (*1973) has published in a variety of Czech media outlets and also writes song lyrics for the singer Monika Načeva. She earned success with her first very novel Žluté oči vedou domů [The Yellow Eyes Will Lead You Home] from 2007, which was nominated for a Magnesia Litera prize and the Josef Škvorecký Prize. The story is set in the world of Brazilian emigrants who start to loose their roots over time. Will they still find their way home? Markéta Pilátová's books have been published in German, Dutch, Polish, Spanish and Portuguese translations.

The daughter of the famous writer and dissident Eda Kriseová, Magdaléna Platzová (*1972), has also made a name for herself within modern Czech literature. She is primarily a playwright, author of children's books, and journalist. She has written for a number of important Czech media outlets and enjoyed great success with her stage plays Na útěku! [On the Run!] and Sayang. Her books have been published in English, Dutch and German.

Magdalena Wagnerová (*1960) is the author of novels, screenplays and many children's books. Among other things, she wrote the screenplay for the feature film Saturnin. Her novel Papíří [Paper] from 2005, about a librarian who would like to fulfil his dreams, is remarkable and at times almost Kafkaesque.

Sometimes he wondered whether the library books understood why he was unfaithful to them. By the same token, he contemplated whether his own books would abandon him if he lingered in the library until late. But the paper was lenient. The library books graciously tolerated their leader's weekends as long as he returned on Monday, while the books at home tolerated their ruler's working days as long as he returned before midnight. That was the unwritten agreement.

- Paper (Dybbuk, 2005)

Comic-book literature also has an important female representative in the shape of Lucie Lomová (*1964). She was the winner of the 2011 Muriel comic-book prizes for best original screenplay and best original Czech comic for the graphic novel Divoši [Savages] and also for the best original book Anna chce skočit [Anna Wants to Jump]. The novel Divoši was first published in France and immediately met with a very positive response. It is no exaggeration to say that this, "the most extensive colour comic-book project since Saudek's Muriel aims to become the most important Czech comic book abroad by employing a universal narrative technique without losing its quintessentially Czech poetic."

Petra Procházková (*1964) is a writer, journalist and humanitarian worker. She worked as a war correspondent. In 2000 she was presented with the Medal of Merit by President Václav Havel. In her writing she primarily captures the lives of people in faraway war-torn countries. She touches upon the painful life stories of wives, mothers and daughters who have lost their loved ones to war. Her book Frišta [Freshta] about one family in Kabul has been translated into English and Polish.

Iva Procházková (*1953), the daughter of the well-known writer Jan Procházka, writes books for adults as well as children's literature. Her books have been published in fifteen languages. She is also the recipient of many literary awards. Among other things, she is the author of the dystopian prose work Tanec trosečníků [Dance of Castaways], published in 2006. In it the world is engulfed by a terrifying pandemic. Will love at least survive?

Love certainly will survive - on the pages of books, in our relationship to them and perhaps also within us. There are many more female writers who have left their mark on modern Czech literature, but how many of them can we store in our memory? How many books can pass through our hands in the space of one short life? Whether written by women or men, they perform a valuable service for many of us by holding up a mirror to life. Perhaps it is appropriate to conclude this overview of women's writing with a quote from a man - a philosopher, who once said that "I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think."

Translated by Graeme Dibble

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Modern Czech Literature Written by Women

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The days when men dominated the literary limelight are long gone. Gone too are the days when to most people the idea of "literature written by women" meant opening the floodgates to a world of romantic and usually unrequited love.

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Visited the Globe Bookstore today and asked about Czech writers who "were not dead."

Note to self: work on phrasing.

The cashier said, "I think Kundera is still alive?" She added that that they only carry what sells and what sells is Kafka, Kundera and Havel. The search continues.

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As I'm driven to the home of Ivan Klima, one of the Czech Republic's most internationally respected writers, the hand of fate slips in beside me in the taxi. Heading into the remote, hilly outskirts of Prague 4, I fumble to show the driver my scrawled address, but he tells me I needn't bother: He used to live right next door to Klima. They were neighbors almost two decades ago.

Has he read any of Klima's books? The driver shakes his head; he was a taxi driver then too, a relatively privileged position. Reading his notorious neighbor, one of the founders of Communist-era Czechoslovakia's samizdat press, he could have lost his position in a flash.

