The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain 9780674292949, 9780674292956, 9780674983373

Citation preview

THE

NONCONFORMISTS

THE NONCONFORMISTS AMERICAN AND CZECH WRITERS ACROSS THE IRON CURTAIN Brian K. Goodman

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND

2023

Copyright © 2023 by Brian K. Goodman All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Cover images: © Ewa Klos / Opale (top left); Zoltan Bozsik / EyeEm (top right); Sovfoto/UIG (bottom center); CSU Archives / Everett Collection (bottom left); Saroch Jindrich (center) Cover design by Lisa Roberts 9780674292949 (EPUB) 9780674292956 (PDF) Publication of this book has been supported through the generous provisions of the Maurice and Lula Bradley Smith Memorial Fund. the library of congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Goodman, Brian K., 1984– author. Title: The nonconformists : American and Czech writers across the Iron Curtain / Brian K. Goodman. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022035477 | ISBN 9780674983373 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Dissenters, Artistic—United States—History—20th century. | Dissenters, Artistic—Czechoslovakia—History—20th century. | Dissenters, Artistic—Czech Republic—Prague—History—20th century. | Authors, American—History—20th century. | Authors, Czech—History—20th century. | Cold War—Influence. | United States— Relations—Czechoslovakia. | Czechoslovakia—Relations—United States. | Czechoslovakia—Intellectual life—1945–1992. | United States— Intellectual life—20th century. Classification: LCC PG5002.5.A4 N66 2023 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035477

For my parents

CO N T E N TS

PROLOGUE Ginsberg’s File 1

INTRODUCTION A Novel Fusion 5

CH APT E R 1

THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED Franz Kafka between Prague and New York 27

CH APT E R 2

BEHIND THE GOLD CURTAIN F. O. Matthiessen on the Czechoslovak Road to Socialism 64

CH APT E R 3

THE COWARDS’ GUIDE TO WORLD LITERATURE Josef Škvorecký’s American Epigraphs 105

CONTENTS CH APT E R 4

THE KINGDOM OF MAY Allen Ginsberg through Springtime Prague 141

CH APT E R 5

THE TOURIST Philip Roth and the Writers from the Other Europe 180

CH APT E R 6

ACROSS THE GRAY ZONE American Writers and the Czech Jazz Section 212

EPILOGUE Everything Goes 249

Abbreviations 269

Notes 271

Acknowledgments 337

Index 341

viii

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NONCONFORMISTS

PRO LO GU E

G I N SBERG ’ S F IL E

I emerged from Prague’s retro-futurist Metro, looked at my wristwatch, and realized I was already late for my appointment with a man named Karel Srp. The year was 2004, fifteen years since the Velvet Revolution, and I’d traveled from California to the Czech Republic to follow the trail of the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. I wanted to better understand why Ginsberg had been expelled from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic nearly forty years earlier, three years before the start of the Prague Spring. Ginsberg had arrived unannounced in the winter of 1965, freshly deported from Castro’s Cuba. He ended up staying behind the Iron Curtain for more than two months, spending much of his time in Prague. By springtime, Ginsberg had become a celebrity among the city’s student underground. On May 1, the American poet was elected as the ceremonial King of May (Král majáles) at a massive student festival that had been banned for much of the communist era. Over the next week, Ginsberg was followed by the secret police, assaulted on the street by an undercover agent, brought in for interrogation, and deported from Czechoslovakia. On the outbound plane, he wrote some of his most powerful spontaneous verses in years: “And I am the King of May, that I may be expelled from my Kingdom with 1

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Honor, as of old, / To shew the difference between Caesar’s Kingdom and the Kingdom of the May of Man.”1 Srp had asked me to meet him outside the Malostranská Metro stop at the foot of Prague Castle. He was waiting there when I arrived, an ageless and ebullient character dressed in black. All I knew about Srp at the time was that he had been briefly imprisoned in the late 1980s as the leader of an illegal countercultural organization known as the Jazz Section, which had dared to publish Ginsberg’s poetry during the repressive period known, euphemistically, as “normalization.” I followed Srp through the cobbled streets of Prague’s Little Quarter until we arrived at an inconspicuous building tucked in the corner of a gated garden. Srp’s cellar-like office was musty but charming—its bookshelves crowded with the familiar titles of American novels, walls covered in old jazz posters. The album Ray Charles in Person was quietly playing on a turntable in the corner. After I explained to Srp why I had come, he smiled like the Cheshire Cat and walked over to a filing cabinet next to the turntable. He rifled through some folders, pulled out a packet of documents, and handed it to me. The cover featured an enlarged black-and-white photograph of a procession making its way through Prague’s Old Town Square. A festive motorcade is being led through a crowd by a young man—about my age at the time—his face framed by a white scarf and bowler hat. Above him a banner proclaims: GINSBERG KRÁLEM MAJÁLES VÝRAZ PROLETÁŘSKÉHO INTERNATIONALISMU! (Ginsberg for King of May, as an expression of proletarian internationalism!). Inside the packet I discovered more photos from Ginsberg’s visit to Prague, alongside photocopies of officiallooking documents stamped with the word “TAJNÉ.” As Srp explained, these “secret” documents were from Ginsberg’s file with the notorious Státní bezpečnost, the communist-era security services, better known as the StB. These documents would ultimately lead me to write this book. But first I had to make sense of Ginsberg’s file and find a way to situate this cultural artifact in a much wider history of literary dissent across the Iron Curtain. When I began my research, the record of Ginsberg’s visit to Prague was largely absent from American literary histories of the Cold War era. Perhaps his spontaneous poem “Kral Majales,” with its alternating lines attacking both capitalist and communist forms of unfreedom—and Ginsberg’s utopian vision of springtime Bohemia as a third alternative—just didn’t fit within the dominant, binary accounts of 2

P rologue

FIGURE P.1.  Banner reading “Ginsberg for King of May, as an expression of proletarian

internationalism!” during Majáles on May 1, 1965. Courtesy of Miroslav Khol.

3

THE NONCONFORMISTS

the Cold War era’s literary politics. Or perhaps it was a lingering post–Cold War romanticism that still obscured the larger, transnational history of literary dissent that lay behind Ginsberg’s poem. Was this history still encoded in Ginsberg’s file? Looking back at the Czech-language reception of Beat literature during the uneven cultural thaw of the late fifties and sixties, the Czech playwright-turned-dissident Václav Havel referred to “those who knew the literature and, by fostering it, created through this common knowledge a brotherhood, a community of nonconformists.” According to Havel, who first met Ginsberg during his 1965 visit, this underground community turned to Beat writing “as a potential instrument for resistance to the totalitarian system that had been imposed upon our existence.”2 By the time I first arrived in Prague, this seductive narrative of Western countercultural influence behind the Iron Curtain had become a key ingredient of Cold War triumphalism in the United States. Even Ginsberg embraced this narrative. After reading an interview between Havel and the musician Lou Reed in 1990, Ginsberg himself suggested that the Czech reception of American counterculture—from the Beats to the Velvet Underground— had created the conditions for the rise of the Plastic People of the Universe, the Charter 77 human rights movement, and the peaceful “cultural revolution” of 1989, which culminated in Havel’s election as president: “All this in a straight line, from rock and roll to closing the offices of the secret police.”3 But as I began writing this book, I quickly discovered that the line connecting the Beats and other American writers to Prague’s “dissident” underground and the Velvet Revolution was hardly straight—and it didn’t run in just one direction.

4

IN TRO DU C TION A N OV E L FU SI O N

At the height of the Prague Spring, Václav Havel was in New York. The thirty-two-year-old Czech playwright arrived in April 1968 to attend the premiere of his absurdist play Vyrozumění, translated into English as The Memorandum, at Joseph Papp’s new Public Theater on Lafayette Street.1 First produced at Prague’s avant-garde Theater on the Balustrade in 1965, The Memorandum is a Kafkaesque workplace satire about the introduction of an artificially precise bureaucratic language called Ptydepe that is so difficult that even the office managers can only pretend to understand it. Their solution is to replace Ptydepe with another, similarly impossible language. In a letter to Papp, Havel described how his original audience in Czechoslovakia had discovered in the play “a metaphor of different events, problems, and attitudes from our recent national history.” But now that The Memorandum was about to be produced in the United States, and Havel’s government was finally allowing him to travel to New York, he thought it was important that his play not be understood only as a satire of communist bureaucracy. “It would be good,” he wrote to Papp, “if some wider and deeper analogy of the social problems in your country could be found.”2 By the time he arrived in New York in the spring of 1968, 5