Has he read any of Klima's books since the 1989 Velvet Revolution?

"No, too busy now," he says, in halting English, a touch embarrassed.

He shows sudden pride, though, as we turn onto a street that's a sort of countrified suburb a half-hour's drive outside downtown Prague. He points to the slate-gray, two-story, semi-detached house that his family once shared with the Klimas-Ivan, his wife and their daughter.

Klima smiles when I recount the story. Sitting in his study, lined with books along the walls and a foot-tall pile of manuscript pages from his latest novel on the floor-finished the day before-he recalls the family next door as decent, "law-abiding" citizens. With thin hair hanging over his head in a bowl cut and eyes bulging behind spectacles, he wears a loose sweater-the uniform of Czech intellectuals-and comes across as a mischievous, grandfatherly figure. While widely known in the West for his novels and for sharp essays (smuggled out of Czechoslovakia) on the absurdities of Communism, Klima now faces, in his own country, the backlash of revolution. Once he was one of the country's most widely read unpublished authors; today, as the comments of my cab driver would imply, he is among the country's least-read published authors. After an initial efflorescence in the nation's cultural life, the downward trajectory in popular appeal of Klima and other former dissident writers has been dramatic as the literary marketplace adjusts to the vagaries of public taste.

The early nineties in this country were heady times. The president was a playwright; the unofficial cultural ambassador he appointed was Frank Zappa; Lou Reed was hosted in the presidential palace. Actors and writers were elected to Parliament. There was a powerful cultural dimension to the Velvet Revolution that made it the toast of intellectuals, bohemians and romantics around the world. French students had scrawled "Imagination Takes Power" on the walls of Paris in 1968; the Czechs, it seemed, were putting that principle into action. The country seemed to be inhabiting that rare historic space in which ideas, and the men and women who had them, animated the public sphere.

Immediately after the revolution, Klima's books, unearthed after twenty years in the underground, were a sensation. My Merry Mornings, a 1985 collection of lighthearted stories for each day of the week, had a press run of 155,000-enormous in a country of 15 million people (that was before Czechoslovakia split in two in 1993). Love and Garbage sold 100,000 copies; My Golden Trades, 80,000.

Since then the country's cultural climate has not been kind to Klima, or to writers of his ilk. Today he's lucky to sell several thousand copies of just about anything-and that's limited almost exclusively to Prague, Brno and the university town of Ostrava. "Nearly everyone was forced to read real literature after the revolution," he tells me, "because there wasn't much else available. There were no trash novels, no Harlequins." Now, the Czech bestseller list looks much like the bestseller crop in any other country, topped by lifestyle, nonfiction scandals and translated editions of Ed McBain, Jackie Collins and Stephen King.

Klima explains one of the gross misperceptions of the sudden celebration, and equally sudden collapse, of formerly banned authors in the Czech literary marketplace. Like many other writers who were proscribed in the Communist era, Klima is not explicitly political in the traditional sense. "Young critics knew we were banned, but they had not seen our work," he comments. "They thought we were writing like Solzhenitsyn. They wanted big heroes."

With the possible exception of Milan Kundera (who has, according to the popular view here, forfeited his "Czechness" by writing in French, from Paris), none of the most well-known banned writers had imbued their writing with the slightest bit of heroic grandeur. Czech fictional narratives are characteristically episodic and highly personal. Klima's fiction is concerned with such themes as the obsessions of love, the power of self-delusion, the unraveling of faith, the tragicomic moments as people attempt, and fail, to be bigger than they are. "The interests of the suppressed writer," Klima says in the preface to his collection of essays, The Spirit of Prague (1998), "far from focusing exclusively on political questions, were similar to the interests of most authors anywhere in the world."

The very human nature of Klima's work is precisely what makes it accessible, if not always lofty. His writing does not belong on the highest rungs of literary masterworks but in the realm of the vivid storyteller, the prober into human foibles. The structures of his stories are not complex-as they are in the novels of Bohumil Hrabal, for example-nor are the characters grandiose in any way. It is his eye, however, for individuals' means of coping with the tragedies and absurdities of political and social conditions-rendered in the background, or even in passing-that made Klima dangerous to the Communists, and today makes his writing resonate with the dramatic changes in the country over the nearly ten years since the revolution.

Klima's latest novel translated into English, The Ultimate Intimacy (1997), reflects many of those changes, as seen through the eyes of a Protestant minister, Daniel Vedra. Forced to practice in a small, isolated town during Communism, after the revolution he returns to Prague. He suddenly finds himself famous-via televised sermons he delivers weekly, with growing numbers of congregants visiting his church-and rich, after he sells a family house obtained through restitution. We catch up with him as his newfound wealth and fame lead him into the arms of temptation, via a mysterious woman who starts showing up at his services. The novel traces Daniel's decline as the fabric of faith and family life he carefully constructed unravels under the pressures of an extramarital affair.

In the process, Klima captures the sense of disillusionment that has followed the heady days of the Velvet Revolution. The novel is laced with the excesses and self-absorption of nouveau capitalism-increasing consumerism, drugs, sexual promiscuity, dissipation of family life and of what were once tight friendships dating from a time when all you had to trust (and not even then, sometimes) were a few close friends upon whom you could rely for support. But Klima is no puritanical moralist: Many of his books revolve around illicit or problematic sexual relations, or the ethical quandaries faced by people in particularly gray situations, whether personal or political.

The disillusionment evoked by Klima is a reflection of the mood of the country. The economy is in crisis; unemployment is rising; corruption is rampant; politicians have sunk quickly into petty maneuvering, virtually paralyzing the Social Democratic government. The ideals of the revolution are barely discernible-in either the political or literary culture. Even President Havel's public support is dwindling, as his eloquence is used against him; he is accused-by rival politicians and by commentators in the nation's press-of being out of touch with economic realities.

In his first novel after the revolution, Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1994), Klima portrays a middle-aged television producer, Pavel, who before 1989 worked for the widely despised government TV-justifying his collaboration by telling himself that by going along, someday he'll be able to make one of his dream projects. He is lying to himself in his professional life, as he is in his love life. When the revolution hits, Pavel is lost-unable to determine what that dream project ever was or should be, and now his credibility is shattered in the newly democratic environment. It's not a smoothly written book; it's even clumsy at times. But the novel conveys the stories people tell themselvesto keep going in an insulting and humiliating system-a particularly vivid portrait in a country in which the ludicrous, anti-Austro-Hungarian pinpricks by "Soldier Schweik," the post-World War I creation of Jaroslav Hasek, have taken on iconographic status. Unlike in the case of Schweik, the system oppressing Pavel actually does disappear within the context of Waiting for the Dark; the characters' disorientation is evoked when the oppression to which they've devised personal, private responses is lifted.

Klima has no explaining to do himself when it comes to devising a response to absurdity and oppression. He spent three and a half years as a young boy in the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt; though Klima was baptized a Catholic, his mother was Jewish. Klima's experience in the camp would later inform his response to the brutalities of the Communism that was soon to come. "I came to realize that few things are harder to restore than lost honour, an impaired morality, and perhaps that was why I tried so hard to safeguard these things during the communist regime," he writes in "A Rather Unconventional Childhood," an essay in The Spirit of Prague. That collection includes autobiographical reflections and essays on life during and after Communism.

Klima was in the United States on a yearlong fellowship when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968. He returned to find his work banned as part of the Soviet-led "normalization," along with that of many other of the nation's leading writers. He subsequently was one of the founders of what would become a thriving network of illegal, underground literature and political commentary. The range of samizdat publications was vast; during my visit he rifles through a pile of yellowed mimeographed pages, as well as professionally bound books, containing works by Havel, Kundera, Hrabal, Josef Skvorecky-an archive of the country's then-thriving underground press.

"We got together and decided to hold readings each month to share each other's works," he recalls. Samizdat took advantage of a gap in the banning law, which allowed for typewritten manuscripts to be distributed among friends but not sold through official channels. Between 1973 and 1976, fifty titles were published in this informal fashion, loosely bound on typing paper. By the late seventies and early eighties, a parallel universe of underground publications had evolved, including magazines and books, and translations of American writers like Arthur Miller and Philip Roth (the most popular single title was George Orwell's 1984, which appeared in no fewer than twenty-four different samizdat editions). Klima was repeatedly harassed by the regime and had a permanent tail on his movements and a tap on his telephone, experiences rendered, often hilariously, in one way or another in virtually all of his pre-1989 works. He survived off foreign royalties; his books have been translated into numerous languages. He used his relative good fortune as the head of the Czech PEN club to assist other writers not so lucky, administering a special fund providing support to banned writers.