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however, Havel’s message would be overshadowed by news of Czechoslovakia’s ongoing political transformation. Just a few months earlier, in January 1968, the reform-minded politician Alexander Dubček had replaced the hard-liner Antonín Novotný as leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, inaugurating a period of unprecedented liberalization in a communist bloc state. This popular project would soon be memorialized by the slogan “socialism with a human face.” By the end of March, state censorship of the media had effectively ceased.3 On April 4, Havel published an explosive essay called “On the Theme of an Opposition” in Literární listy, the Writers’ Union’s reconstituted weekly, which had become a vital forum for public discussion of formerly taboo subjects in recent Czechoslovak history and politics.4 Despite his own participation in these debates, Havel remained ambivalent about the vanguard role that writers were playing in the Prague Spring movement. “I don’t believe that a society of artists should try to partake of state power,” Havel told the reformist intellectual Antonín J. Liehm in an interview.5 Instead, Havel tried to turn his attention back to the theater. His latest play, “The Increased Difficulty of Concentration” (Ztížená možnost soustředění ), premiered at the Theater on the Balustrade on April 11. Then, just as Dubček’s reformist Action Program was finally being implemented in Czechoslovakia, Havel left for the United States.6 The Memorandum premiered at the Public Theater on April 23. Given the timing, it was all but inevitable that the Prague Spring would color the American reception of Havel’s play. When the New York Times interviewed Havel on May 5, the questions focused almost entirely on political issues, particularly Havel’s attempts to liberalize the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union. Finally asked about The Memorandum, Havel tried to explain that he was actually addressing a much broader theme in his play: “These languages stand for all the political and ideological systems made to serve man, but which end by mastering him.”7 In a review that appeared in the Times a day later, the critic Clive Barnes noted that although The Memorandum was “bound to appear anti-Communistic” to an American audience, he actually saw it as further evidence of “the Eastern bloc’s ideological thaw.” As Barnes pointed out, Havel’s plays had been staged in Czechoslovakia for years, and now the playwright was able to travel to the New York premiere “without let or hindrance.” But Barnes also reminded 6

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FIGURE I.1.  Václav Havel in Central Park, New York City, in April 1968. © Jan Lukas.

his American readers, “We must not forget that ‘The Memorandum’ has a message for us as well as for Eastern Europe.”8 As Havel discovered during his six-week visit, the United States had entered its own season of dissent in the spring of 1968. Just a few weeks before Havel’s arrival, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis. At the end of April, Havel attended a mass protest against the Vietnam War in Central Park, where the recently widowed Coretta Scott King was a speaker. Papp also arranged for Havel to meet with striking students at Columbia who would soon occupy the university’s administration buildings. On Broadway, Havel attended a revival of Arthur Miller’s controversial 1947 play, All My Sons, and a performance of the hit musical Hair, which had premiered at the Public Theater a year earlier (and would later be made into a film by Havel’s friend Miloš Forman, the Czech filmmaker). When Havel finally returned to Czechoslovakia in May, he brought back a few souvenirs: an “Elect Bobby Kennedy” button, a small collection of psychedelic posters, and prized albums by the Bee Gees and the Velvet Underground.9 Havel’s trip to New York, enabled by the Prague Spring reforms, seemed to confirm a new era in the cultural relationship between the United States and Czechoslovakia. Even if the broader message of Havel’s 7

THE NONCONFORMISTS

play was partly obscured by the exciting news from Prague, the American premiere of The Memorandum was yet another departure from the frozen cultural politics of the early Cold War years. Just as the Prague Spring held out the tantalizing possibility of a “third way” beyond communist dictatorship and capitalist democracy, the most innovative works of Czechoslovak literature, film, and art from the sixties represented an attractive alternative to the stale aesthetic formulas of both socialist realism and liberal modernism. Emerging from a long but uneven period of cultural thaw, Havel’s absurdist plays—along with the celebrated films of the Czechoslovak New Wave—were paving the way for other cultural exports from across the communist world that challenged any easy EastWest dichotomy. For Czech writers like Havel, the future looked bright in the spring of 1968. By the end of the summer, Havel learned that The Memorandum had won the Obie Award for Best Foreign Play. But his celebration was shortlived. Over the night of August 20–21, a Soviet-led army composed of more than 250,000 troops and 2,000 tanks from neighboring Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia, putting an emphatic end to the Prague Spring. In the immediate wake of the invasion, thousands of Czechoslovak citizens took to the streets, drawing on a wide repertoire of creative resistance strategies, some of which they had first encountered in state media coverage of Western protest actions—from the nonviolent tactics of the African American civil rights movement to the street theater of the May 1968 demonstrations in Paris.10 “It sounded a bit different from how it had sounded in Central Park,” Havel later reflected, “though it had essentially the same ethos: the longing for a free and colorful and poetic world without violence.”11 When the invasion began, Havel was again away from Prague, this time visiting friends in the northern Bohemian border town of Liberec. After Soviet tanks rolled into the town square, Havel reported to a nearby radio station to help organize a local resistance. In one of his first broadcasts from Liberec, Havel also called on prominent writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain—including Günter Grass, Kingsley Amis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko—to speak out against the Soviet-led invasion. But statements of support from writers abroad could only go so far. Within a decade of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, Havel would be sentenced to prison for “subversion” 8

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against the state, and the promising young playwright from Prague would become one of the world’s most famous “dissidents.” But this was not the end of the story, just as the Prague Spring was not the beginning. By the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Havel and other persecuted Czech writers would help redefine the meaning of free expression, dissent, and human rights in the United States and elsewhere. Prague would also continue to produce some of the most interesting and provocative art of the entire Cold War era. But was Havel’s message from spring 1968 ever received? What “wider and deeper analogy” did he hope an American audience would discover in his writing? As Havel knew firsthand, whenever the words of a nonconformist writer crossed the Iron Curtain, there was a risk of political metamorphosis.12 Conditions of Freedom

One of the American writers who responded to Václav Havel’s message from Liberec was the playwright Arthur Miller. A year after the crushing of the Prague Spring, Miller traveled to the “birthplace of Kafka” to survey the cultural wreckage of the Soviet-led invasion alongside a group of the city’s shell-shocked writers, including Havel.13 A decade later, Miller would also play a critical role in bringing increased international attention to Havel’s imprisonment. Miller’s extended engagement with Havel reflected a growing cultural investment in the fate of Prague’s nonconformist writers in the United States during the final decades of the Cold War era. Like Havel, Miller had his own brushes with state persecution as a young playwright. In 1954, he had been denied permission by the US government to travel abroad for the premiere of The Crucible in Brussels; then, two years later, he was called in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee when he tried to reinstate his passport. Famously, Miller refused to name names, invoking the First rather than the Fifth Amendment. Although he was convicted for contempt of Congress, the decision was later overturned by the Supreme Court. By the end of the sixties, Miller had become one of the most famous playwrights in the world, serving out the final year of his term as the president of PEN International, an organization he helped reinvigorate as the world’s leading advocate for imprisoned writers.14 9

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It was in this semiofficial capacity that Miller first visited Prague in 1969. In the eyes of Soviet ideologues, Miller still qualified as a “progressive writer,” and his plays had been produced across the Eastern bloc for years. Indeed, while he was in Prague, a Czech-language production of The Crucible was being staged at Czechoslovakia’s National Theater, under the title “Ordeal by Fire” (Zkouška ohněm), a darkly ironic echo of Jan Palach’s recent self-immolation in protest of the Soviet occupation.15 As Miller would later recall in his memoir, “the enormity of it all was naked in Prague, and probably more immediate because we were moving around the city with anxious playwrights, with Václav Havel and Pavel Kohout, the first not yet in prison.”16 In the late 1970s, at the height of the neo-Stalinist period known as “normalization,” Havel went on to play a lead role in the formation of Charter 77, a movement that used the language of human rights to hold Czechoslovakia’s new regime to account, and the related Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted, known by the acronym VONS.17 In October 1978, Havel completed his most influential essay, “The Power of the Powerless” (Moc bezmocných), which at first only circulated in underground samizdat form. Within a year, he was arrested and sentenced to nearly five years in prison. The first English-language excerpts from “The Power of the Powerless” didn’t appear until 1983, when they were published in a new US-based journal called Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture, during a period of renewed Western interest in Eastern bloc dissidence.18 The essay helped draw much-needed attention to Havel’s worsening condition in prison. That winter, Havel was transferred from his cell at Plzeň-Bory, a nineteenth-century panopticon in Western Bohemia, to the hospital wing of the notorious Pankrác Prison in Prague. Suffering from pneumonia and other ailments, Havel was finally released on February 7, 1983. The same year, Miller published a monologue dedicated to Havel in Cross Currents, alongside the first excerpts from “The Power of the Powerless.”19 Miller’s “expression of solidarity” begins with an unnamed Western writer sorting through a pile of mail, throwing all but two letters into a trash bin. Most of the letters are appeals from various progressive causes and organizations: “Ban the Bomb,” “Save the Children,” “Save the Rain Forests,” “Fight the Ku Klux Klan,” “Amnesty International,” the list goes on. “The mind simply cannot take all of this seriously,” the writer mutters. 10

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“Things just can’t be this bad.” A second figure in “rumpledgray” clothing, identified only as “THE IMPRISONED ONE,” is sitting nearby but never speaks. After sorting his mail, the Western writer addresses his “imprisoned counterpart,” asking why his situation seems more urgent than all the other causes competing for his attention. “Maybe it’s the immense investment so many of us have made in Socialism,” the writer reflects. “And maybe, too, because your prison is probably further West than Vienna.” Near the end of his monologue, the unnamed Western writer concludes, “In some indescribable way we are each other’s continuation.”20 Just as Havel had been searching for analogies during his trip to New York, Miller was trying to understand the experiences of Prague’s writers in terms of his own disillusionment with Soviet-style communism. Like Miller, many Czech writers and intellectuals of Havel’s generation (if not Havel himself, who never joined the Communist Party) had looked to the Soviet Union after the Second World War as the world’s leading model of “socialism,” only to be tragically disappointed by the Stalinist repression of the fifties. “I knew all about that,” Miller recalls in his memoir, “and it was part of the same surreal pastiche for me as it was for them, and I was glad of it.”21 Miller was “perversely thankful” for his own disillusionment because it helped him see that, despite living and working on different sides of the Iron Curtain, he and Havel were a part of the same unfolding story. This larger story—about the surprising continuities between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War—is the subject of this book. Miller was hardly the only US writer or intellectual who felt a deep connection to the fate of Czech literature and culture under communism. From the end of the Second World War to the Velvet Revolution, a wide range of prominent American literary figures traveled to Prague, including F. O. Matthiessen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, William and Rose Styron, Philip Roth, Edward Albee, John Updike, and Kurt Vonnegut. Although each had their own reasons for undertaking these journeys behind the Iron Curtain, Miller’s fascination with Havel can help us begin to understand why so many US writers were drawn to Prague during the Cold War era. Miller’s realization that his own freedom somehow depended on the fate of an imprisoned Czech playwright began as a lesson in cultural geography. Looking back on his 1969 visit, Miller later admitted, “It had not dawned on me until then that Prague was not ‘East,’ but a European 11

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city west of Vienna.”22 This was more than just a piece of geographic trivia: the idea that Czechoslovakia, located at the heart of a divided European continent, had been consigned to a political fiction called “Eastern Europe” took on a great deal of cultural significance in the final decade of the Cold War, especially after the publication of Milan Kundera’s essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” in the New York Review of Books in 1984. In his landmark essay, the exiled Czech writer reminded American readers that the Prague Spring and its devastating cultural aftermath were also “a drama of the West—a West that, kidnapped, displaced, brainwashed, nevertheless insists on defending its identity.”23 In placing Prague at the heart of an idealized “Central Europe,” Kundera was revising a much older image of the Kingdom of Bohemia as a bridge between East and West. “Bohemia” (or Böhmen in German) is the name that outsiders have given to the region of Čechy, the westernmost of the historic Czech-speaking lands (which also include Moravia, Kundera’s native region, and parts of Silesia). The etymological root of Praha, the Czech name for Bohemia’s capital, is thought to be práh, which means “threshold.” This liminal position made Bohemia particularly vulnerable to occupation by its great-power neighbors, from the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the “totalitarian” dictatorships of the Third Reich and Soviet Union. But Prague’s unenviable geographic position also turned the city into an important cultural crossroads. In the fourteenth century, Charles IV established Prague Castle as seat of the Holy Roman Empire, and the capital of Bohemia became one of the great cultural centers of Europe.24 But Bohemia was never just a place on a map. Ever since Shakespeare’s reference to “Bohemia” in A Winter’s Tale as a “desert country near the sea,” the word has also referred to a utopian geography of the imagination.25 By the early twentieth century, the cultural idea—and, later, journalistic stereotype—of Bohemia as a sexually liberated enclave of political and artistic nonconformists had migrated westward, via nineteenth-century Paris, to the “freethinking” neighborhoods of American cities, like Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York City or North Beach in San Francisco. “When they imagined bohemia,” the cultural historian Christine Stansell has written, “twentieth-century Americans called up an image of art, hedonism, and dissent from bourgeois life.”26 Even as “Bohemia” became detached from the historical Czech lands, a related cultural image 12

13

NETHERLANDS

North Sea

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ITALY

250 miles

CHO

AUSTRIA

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Vienna

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Brno

SLO

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Budapest

KI VA

VAKI

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Sofia

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Bucharest

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BULGARIA

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Black Sea

Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ), German Democratic Republic (GDR) after 1949

Czechoslovak Road to Socialism: National Front coalition government until February 1948

The emerging Eastern bloc: Communist Party-controlled states as of January 1948

Warsaw

Belgrade

HUNGARY

BOHEMI A Náchod CZE MORAVIA

Prague

ZONE (SBZ)

OCCUPATION

SOVIET

Berlin

POLAND

Baltic Sea

MAP 1.  Czechoslovakia as a “bridge between East and West” on the eve of the Communist Party takeover of February 1948. © Brian Goodman.

Mediterranean Sea

G E R M A N Y

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Bern SWITZERLAND

LUX.

BELGIUM

FRANCE

Paris

London

GREAT BRITAIN

Vltava R.

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would find new expression in the libertine reputation of Prague’s literary underground during the communist era. The appeal of Bohemia was political as well as cultural. After the First World War, Prague was transformed yet again from a cosmopolitan but peripheral outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into the thriving capital of a new multiethnic democracy.27 The First Czechoslovak Republic’s founding president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, was a respected humanist philosopher who had lectured at the University of Chicago and was married to an American. In 1918, he traveled again to the United States to win Woodrow Wilson’s support for Czechoslovak independence.28 During the interwar period, Masaryk and his successor, Edvard Beneš, continued to promote the image of Czechoslovakia as a cultural bridge—an island of democracy between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—right up until the Munich Agreement was signed on September 30, 1938.29 After the Second World War, the image of Czechoslovakia as a bridge between East and West took on a new geopolitical significance. In the late forties, American leftists like F. O. Matthiessen embraced the metaphor of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism,” both as a democratic socialist alternative to Stalinist dictatorship and as a potential bulwark against the final division of Europe between emerging superpower blocs. But this particular road led only to the Communist Party’s seizure of power in February 1948. Twenty years later, in 1968, the seductive image of Czechoslovakia as a meeting point for liberal-democratic and socialist political traditions was briefly revived during the Prague Spring. For Miller, the movement for “socialism with a human face” briefly realized the New Left’s dream of “a new unaggressive society based on human connection rather than values of the market economy.” But the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 represented yet another defeat of that dream. In an essay called “Conditions of Freedom,” Miller later recalled, “There, with the Soviet ousting of Dubček and the crushing of all hope for an egalitarian socialist economy wedded to liberal freedoms of speech and artistic expression, the crash of expectations was especially terrible, for it was in Prague that this novel fusion seemed actually to have begun to function.”30 Miller’s desire for a “novel fusion” between East and West helps explain why many American writers and intellectuals were so invested in the fate of Czech literature and culture before and after the Prague Spring. 14

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This frustrated search for a novel fusion between East and West also inspired writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain to reimagine the relationship between literature and state power. In 1977, eight years after he first met Havel in Prague, Miller premiered a new play called The Archbishop’s Ceiling, about a famous American author who visits a group of writers in an unnamed “Eastern European” capital.31 The setting of Miller’s play is the expropriated apartment of a former archbishop, which now belongs to a politically compromised writer. There are rumors that the secret police have placed a listening device in the ceiling. As Miller later revealed in “Conditions of Freedom,” the play’s premise was inspired by one of Havel’s anecdotes about discovering a listening device hidden in his own apartment’s chandelier. “The occasion, then, of The Archbishop’s Ceiling is the bug and how people live with it,” Miller explains, “but the theme is something different.”32 In the 1970s, Miller believed that societies on both sides of the Cold War divide had entered a new “era of the listening device.”33 The more that he reflected on this shared situation, “the more the real issue changed from a purely political one to the question of what effect this surveillance was having on the minds of people who had to live under such ceilings, on whichever side of the Cold War line they happened to be.”34 Miller’s comparative theme was lost on his American audience when The Archbishop’s Ceiling was first performed in Washington, DC, in 1977. However, by the time the play was produced again in London in the mid-1980s, broader cultural attitudes about Eastern bloc dissidence had changed in the West. Finally, Miller observed, “People could see that the play was not about ‘the East’ alone; we were all secretly talking to power, to the bugged ceiling of the mind, whether knowingly or not in the West.”35 This broader shift in the Western political imagination was itself a partial consequence of decades of cultural exchange between American and Czech writers across the Iron Curtain—and the new forms of literary dissent those encounters produced. But for dissident writers like Havel, this newfound recognition did not come without a cost. Dissidents as Writing People