Repeatedly given the opportunity to emigrate, Klima refused. He explains this decision to a former lover in "Tuesday Morning," one of the autobiographical selections in My Merry Mornings,after she demands to know why he didn't follow her abroad:

Because here I have several friends whom I need just as they need me. And because people here speak the same language as I do. Because I'd like to go on being a writer, and to be a writer means also to stick up for people whose fate is not a matter of indifference to me.... All this I can do here, where I grew up, where I became part of whatever is happening and can therefore understand it.

The Velvet Revolution offered redemption for those, like Klima, who labored for years in the cultural wilderness. According to the National Library, more than 13,000 books were published in the Czech Republic in 1997, nearly triple the number of titles published in 1989. But that has not translated into a literary boom: In the mid-nineties publishers of serious fiction could expect to sell upward of 5,000 copies; today, they're happy to sell 2,000. Several of the nation's top-quality publishing houses-which flowered in the early years after the revolution-have either folded or adapted to the market with romance novels, nonfiction, self-help books or works in translation.

Of course, such an ineluctable process is not unique to the Czech Republic. The free market does not work in mysterious ways. But here, if nothing else, the country's steps off the literary pedestal have been particularly painful, given the high expectations of those who labored for years in the limited space of the cultural underground. The same goes for the country's dissident folk singers, who used to be able to rouse a packed hall, and now are lucky to be playing small clubs where they compete with the beer.

"After the revolution," Klima says, "many of my friends dreamed of starting a good publishing business. Writers, theater people-they wanted to publish all of us from the samizdat, they wanted to show Beckett, Ionesco. But the big theaters found it difficult to survive showing Beckett and Ionesco, and most publishers of good books are now very poor creatures. Dreams are dreams, and reality is reality, and reality that demands money has a quite difficult time facing the dreams."

Today, ironically, those writers who sustained the country's cultural lifeblood in the underground face an audience not dramatically different or expanded from the days when their works could be obtained only on the sly. "Most of this society collaborated with the regime from the first moment [in 1948]," Klima comments. "Later, samizdat did not represent them. Samizdat was for a small number of people, a few thousand at most, who opposed the regime and lived according to their own beliefs. And it's no different now in terms of who reads the [quality] literature."

In a remarkably prescient colloquy between Klima and Philip Roth, published in the New York Review of Books six months after the revolution, Roth cautioned Klima of the coming pressures of the marketplace, and how writers would "come to mean far less to readers here than you did when you were fighting to keep alive for them a language other than the language of the official newspapers...and books." Klima recalls being confused by Roth's admonition at the time. Now, he says simply, "Roth was right."

But Klima does not seem particularly perturbed by this development; in fact, he conveys a certain fatalistic optimism. "My dream was to get my books published," he says with a wry smile.

"I argue with those who complain about how writers are less important today. Because now, you know how to write or you don't know how to write.... For some people, it has been difficult to accept. They are less famous, less heroic than they were before. On the other hand, you might have been famous for your bravery, but not for your mastery."

He refers to the statement he made to Roth a decade ago, which he still holds to today: "I believe that, for the time being at least, the fall of the totalitarian system will not turn literature into an occasional subject with which to ward off boredom at parties."

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As I'm driven to the home of Ivan Klima, one of the Czech Republic's most internationally respected writers, the hand of fate slips in beside me in the taxi. Heading into the remote, hilly outskirts of Prague 4, I fumble to show the driver my scrawled address, but he tells me I needn't bother: He used to live right next door to Klima.

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Czech dissident publications on display in New York help shed new light on a dark, courageous chapter of modern history

From the journal SadoMaso, 1984, a pun on S&M and the Czech word for meat (maso) | foto: © SadoMaso, Česká pozice

Since the death of Václav Havel on Sunday, Czech television has been filled with scenes from the '60s through the '80s documenting the dissident movement the former president and playwright played such a prominent role in. At the Czech Center in New York City, a spotlight is shining on that same era of history in the exhibition Samizdat: The Czech Art of Resistance, 1968-1989.