Havel was never entirely comfortable with the label “dissident.” Throughout “The Power of the Powerless,” he places the word “dissident” 15

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between quotation marks to emphasize that the term was “chosen by Western journalists.” Many of these “so-called dissidents” were actually what Havel calls “writing people”—that is, “people for whom the written word is the primary—and often the only—political medium they command, and that can gain them attention, particularly from abroad.” At some point, each of these writing people had crossed an “invisible line” and were now unable to publish at home. Meanwhile, abroad, they were recognized only for “the critical, political aspects of their work.”36 Indeed, as Jonathan Bolton points out in his groundbreaking history of Czech dissidence in the 1970s, the West “often thought it was listening in on a conversation that, in fact, it had helped to stage by choosing and translating the thinkers . . . that spoke most closely to its own concerns.” Echoing Havel’s original insight, Bolton argues that a “Western desire for lofty political meditations and courageous nonconformism” has long “systematically obscured” the more local concerns and social practices that defined Czech cultures of dissent under unique conditions of political normalization after the Soviet-led invasion of 1968.37 But the term “dissident” wasn’t only a Western invention. As Peter Bugge has shown in his own genealogical research, the term’s meanings were shaped through its use in transnational media in the late 1970s, including in Czech-language exile publications across Europe and North America.38 Bugge usefully distinguishes between two closely related terms: “dissident” and “dissent.” While the more general term “dissent” derives from Latin roots (dis- + sentiō) meaning, roughly, “to think or feel differently,” the term “dissident” developed out of a Latin word (dissidēr) meaning, literally, “to sit apart.”39 Prior to the twentieth century, both these terms were used interchangeably to describe expressions of religious heterodoxy, much like the term “nonconformist.” But in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, the English-language press began using the term “dissident” to also describe ideological deviation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a new political application that reached its height during the Moscow show trials of 1936–1938.40 It was only in the 1960s that Western journalists also began to refer to nonparty intellectuals in the Soviet Union, including “writing people” like Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as “dissidents.” After 1968, the term slowly migrated to other Eastern bloc countries, including Czechoslovakia.41 Havel and other Charter 77 activists eventually learned 16

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to live with the “dissident” label as the cost of Western recognition, but not before transforming its meaning in the process. In 1978, the same year that Havel first circulated “The Power of the Powerless” in samizdat, Miller published his own essay called “The Sin of Power” in Index on Censorship. Like Havel, he refers to Prague’s banned writers as “so-called dissidents,” distancing himself from the problematic term.42 In making this choice, Miller may have been drawing on his own experiences as an antiwar activist during the sixties. In the essay, he briefly compares the situation of Czechoslovakia’s dissenting writers to his own generation’s opposition to the American war in Vietnam.43 Miller speculates that another reason many American artists and intellectuals felt such “a deep connection” with Czechoslovakia’s banned writers was “precisely because there has been a fear in the West over many generations that the simple right to reply to power is a tenuous thing and is always on the verge of being snipped like a nerve.” Miller was sensitive to the hypocrisy of so much human rights talk in the United States. As he also explains in the essay, “by no means everybody in the West is in favor of human rights, and western support for eastern dissidents has more hypocritical self-satisfaction in it than one wants to think too much about.” But Miller may have underestimated the degree to which Eastern bloc dissident movements, including Charter 77, were seizing on the universal language of human rights for their own strategic purposes. Beginning in the late 1970s, a small cohort of nonconforming literary intellectuals from across East-Central Europe—including both Havel and his Hungarian counterpart, György Konrád—helped Western activists reimagine human rights as a form of cultural “antipolitics.”44 Today, critics often dismiss “antipolitics” as a weakhanded substitution of morality for a more traditional, state-centered notion of politics. But Havel’s example can remind us that the idea of antipolitics originated as a cultural response to a shared sense of political impasse among Eastern bloc artists and intellectuals. When both social revolution and democratic reform are foreclosed as possibilities, political struggles are displaced onto culture. As Timothy Garton Ash put it in the New York Review of Books in 1986, “Since you cannot practice the art of the possible, you invent the art of the impossible.”45 Despite the obvious limitations of antipolitics as a governing philosophy, antipolitical movements were surprisingly effective at mobilizing against authoritarian regimes across the Eastern bloc and 17

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Latin America at the end of the Cold War. Even as dissident thinkers like Havel and Konrád redefined human rights in the specialized terms of their own dilemmas as writing people in “post-totalitarian” societies, they managed to articulate new philosophies of dissent with a surprisingly universal appeal.46 And in the United States, the timing was right for their message. “Dissent” has long been a keyword in American studies, the academic field in which I was originally trained.47 But our field also offers a cautionary tale: when dissent becomes a national fetish, it turns into a dead end. This was one of the central insights of Sacvan Bercovitch’s classic study The American Jeremiad, which was also published in 1978. Like that of both Havel and Miller, Bercovitch’s conception of dissent was shaped by the disappointments of the previous decade. Arriving in the United States in the midsixties, a Russian Jewish immigrant from Canada, “the spectacle that greeted me was a nation in dissent,” Bercovitch writes in an updated preface to American Jeremiad. He later realized that the sixties counterculture was only the latest manifestation of an entire “culture of dissent, a nation-state structured on documents of dissent, beginning with the formulaically quoted Declaration of Independence.” According to Bercovitch, this “heroic lineage of dissent” extended through the entire American literary canon, from Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to “the ‘Red’ (but decidedly not ‘bolsheviky’) Tom Joad, the opt-out Holden Caulfield, and the Beat Dean Moriarty.” Rather than celebrating this oppositional spirit, however, Bercovitch concluded that what he had witnessed in the late sixties “was social change ritually controlled through dissent.” For Bercovitch—and many other post-1968 scholars of American literature and culture—this nationalist tradition of dissent ultimately served the forces of “containment,” that omnipresent geopolitical metaphor for domestic Cold War culture in the United States.48 But literary dissent was not so easily contained during the Cold War, especially when it circulated across the Iron Curtain. Scholars now recognize that the communist “East” and capitalist “West” were never entirely discrete cultural worlds, nor were they defined by a clear set of binary oppositions: between totalitarianism and democracy, socialist realism and liberal modernism, or censorship and free expression.49 And yet bipolarity has been surprisingly difficult to leave behind. Even in “revisionist” histories, when writers from the United States and the Eastern bloc come into 18

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contact it is usually under the rubric of the “cultural Cold War,” a body of scholarship that treats literary culture as an ideological proxy for USSoviet geopolitical rivalry rather than as an imaginative form of politics in its own right.50 Despite increased attention to the so-called “Third World,” the socialist “Second World” has largely remained a “terra incognita” for Americanists, especially outside the borders of the former Soviet Union.51 All these tendencies have reinforced an outdated narrative of Cold War cultural history that is at once US-centric and unilateral, a picture that includes well-known US literary figures like Arthur Miller but not Václav Havel—and certainly not both American and Czech writing people together in one frame.52 A more reciprocal view demonstrates that Eastern bloc societies were much more than passive receptacles for US cultural propaganda, or the commercial exports of Western popular culture. In their work on the transnational circulation of samizdat and tamizdat (samizdat texts published abroad), Jessie Labov and Friederike Kind-Kovács argue that literary exchange during the Cold War was “much more than a single flow of material smuggled from East to West, or from West to East; it was a network of transfer and dissemination, translation, amplification and distortion.” The result was “an aesthetic cross-fertilization between two cultural spheres.”53 As scholars are just beginning to discover, this unruly process had important political as well as artistic consequences. In subsequent work, Labov has demonstrated how the circulation of unofficial literature across the Iron Curtain helped constitute a new “transatlantic Central European imaginary,” exemplified by political-cultural journals like Cross Currents, which published writers like Havel and Miller side by side.54 Meanwhile, in the United States, liberal publications like the New York Review of Books encouraged literary intellectuals, and their influential readership, to advocate for dissident writers and the free flow of literature across the political boundaries of the Cold War.55 Just as the term “dissident” wasn’t only a Western invention, “dissent” was never an exclusively “American idea.”56 This book attempts to break out of what Bercovitch called the “America-trap” by embracing a broader, transnational conception of literary dissent.57 But even this approach comes with some necessary limitations.58 Although I refer to “Czechoslovakia” throughout, Slovak-language literary culture is beyond the scope of this book. Different linguistic or cultural coordinates 19

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would reveal distinctly valuable insights. For instance, the Prague-based writer, critic, and translator Justin Quinn has revealed the surprising “isomorphisms” that structured Czech and Anglophone poetic relations during the Cold War.59 Even if the Iron Curtain sometimes functioned as a mirror, one challenge in writing about the relationship between dissenting literary cultures in Czechoslovakia and the United States is the need to address more than one audience at once. This is in part a problem of terminology.60 My own imperfect solution in this book is to distinguish between the historically specific phenomenon of Soviet bloc “dissidence,” a term that was only applied in a Czech-language context beginning in the 1970s, and the more general concept of “dissent,” which is usefully promiscuous in its historical and cultural applications on both sides of the Iron Curtain.61 This book argues that Cold War–era literary dissent was yet another form of “novel fusion” between East and West. And to fully understand this history, we need to recognize dissidents like Havel, first and foremost, as writing people. Literary Dissent across the Iron Curtain

For American writing people like Arthur Miller, communist-era Prague was a city they still associated with the spectral figure of Franz Kafka. When they arrived, they also discovered an evolving literary counterculture influenced by years of engagement with American sources, from Moby-Dick and the Beat Generation to Dixieland jazz and rock and roll. Even during the harshest years of the communist era, Czech writers and translators eagerly followed cultural trends in the United States, importing and creatively appropriating contemporary works of American literature and culture whenever it was politically feasible. By the 1970s, both official and underground forms of cultural exchange had opened up new channels of literary circulation, aesthetic influence, and political communication across the Iron Curtain. Famous American writers like Allen Ginsberg and Philip Roth established lasting solidarities and friendships with their persecuted Czech counterparts, including Josef Škvorecký, Ivan Klíma, Ludvík Vaculík, Milan Kundera, and Václav Havel, who were all banned by the post-1968 regime. By the end of the Cold War era, decades of risky encounters between American and Czech writers 20

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had helped transform the city of Kafka into an international capital of dissent. The most important episodes from this history of literary dissent across the Iron Curtain are all included as chapters in this book: Franz Kafka’s divergent reception in New York and Prague in the years leading up to the Cold War; F. O. Matthiessen’s journey to Prague on the eve of the Communist Party takeover in the late forties; Josef Škvorecký’s creative appropriation of American literary sources in an era of uneven cultural de-Stalinization; Allen Ginsberg’s election as King of May in the period leading up to the Prague Spring; Philip Roth’s extended encounter with Czechoslovakia’s banned writers during normalization; and, in the final years of the Cold War, the participation of prominent US writers, including John Updike and Kurt Vonnegut, in the international campaign to save a renegade cultural organization in Czechoslovakia known as the Jazz Section. But each of these dramatic episodes is just the most visible manifestation of a much wider process of cultural exchange. I also reconstruct the broader social context of all these episodes by examining the cultural institutions—from socialist literary magazines and Penguin paperback series to poetry cafés and state censors—that mediated the transmission of literature across the Iron Curtain. Throughout, I narrate the stories of the key individuals who served as “foreign exchange brokers” in the circulation of literary dissent between the United States and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.62 This a history of continuity as well as rupture. Reaching back into the period immediately preceding the Cold War, I begin by describing the emergence of a “dissenting canon” of literary works between the United States and Czechoslovakia in the years after the Second World War. Juxtaposing Franz Kafka with nineteenth-century American classics, this tradition of literary dissent would provide a foundation for cultural exchange between American and Czech writers during later stages of the Cold War era. Next, I examine the explosion of literary exchange during a period of relative cultural thaw between 1956 and 1968, when the creative translation, adaptation, and appropriation of contemporary American literature (ranging from previously translated authors like Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes to younger upstarts like Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac) in Czechoslovakia fueled the creation of new hybrid cultural forms that dissented from Stalinist-era models of socialist realism, state censorship, 21

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and one-party dictatorship. Finally, I explore the two decades after the Prague Spring, a period when Kafka was once again banned in Czechoslovakia and a new generation of cultural “dissidents” began to captivate the Western imagination. This was also the era of the so-called “Gray Zone” (Šedá zóna), when the border between underground dissent and official collaboration became even more porous than it had always been. By the end of the 1980s, four decades of cultural exchange between dissenting American and Czech writers had helped consolidate a network of literary circulation, political solidarity, and personal friendship that challenged the political and artistic divisions of the Cold War era. From the disappointed dreams of the Czechoslovak road to socialism and the Prague Spring to the antipolitics of human rights and the neoconservative embrace of Eastern bloc dissidence, the political meanings of literary dissent across the Iron Curtain evolved dramatically over the course of the Cold War. And yet the politics of dissent remained circumscribed in other ways. One blind spot for many of the literary figures discussed in this book, even those Czech writers who were reading and translating African American writers, was the problem of racial authoritarianism in the United States.63 Another was the gendered constraints of Cold War– era sexual liberation. Nearly all of the Eastern bloc dissident writers who became well-known in the West were men. My decision to focus on the transnational dynamics of canon formation—on the question of which writers made it into wider circulation during the Cold War and why—has resulted in even more (though far from exclusive) attention on a subset of famous male literary figures. Many of the writers discussed in this book, from Škvorecký and Ginsberg to Roth and Kundera, were notorious for celebrating sexual transgression in their writing. But their expressions of sexual dissent (not to mention their own erotic imaginations) rarely extended further than the era’s masculine chauvinism would allow. We are still living with the cultural consequences.64 “Literature is put to all kinds of uses, public and private,” Roth once observed, “but one oughtn’t to confuse those uses with the hard-won reality that an author has succeeded in realizing in a work of art.”65 One argument of this book is that even when literary dissent failed as a form of politics, it could still succeed as art. The collision between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War often resulted in public scandal: books were blacklisted, careers were cut short, contacts were 22

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interrogated by the secret police, and several American writers (including Roth) were banned from ever returning to Czechoslovakia. But as Jiřina Šmejkalová has argued, censorship must also be understood as a process of canon formation.66 All these controversies only served to increase the visibility and influence of literary dissent on both sides of the Iron Curtain. When Roth made this statement in 2004, after the publication of his novel The Plot against America, he was specifically referring to the writing people he met in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. But he was also thinking of their dissident appropriations of a Prague writer from an even earlier era: Franz Kafka. For the nonconforming American and Czech writers who were attempting to communicate across the Iron Curtain, Kafka was a necessary starting point. Who’s Afraid of Franz Kafka?

When Edward Albee’s hit play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? was translated into Czech in 1963, Virginia Woolf’s name was replaced in the title by Franz Kafka. The play’s earliest Czech translators, Bedřich Becher and the avant-garde poet and artist Jiří Kolář, may have just been worried that the original title’s pun on the Disney song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” would have been lost on their socialist audience. But their new Czech-language title (Kdopak by se Kafky bál? ) also winks at Kafka’s former status as a banned author in Stalinist-era Czechoslovakia. As if to underscore the absurdity of the situation, the translators turned the play’s title into a conditional question: “Who Would Be Afraid of Kafka?”67 In a sense, this is the central question of this book. How and why were some works of literature, by both American and Czech writers, translated into forms of dissent when they traveled across the Iron Curtain, and what were the political and aesthetic consequences? After the Communist Party seized power in 1948, Kafka’s writing couldn’t be published in Czechoslovakia until the tentative cultural thaw of the late 1950s. Looking back after 1968, the exiled Czech intellectual Antonín Liehm explains, “After World War II—in the years of the Cold War and the almost total isolation of the socialist part of the world—the official cultural position of the socialist countries was a sharp rejection of Kafka as a decadent antirealist, as a divisive force out of place in a society intent on building socialism.”68 According to Liehm, the situation changed after 23

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Jean-Paul Sartre delivered a keynote speech entitled “The Weaponization of Culture” at the World Peace Congress in Moscow in 1962. Sartre claimed that Kafka had suffered a “double harm” since the start of the Cold War: “In the West, he is falsified and distorted; in the East, one passes him in silence.”69 Because Kafka’s writing had been banned in the communist world, Cold War liberals had been free to misrepresent Kafka as a critic of all socialist forms of bureaucracy. According to Sartre, it was as if anticommunist intellectuals had laced Kafka’s books with explosives so that they would detonate whenever they were finally allowed into the hands of Soviet bloc readers. For Sartre, the key question was now, “To whom does Kafka belong, you or us?” But it was precisely because Kafka—a Bohemian Jew who wrote in German—didn’t belong to anyone that he played such a central role in the history of literary dissent between the United States and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War era. Despite the best efforts of both Stalinist and anticommunist intellectuals, Kafka’s writing was actually quite difficult to assimilate into either ideological camp. This remained the case even after 1963, when Kafka was officially “rehabilitated” by a conference of Marxist critics at Liblice Castle, forty kilometers north of Prague. The history of Kafka’s cultural reception during the Cold War period is also a history of creative mistranslation. As I show throughout this book, the dissenting readings of Kafka that emerged during this period laid a crucial foundation for cultural exchange between American and Czech writers, including Miller and Havel, over the next four decades. The 1983 issue of Cross Currents that published the first excerpts of Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” alongside Miller’s expression of solidarity featured an image of Kafka on its cover. Inside, the issue also included a long essay by Josef Škvorecký called “Franz Kafka, Jazz, the Antisemitic Reader, and Other Marginal Matters.” Not only had American and Czech discourses of cultural dissent become entangled by the eighties but Kafka was mediating the reception and influence of dissident writers like Havel in the United States. Fifteen years earlier, in April 1968, just days before Havel departed for the premiere of The Memorandum in New York, the young Czech playwright had attempted to explain his own “life-long affinity for Kafka, for his sense of isolation and alienation from the world.” In his interview with Liehm that April, Havel suggested that the ultimate source of Kafka’s 24