Though the term " samizdat " refers to self-publishing it has nothing in common with the way that term is understood in free, democratic countries. Nor is samizdat an equivalent to Western ideas of underground publishing. During communism, dissidents in the Soviet Bloc had to rely on their own information distribution system, publishing censored books, journals and documents on their own and then passing out handmade copies.

The samizdat exhibition is presenting 120 of these rarely seen works as well as footage of underground concerts and bootleg recordings of banned Czech music. While many people have read about samizdat publications of famous novels and poems, the exhibition's Czech-born Canadian curator, Daniela Sneppova, insists that seeing the actual work is an entirely different experience.

"On my first trip back to Czechoslovakia in 1990, I bought the journals and Revolver Revue, and found out that they had been samizdat before '89. This made me very curious because my understanding as a naive North American was that nothing was available. Once I started doing the research though my brain was blown wide open," Sneppova told Czech Position.

It was not only the quality and extent of the work that surprised Sneppova but the breadth of the material and variety of producers. "It wasn't just [famous] Czech intellectuals like Ivan Klíma and Ludvík Vaculík. It was people working in sociology and economics. Anything that comes to mind was being produced through unofficial channels. There's no stereotypical writer or producer of samizdat."

Risk factor

The daughter of a writer who emigrated from Czechoslovakia in '68, Sneppova had heard stories of how many people were producing samizdat pamphlets and other material and knew of the consequences if they were caught. "It became fascinating to me to think who was doing it because it came at great personal risk," she said.

At a symposium held in New York that accompanied the exhibition's opening Czech writer, Jáchym Topol, who debuted as a samizdat writer, spoke about the chief element of publishing samizdat work as living in fear while doing it. For Sneppova it raised the question of why some participated in it and others didn't as well as the schizophrenia of living a truly secret, underground life.

"I can't imagine having to have lived those two lives - the official life where you spout this doctrine and then your other life where you say or write what you really think."

Besides the samizdat works themselves, the exhibition makes use of surveillance photos from the secret police (StB) archives of people included or mentioned in the show. There are also objects and décor from the period, such as a reel-to-reel tape recorder used by The Plastic People of the Universe and typewriters on which the manuscripts were written and copied. Sneppova says that these objects were ways to help bring these alien experiences closer to New York audiences who have no equivalent experience of censorship and oppression.

Object ingenuity

When you read about samizdat literature you assume that like ordinary literature most of its creativity is confined to the text itself. Seeing the books on display though quickly dispels this illusion, for the authors of samizdat had to marshal their creativity for an altogether different audience than your typical writer; they had to escape the detection of the secret police.

One of the most interesting books in the exhibition is a 1979 copy of Egon Bondy's Notes on the History of Philosophy in which the manuscript pages were photographed individually and then placed in a generic folder of photographic paper. Then there were the works referred to as "tamizdat" because the books were published in Germany (tam means "there" in Czech and Russian) and then smuggled back into the country. The show has tamizdat Bondy work - a palm-sized fold-out book in which a magnifying glass was placed in the book's spine to better read the small type.

There is a 1979 edition of Sigmund Freud's Freud on Literature where the cover is made from wood-grain wallpaper as a kind of camouflage. Other books were made from insulation, office materials such as binders and calendars.

Some of the books and art works inside are simply stunning art that goes beyond the political definitions given to samizdat, particularly in the West. "A lot of the work wasn't political in content, but the act of making it became political," Sneppova said.

Due to the limited circles these books and music circulated in during communism many of it still hasn't been widely seen and heard even in the Czech Republic. Sneppova says that there remains a lot more to be seen and discovered in shedding light on the legacy of samizdat, a legacy which is in the past for its Czech practitioners but in discussions at the symposium on less fortunate compatriots, is still very much a relevant concern today in much of the world.

Samizdat: The Czech Art of Resistance, 1968-1989
Czech Center New York
Through Jan. 12, 2012

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Notes from underground: a look back at Czech samizdat | Téma | Lidovky.cz

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Czech dissident publications on display in New York help shed new light on a dark, courageous chapter of modern history From the journal SadoMaso, 1984, a pun on S&M and the Czech word for meat (maso) | foto: © SadoMaso, Česká pozice Since the death of Václav Havel on Sunday, Czech television has been filled with scenes from the '60s through the '80s documenting the dissident movement the former president and playwright played such a prominent role in.