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FIGURE I.2.  Cover image featuring Franz Kafka from the 1983 issue of Cross Currents: A

Yearbook of Central European Culture, which published excerpts from Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” alongside Arthur Miller’s monologue “I Think about You a Great Deal.” Courtesy of Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan.

absurdity was his strong desire “to become accepted by the world,” a goal that was always just beyond reach. Kafka’s intense desire for connection resonated with Havel. “The desperate striving to bridge the gulf between the world and oneself, to become part of the world, to attain a certain legitimacy,” he explains in the interview, “all this is nothing else but an attempt to find one’s own meaning.”70 25

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Havel’s reflections on Kafka, recorded at the height of the Prague Spring, contain an important lesson about the history of literary dissent across the Iron Curtain: Kafka wasn’t dangerous because his books were like sticks of dynamite positioned between Cold War blocs; Kafka was dangerous because his writing served as a bridge between Prague’s nonconformist writers and the rest of the world.

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Chapter One

T HE MA N WH O DISAPPEA RED FRA N Z K A F K A BET W EE N P RAG U E A N D N E W YO RK

Even though Franz Kafka had been dead since 1924, his writing would provide Cold War–era writers and intellectuals in the United States with a literary vocabulary for imagining life behind the Iron Curtain. After the Second World War, a wave of new Kafka translations, editions, and critical works swept across the English-speaking world.1 In retrospect, it is not hard to understand what fueled this vogue. As Mark Greif writes in his study of midcentury literature and ideas, Kafka’s writing “seemed to show the condition of the individual under a continuous line of totalitarians— first Hitler in Western Europe, now Stalin in the East—with Kafka usefully, geographically, in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on the border between them.”2 This uncomfortable intermediate position, and the anachronistic image of Kafka as a writer suspended between two “totalitarian” worlds, would help him become the most important missing figure in a history of cultural exchange between dissenting American and Czech writers during the Cold War era. But just as Kafka was no prophet, his eminent Cold War status was hardly inevitable: the year 1947 was the pivotal moment for this unforeseen development. 27

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Just as a “Kafka craze” was beginning to take hold in the postwar United States, there were tentative signs that the neglected Prague author might also enjoy a Czech-language renaissance in his native city.3 But then, in February 1948, the Communist Party seized control of Czechoslovakia, and Kafka was declared both a dangerous relic of interwar Prague’s decadent bourgeoisie and a corrupted symbol of the postwar existentialism being imported from abroad. His writing disappeared from public view for almost a decade. Although Kafka was slowly “rehabilitated” in the period after 1956, he was once again banned after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. For many American intellectuals, there was an attractive irony to the idea that Kafka, popularized in the United States as a writer of anti-totalitarian fables, was proscribed in his home country. By the last decade of the Cold War, the image of Kafka as a prototypical dissident writer had taken hold in both the American and Czech literary imagination. But in 1947, not everyone yet agreed about Kafka. “I find it impossible to take him seriously as a major writer,” the American critic Edmund Wilson wrote in a review that year, “and have never ceased to be amazed at the number of people who can.”4 As he observed, since the Second World War, Kafka’s reputation had risen in the United States like a “meteorological phenomenon.”5 Wilson, however, remained unconvinced. When he published his “Dissenting Opinion on Kafka” in the New Yorker in the summer of 1947, Wilson was still one of the most influential literary critics in the United States. Within a few years, he would also become an outspoken critic of US foreign policy during the early Cold War.6 Even if Wilson was increasingly out of step with his liberal intellectual peers in postwar America, his dissenting reading of Kafka can help us begin to understand how and why Kafka came to play such a central role in cultural exchange between dissenting American and Czech writers throughout the entire Cold War period. Wilson could certainly understand why Kafka’s strange fantasies had gained such “validity” in Europe “under the rule of the Nazis and the Soviets.” Barely a decade after Kafka’s death in 1924, “men were to find themselves arrested and condemned on charges that had no relation to any accepted code of morals or law, or were driven from place to place to labor or to fight by first one then another inhuman unpetitionable government, which they hadn’t the force to defy or the intellect to grasp and disinte28

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grate.”7 Indeed, Wilson celebrated the news that a long-planned edition of Kafka’s collected works, “begun in Berlin under Hitler and only finished in Prague on the eve of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia,” had been “salvaged from the ruins of Central European culture and brought out in the United States.”8 What Wilson objected to was the postwar “cultists of Kafka,” an ideologically diverse group of writers and critics, from W. H. Auden to Austin Warren, contributing to new volumes like The Kafka Problem and A Kafka Miscellany. By 1947, even the conservative Time magazine was getting in on the Kafka action.9 Wilson worried that all this attention, with its incoherent range of interpretations, would “oversaturate and stupefy” American readers.10 By the end of the 1940s, however, a critical consensus about Kafka was slowly beginning to emerge in the United States. The same year that Wilson published his “Dissenting Opinion,” Partisan Review published an essay by James Burnham called “Observations on Kafka.” In his own review of recent Kafka-related publications, Burnham sketches out a useful theory of how a “new and seemingly unique writer” like Kafka gets assimilated into the “functional structures of values and categories” of another literary culture: This process of cultural absorption is, as in all such cases, correlated with the wavelike expansion of the new artist’s audience. At first there are a few friends, then scattered outsiders who welcome the first public appearance. Some among these friends and outsiders are not content with having been recognized. The news must be told, the swelling begins. The avantgarde is alerted, little magazines publish and comment, a clique forms. A professor here and there revises a lecture, and a semiprofessional publisher decides to take a chance. The stirring is felt internationally, imitations pay their substantial flattery, and the general public, if not able to face the original, becomes familiar with chic references and with devices borrowed for the mass market.11 What Burnham doesn’t mention is that Partisan Review was precisely the “little magazine” that had done the most to establish Kafka’s reputation in the United States, and Burnham was now a part of their clique. 29

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The  ascension of Burnham—a Trotskyite turned Cold War hawk, best remembered for his theories of “managerial totalitarianism”—to the editorial board of Partisan Review in the late forties was a signal of the magazine’s final drift away from the Marxist radicalism of the thirties toward their new and influential brand of literary anticommunism.12 The dominant political interpretations of Kafka’s writing followed a trajectory similar to that of Partisan Review in the United States, migrating away from the literary radicalism of the interwar period toward the liberal-modernist consensus of the early Cold War era. Wilson’s dissenting reading of Kafka did not quite fit Burnham’s model. Like the magazine’s editors, Wilson had been a member of the antiStalinist Left, but by the end of the 1930s, he had become a “dissident from all organized forms of dissidence.”13 His reading of Kafka was similarly idiosyncratic. Sweeping aside the earlier religious interpretations of Kafka’s writing, Wilson argues that a typical Kafka story should be read “much less like an edifying allegory of the relations between God and man than like a Marxist-Flaubertian satire on the parasites of the bourgeoisie.”14 By promoting the idea of Kafka as a potential bridge between “Marxist” revolutionary politics and “Flaubertian” formal innovation, Wilson was actually carrying a now-forgotten radical reading of Kafka from the thirties forward into the Cold War era. His Marxist-Flaubertian formula was a clear rejection of the new boundaries between literary modernism and left-wing politics, policed most aggressively by the editors of Partisan Review. Writing at a time of escalating tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, Wilson pointedly argued that Kafka should be read as an heir to both Edgar Allan Poe and Nikolai Gogol, the great antirealists of nineteenth-century American and Russian literature. What distinguished Kafka from both these writers, however, was that Kafka belonged to no country; since his death, according to Wilson, he had been “denationalized, discouraged, disaffected, disabled.”15 This image of Kafka as a “denationalized” writer, symbolically available to nonconformist writers and intellectuals on both sides of the emerging Cold War divide, would help transform Kafka’s writing into a mediating force in literary exchange across the Iron Curtain. In his “Dissenting Opinion,” Wilson correctly predicted, “Kafka’s novels have exploited a vein of the comedy and pathos of futile effort which is likely to make ‘Kafka-esque’ a permanent word.”16 The Oxford English 30

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Dictionary (OED) credits Wilson with being the first person to use the word “Kafka-esque” in print—although not in his essay on Kafka. A few months before he published his “Dissenting Opinion,” Wilson had reviewed the memoir of George Grosz, the famous German Dadaist who had fled Berlin in 1933, just weeks before the burning of the Reichstag. In Wilson’s review, he describes how Grosz had “felt the pressure of impending tyranny, and, warned, he says, by a Kafka-esque nightmare of blind alleys, covert persecution, and a plague of stinking fish, decided to move to America.”17 But Wilson did not invent the term himself. “Kafka-esque,” in its initial hyphenated form, first appeared a full nine years earlier in the American communist magazine New Masses. It was actually coined by the socialist poet Cecil Day-Lewis, a member of the Auden circle, in his report on a rising generation of radical English writers who were looking for new literary models to help them move beyond the formal limitations of proletarian fiction and the contradictions of their own bourgeois backgrounds. In the thirties, many left-wing writers across the English-speaking world were similarly turning to Kafka.18 But even if the Kafkaesque was an invention of the interwar literary Left, the term took on new anti-totalitarian political associations after the onset of the Cold War. The second usage of “Kafkaesque” in the OED, listed after Wilson’s description of Grosz’s nightmare, comes from the Hungarian British writer Arthur Koestler, a former Communist Party member who became a leading anti-Stalinist in the late forties. In his memoir Invisible Writing, published in 1954, Koestler explains his gradual political conversion, describing how the Moscow show trials had only gradually revealed their “weird, Kafka-esque pattern to the incredulous world.”19 This strange history of the word “Kafkaesque,” from New Masses and George Grosz’s nightmare to Wilson’s dissent and Invisible Writing, is a reminder that the Cold War–era reading of Kafka as an anti-totalitarian writer had origins in a fracturing interwar Left and its collision with a generation of émigré writers, artists, and intellectuals escaping war-torn Central Europe. To understand why Kafka would come to play such an important role in the history of literary dissent across the Iron Curtain, we must therefore first explore the various intellectual subcultures—socialist, surrealist, émigré, anti-Stalinist, Jewish, and hipster—that shaped Kafka’s reception between Prague and New York in the decades between Kafka’s death and the start of the Cold War. Wilson was hardly alone in promoting 31

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a dissenting reading of Kafka during these years. In this chapter, I examine many other heterodox interpretations of Kafka’s writing that emerged between the 1920s and 1950s and laid important groundwork for literary exchange between the United States and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War era. The story of Kafka’s American reception begins much earlier, in Prague. The Stokers

Franz Kafka began plotting his arrival in the United States as early as 1911. “Once I projected a novel in which two brothers fought each other,” Kafka wrote in his diary, “one of whom went to America and the other who remained in a European prison.”20 It is tempting to read Kafka’s diary entry as a prophetic allegory about the divergent fate of his writing in the United States and Czechoslovakia after the onset of the Cold War. But there is another way of reading Kafka’s diary entry that provides just as much insight into the role that his writing would later play as a cultural bridge between Prague and New York. As it turns out, Kafka’s story about the two brothers was a childhood daydream that evolved into an early sketch of his first attempt at a novel. Kafka never completed the project before his early death from tuberculosis in 1924.21 However, the manuscript Kafka left behind tells the story of just one of the brothers mentioned in his diary entry: young Karl Rossmann, who is sent into involuntary exile in America. Kafka’s abandoned manuscript was later rescued by Max Brod, who famously ignored his close friend’s instructions to burn all of his unfinished works. Instead, Brod patched the manuscript together, rearranged its disjointed parts, and selected his preferred ending. The resulting novel was published in 1927 under Brod’s chosen name, Amerika. While he was still alive, Kafka’s own working title for the project had been Der Verschollene: “The man who disappeared.”22 Even though Amerika was never published during Kafka’s own lifetime, the long opening chapter from his unfinished project, titled “The Stoker” (Der Heizer), became the first of Kafka’s fictions to be translated from German into another language when it appeared as “Topič” in the Czech-language socialist journal Kmen in 1920.23 Kafka’s first translator was Milena Jesenská. Beginning with the appearance of Jesenská’s trans32

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FIGURE 1.1.  Franz Kafka on the day of his Bar Mitzvah in Prague, June 13, 1896. adoc-photos/ Corbis via Getty Images.

lation of “Topič” in 1920, the Czech-language reception of Kafka’s writing between the world wars would continue to shape how Kafka was interpreted in Czechoslovakia during the communist era. Even though Kafka’s writing would be forced underground during the Nazi occupation of Bohemia, left-wing and avant-garde readings of Kafka from the interwar period would have a subterranean influence on a rising generation of Czech writers and intellectuals after 1948. The magazine Kmen, where Kafka was first translated, was edited by Stanislav Kostka Neumann, a symbolist poet who went on to become a founding member of Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party a year after the publication of “Topič.” Neumann’s magazine was committed to publishing avant-garde literature alongside left-wing political argument and expressions of proletarian culture.24 As Annie Jameson writes in her study of 33

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Kafka’s relationship to interwar Czech print culture, Kmen “encapsulated both the promise and the ultimate fate of the inclusive Leftist print culture that thrived for a short time in Prague toward the end of Kafka’s life.”25 Like many other little magazines of the modernist era, Kmen was also international in scope, publishing translated texts from across Europe, Russia, and the United States alongside promising writers from within Czechoslovakia. (A communist-era publication with a similar mandate, Světová literatura, would play a key role in Kafka’s return to Czech after 1956.) This cosmopolitan print culture mediated Kafka’s Czech-language reception during the interwar period, with surprising consequences for how he would be read during the Cold War period.26 Although Kafka’s writing was never fully welcomed into Czech literary culture before the Second World War, radical and surrealist readings of his works would help keep the flame of his influence alive even after 1948. S. K. Neumann thought “Topič” fit the mission of his journal so well that he devoted an entire issue to Kafka’s story.27 And it’s not hard to see why. In the first paragraph, we learn that young Rossmann has been cast out by his bourgeois parents because of a sexual impropriety with one of the family servants. Almost all of the action of the story takes place in New York harbor, on board the ocean liner that has just delivered Rossmann to his exile in America. While searching the subterranean levels of the ship for his missing umbrella, Rossmann encounters one of the ship’s stokers, whose job it is to shovel coal and tend the furnace in the engine room. The stoker tells Rossmann that he has been treated unjustly by his overseer, and Rossmann decides to help the stoker plead his case with the ship’s captain. Rossmann’s alliance with this representative of the working class is short-lived. The story concludes when Rossmann encounters his long-lost Uncle Jakob, who he learns (quite improbably) is now a US senator, in the captain’s cabin. As Rossmann is taken off the ship by his uncle, he bursts into tears. For Rossmann, “it was as if the stoker had ceased to exist.”28 Neumann read “The Stoker” as a tale of cross-class solidarity, and the readers of Kmen would have likely understood the story in a similar vein.29 According to this reading, Rossmann offers his services to the stoker as a sympathetic member of the educated classes, but the story’s ending also points to the limits of bourgeois solidarity. Regardless of Kafka’s own intentions for the story of Karl Rossmann’s arrival in America, its publication in Kmen would have shaped its initial Czech reception as an 34

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experimental socialist allegory. Once “The Stoker” was published in Kmen, Kafka had ceded control of his Czech-language reception to Neumann— and, ultimately, to Kmen’s left-wing readers. The question of Kafka’s own attitude toward the radical politics of the interwar era was somewhat beside the point. Of course, this hasn’t stopped generations of scholars from trying to pin down Kafka’s elusive political commitments.30 For many of these scholars, Amerika is a key text, largely because the novel contains the most overt elements of social criticism of any of Kafka’s novels. Two of the contemporary sources that Kafka drew on when he composed his American narrative were socialist travelogues: Amerika: Heute und Morgen (1913), by the Hungarian Jewish writer Arthur Holitscher, and Amerika: Řada obrazů z amerického života (1912), by the Czech politician and journalist František Soukup.31 Michael Löwy takes Holitscher’s book, in particular, as further evidence that Kafka was strongly attracted to anarchist and antiauthoritarian forms of socialism in his own lifetime.32 In the end, however, Kafka’s own political commitments are much less relevant to the story of his Cold War reception than is the radical orientation of his earliest champions between Prague and New York, beginning with Milena Jesenská. For many of Kafka’s Cold War–era readers, Jesenská remained a cipher, the absent presence in Kafka’s passionate and obsessive Letters to Milena, first published in 1952. In recent years, however, Jesenská’s work as a pioneering translator, feminist, and journalist has received renewed attention.33 As Michelle Woods shows in her indispensable book on Kafka’s translators, Jesenská was much more than Kafka’s distant lover and correspondent, the “phantasmal ‘Milena.’”34 Woods details the key role that Jesenská played in introducing Kafka’s writing to Czech literary culture in the 1920s as part of a new generation of translators, many of whom were women. As Woods points out, “Translating contemporary world literature was regarded as a means of introducing a cosmopolitan view to the writing of the new Czechoslovak Republic (founded in 1918), and women were at the forefront of the respected profession.”35 Many of these translators, including Jesenská, were attracted to the left-wing political movements, hence Jesenská’s connection to Neumann and Kmen. Although Jesenská did much of her work on “Topič” from Vienna, her translations introduced Kafka’s writing into the cosmopolitan Czech-language milieu of Prague’s intellectual Left.36 35