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Writer whose works have appeared in The Guardian, The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares Blog, Little Star, and elsewhere.

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In 1959, a week before his debut short story collection was slated to be published, the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal was informed that the entire print run was bound instead for the pulping mill. Just a few years prior, under intense pressure from the USSR, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had ousted and executed its own general secretary, Rudolph Slánský, after he confessed to paranoiac charges of aiding a Western capitalist conspiracy in a speech spoon-fed to him by interrogators. The heady melody of revolution that would crescendo in 1968 with the Prague Spring was still no more than a faint whisper, and artists were expected to hew strictly to socialist realism, a style that espoused formal conservatism and didactic content of a kind often derided as "boy meets tractor" tales. Those pushing against these state-prescribed aesthetics did so at immense risk to their careers, their livelihoods, and the well-being of themselves and their families. A little over a decade later, censors once more dashed Hrabal's dreams for publication in dramatic fashion, this time twice over in one year: distribution of Home Work was blocked, and all copies of Buds were ordered to be set ablaze.

In light of his biography, it's difficult not to see something deeply personal in Hrabal's later Too Loud a Solitude,which appeared in a samizdat - underground self-publishing - version in 1976 but wasn't given an official print run until the collapse of communist rule in Czechoslovakia in 1989. Too Loud a Solitude centers around a protagonist who makes his living crushing books at a waste paper mill, indiscriminately shoveling volumes of Kant and crumpled-up newsprint into the belly of the compactor. Yet Hrabal's novel was not only a reaction to his own experience of censorship; it also spoke to a thematic concern shared by many Czech authors of his generation. Writing at a time when the expectation that public speech should toe the Party line had resulted in the uncoupling of speech and thought - and when the disjuncture between government proclamation and lived reality was readily visible but politically dangerous to voice - these writers frequently explored the theme of language's decay and collapse. With the current global rise of the far right, when phrases like "post-truth" and "fake news" are uttered by pundits and plutocrats alike without so much as the bat of an eyelash, the literary investigations of writers from the Eastern Bloc can take on an eerie second life, like Cassandra's prophecies recollected as Troy burns.

Too Loud a Solitude is a paean to the many-splendored beauties of the written word: Han'ta, the paper-compacting narrator, is paradoxically an avowed admirer of the texts he is charged with destroying, tenderly arranging them in bales and occasionally fishing out something to be saved. Strains of Han'ta's salvaged readings thread themselves through the novel, giving texture and rhythm to his often breathlessly long sentences. Yet the novel also revels in its descriptions of books' physical breakdown: in the basement room where Han'ta works, volumes of Goethe and Lao Tzu rub shoulders with discarded playbills and blood-soaked butcher shop wrappers, and "the wastepaper, piled to the ceiling, wet and moldy, ferments in a way that makes manure seem sweet, a swamp decomposing in the depths of my cellar, with bubbles rising to the surface like will-o'-the-wisps from a stump rotting in the mire." Here, Hrabal captures the moral repugnance of the state's suppression of ideas via a scene that is viscerally repulsive, twinning the literal rot of pages bound for the compactor with the spiritual rot of the government power that consigned them to such a fate. The metaphor continues elsewhere in the novel when Han'ta introduces readers to the Czech underground in quite a literal sense: writers, philosophers, and professors who have run afoul of Party orthodoxy and been forced to do drudgework in the reeking municipal sewers.

Other works of Hrabal's take aim at official speech directly. In 1965's Closely Watched Trains (also translated as Closely Observed Trains), a story of Czech railway workers who variously collaborate with and fight against the German occupation during WWII, the seditious stationmaster appropriates bureaucratic rubber stamps for use in sexual games, undermining the governmental gravitas the stamps' words embody and suggesting the moral poverty of the authority with which they are invested. But Hrabal was hardly alone in observing the decay of meaning under totalitarian rule; dogged by state suppression, many of Hrabal's contemporaries likewise addressed the theme of language's breakdown in their work. The Memorandum (1965) - whose author, Václav Havel, would go from jailed playwright to prime minister after the fall of communist rule - concerns a business's attempt to create an emotionless and unambiguous language, as well as the bureaucratic violence that ensues when workers object to such a project. In their quest for linguistic control, the firm's leadership succeeds only in rendering meaningful communication impossible. A rule mandating that all words be as dissimilar as possible to avoid confusion results in a language composed of consonant-encrusted nonsense words that can reach hundreds of letters in length - and an office full of workers completely unable to wrap their heads around it. The name for Havel's invented language, Ptydepe, has since become a Czech byword for incomprehensible officialese.

Dogged by state suppression, many of Hrabal's contemporaries addressed the theme of language's breakdown in their work.

One writer who took a less allegorical route in his institutional critique is Milan Kundera; the plot of his debut novel The Joke (1967) is set in motion when university officials refuse to interpret a student's sarcastically pro-Trotsky postcard any way but literally, upending the young man's life in the process. The apparatchiks who summon the student in question, Ludvik, for an explanation of his actions refuse to believe that what he wrote did not express his true feelings: "Whether you wrote it quickly or slowly, in your lap or at a desk, you could only have written what was inside you. That and nothing else," they insist. The officials' condemnation of Ludvik - and his real-life equivalents - relies on a contradiction: the assertion of two-facedness when confronted with protestations of innocence on the part of the accused, but also the firm denial that subversive content could be anything other than sincere. The university functionaries who ultimately expel Ludvik reduce speech to its flattest, most rudimentary form, presenting a hollowed-out version of language without nuance, without subtext - without substance at all.

The circumscription and breakdown of language as exemplified by official euphemism and state language policing, these works suggest, is corrosive to the public - but not because, as Orwell argued in "Politics on the English Language" (1946), it effectively prevents citizens from accurately perceiving the world around them. Everyone can see, for instance, that Ptydepe is a failure and that the policies attendant upon it are a snare of contradictions. The gap between reality and verbal depiction is readily apparent - but the inability to describe this, the need to constantly keep up public pretense, and the sight of everyone around you doing the same, is both exhausting and intellectually humiliating. Language control, then, works not because it successfully binds people together in one unifying belief, but because it atomizes, preventing the trust in honest communication that is necessary to building collective action.

I first read Too Loud a Solitude in December of 2016, on the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. It was that eerie uncertain twilight between Trump's election and his confirmation, and in the time since it has frequently struck me that the themes treated by Hrabal and his contemporaries have found belated resonance in the current political moment. Recent reports that the Department of Health and Human Services is considering redefining gender as a binary and unchangeable concept determined solely by one's genitals and genome - a move that would strip over a million trans Americans of legal recognition - are indicative of just the kind of top-down manipulation of language that Havel took aim at in Memorandum. So too is the fact that Department of Agriculture officials have warned staff members not to use the term "climate change"; such an attempt to find-replace global warming out of existence takes on new and despair-inducing urgency in light of the bombshell report unveiled by the IPCC last October. And in a climate where brazen falsities may be presented by poker-faced officials and their supporters as "alternative facts," it is sometimes difficult not to feel that language itself is rotting just like the mouldering paper in the lightless cellar of Too Loud a Solitude.

Yet if Czechoslovakia's dissident writers often offered grim predictions about the ease with which language could be appropriated and corroded by those in power, their work also embodied a mode of resistance to that very phenomenon. At one point in Too Loud a Solitude, Han'ta sympathetically describes the social structure of Roma who "light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads' fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of rough-hewn wood like a child's laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire...warming the wanderer's eye and soul." Han'ta's description of a free society coextensive but distinct from the mainstream echoes dissident thinker Václav Benda's calls for the creation of a "parallel polis," a system of independent social institutions built by and meant to sustain the underground. At a time when the idea of a parallel polis is coming back into vogue among those seeking to actively resist the rise of the far right, dissident writers like Hrabal and his ilk can help point the way forward for how language and literature can be reclaimed as weapons.

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Czech Dissident Writers Can Teach Us How to Protect Language from Lies - Electric Literature

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In 1959, a week before his debut short story collection was slated to be published, the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal was informed that the entire print run was bound instead for the pulping mill. Just a few years prior, under intense pressure from the USSR, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had ousted and executed its ...

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Michal Ajvaz
Petra Hulova
Michal Viewegh
Patrik Ourednik

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Grusa
Havel
Hrabal
Kohout
Kundera
Klima
Lustig
Seifert
Skvorecky
Topol
Vaculik
Peter Weiss is Czech-born....