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Jesenská’s translations of Kafka also drew out the “subterranean” qualities of his prose that would appeal so strongly to Czechoslovakia’s cultural underground in later decades. Although Kafka’s first language was German, he was also fully conversant in Czech, so he was in a good position to judge the fidelity of Jesenská’s translations. After reading her Czech translation of “Topič,” Kafka immediately wrote to Jesenská, “I am moved by your faithfulness to every little sentence.”37 Several weeks later, he elaborated: Your translation is faithful and I have the feeling that I’m taking you by the hand through the story’s subterranean passages, gloomy, low, ugly, almost endless (that’s why the sentences are almost endless, didn’t you realize that?), almost endless (only two months, you say?) hopefully in order to have the good sense to disappear into the daylight at the exit.38 Not only is the word “subterranean” (unterirdischen in the original Ger­ man, podzemní in Czech) a near-perfect descriptor for Kafka’s prose style; it can also serve as a key term for thinking about Kafka’s reception in the decades after his death.39 More intimately, in the waning years of his life, Kafka uses the word in his correspondence with Jesenská to describe both the joys and agonies of their long-distance love affair. The same year that “Topič” appeared in Kmen, Kafka announced to Jesenská, “This subterranean threat constitutes my life, my being; if it ceases, I cease.”40 Unfortunately, we don’t have access to Jesenská’s responses to any of Kafka’s tortured and self-dramatizing missives. Jesenská requested that Max Brod burn all her correspondence with Kafka after his death. But unlike Kafka’s unfinished manuscripts, Brod seems to have complied with Jesenská’s request and destroyed her half of the correspondence. While Brod worked tirelessly to preserve Kafka’s legacy after his death in 1924, both Jesenská and Neumann tried to keep the flame of Kafka’s imagination alive within Czech literary culture. Jesenská penned one of only two Czech-language obituaries that appeared after Kafka’s death. Neumann’s own remembrance, which appeared in the Komunistická revue (Communist review), praised Kafka’s ability to see the injustice of contemporary society and champion the exploited classes in complex yet poignant fictions. He told his left-wing readers that they should remember 36

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Kafka’s stories “with only respect.”41 (It would be nearly four decades before Czechoslovakia’s communist critics heeded this advice.) Initially, Jesenská and Neumann made plans to reprint “Topič” alongside new translations of both The Trial and The Metamorphosis, both by Jesenská, but the project never came to fruition. The Metamorphosis was ultimately translated into Czech by a circle of Catholic intellectuals at the end of the twenties, but the translation had little discernible impact. With Jesenská and Neumann moving on to other projects over the next two decades, Kafka’s fiction drifted away from the most vital debates within interwar Czech literary culture. There was one major exception in the midthirties, with significant consequences for the subterranean reading of Kafka that would emerge from under the wreckage of the Second World War. In 1935, The Castle became the first—and only—of Kafka’s novels to be translated into Czech before the war. Kafka’s new Czech translator was Pavel Eisner, who would become Kafka’s most influential Czech-language translator and interpreter over the coming decades. During the interwar years, Eisner was a major interlocutor between German and Czech literary culture. Although his own tastes ran toward German expressionism, his translation of The Castle/Zámek would help popularize Kafka among a new generation of the left-wing avant-garde even more committed to literary experimentalism, most notably the Czech surrealists. Eisner had a hard time securing a publishing agreement with a more mainstream publisher, so he eventually released Zámek with the publishing wing of Spolek výtvarných umělců Mánes, an association of artists and exhibition space that fostered connections between the Czech art world and the international avant-garde. As Kafka was all but forgotten in Czechoslovakia by this point, Zámek sold terribly, but Eisner’s translation managed to establish Kafka’s reputation among the interwar surrealists and their communist-era disciples. It certainly helped that Eisner’s translation was paired with a striking cover image, evoking the technique of photomontage, by the artist Marie Čermínová, better known as Toyen. The popularity of Zámek among the surrealists would have an enduring impact on how Kafka was received in Czechoslovakia after 1948, particularly among the writers and artists of the cultural underground during the Stalinist era. Jesenská had returned to Prague from Vienna in 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, and soon became a fixture of the city’s literary scene. With 37

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translations of writers like Tolstoy and Upton Sinclair already under her belt, she turned her attention to literary journalism. She also joined the Communist Party and continued to have wide-ranging contacts among the Czech cultural Left, mixing with the avant-garde Devětsil group and having a brief affair with the radical journalist Julius Fučík. However, she eventually canceled her party membership over the Moscow Trials, like so many of her leftist counterparts in the United States. During the early days of the German occupation, Jesenská assumed the editorship of the important Czech political-cultural weekly Přítomnost, where she produced articles about daily life under Nazi rule. The magazine was soon shut down by Nazi censors, and Jesenská was banned from publishing entirely. Jesenská was also involved in more direct anti-fascist resistance activities, helping Jews to escape the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia. Before long, she was arrested and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died from kidney failure in 1944, sharing a fate similar to those of Kafka’s three younger sisters, who all perished in the camps.42 After May 1945, Jesenská was briefly celebrated as a martyr in Czechoslovakia, but the writer she had translated in her youth was barely remembered.43 New Arrivals

Before the Nazi occupation, Prague briefly served as a way station for several of Kafka’s earliest and most important German-language champions who were trying to escape the Third Reich. Many of them would play a central role in Kafka’s American reception after the war. In 1933, the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt fled across the GermanCzech border, stopping over in Prague on her way to France. Two years later, the writer Klaus Mann, son of the German novelist Thomas Mann, was stripped of his German citizenship and briefly relocated to Czechoslovakia, where he was awarded honorary citizenship by the beleaguered Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš.44 The younger Mann had at least three strikes against him after the rise of Hitler: he had a Jewish mother, he was openly gay, and he was an early and outspoken critic of Nazism. He was also one of Kafka’s earliest champions in Germany. Ironically, it was one of Mann’s reviews of Kafka, written in Bohemia and published in a German exile magazine, that helped bring Kafka’s writing to the attention of Nazi censors back in Germany. In the review, Mann had registered his 38

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amazement that Kafka’s German-language rediscovery had “occurred within a splendid isolation, in a ghetto far from the German cultural ministry.”45 The same year, Kafka’s primary German-language publisher, Schocken Verlag, received official notice that Kafka’s works had been added to a “list of harmful and undesirable writings.”46 Schocken had no choice but to relocate its entire Kafka publishing program to its Prague satellite office, where they continued to produce German-language editions of Kafka’s stories, diaries, and letters until they were finally forced to shut down operations in Czechoslovakia as well.47 On September 30, 1938, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland; within months, he had established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, inaugurating a six-year period of occupation. Max Brod escaped Prague with a suitcase full of Kafka’s papers. Meanwhile, Schocken, along with Mann and Arendt, would have to resume their Kafka-related work in the United States. The American Kafka craze didn’t arrive out of nowhere. It was the result of a collision between two midcentury cultural formations: first, a wave of European émigré intellectuals fleeing the threat of Nazism and, second, a rising cohort of American writers and critics, later known collectively as “the New York intellectuals,” many of whom were raised in the Jewish immigrant milieu of New York City. A number of the former group, including Mann and Arendt, were already devotees of Kafka when they arrived in the United States. Before the Kafka craze began in earnest in the late 1940s, these new arrivals helped keep Kafka’s cultural legacy alive in the United States during the war years. In the process, however, Kafka’s writing took on a whole new set of anti-totalitarian associations. “Do not despair, not even at not despairing,” Kafka once wrote. “When everything seems as a dead end, even then new forces draw up and march—and therein lies the significance of your being alive.”48 Klaus Mann adopted this aphorism from Kafka’s Diaries as the motto for his own 1942 memoir, The Turning Point, published after Mann had relocated to the United States. Given his own recent relocation from Nazi Germany, via Bohemia, Mann was well qualified to write the preface to the first English-language edition of Amerika, published in 1940 by New Directions. But Mann’s interpretation of Kafka was also strongly influenced by the calamitous political events he had witnessed in Central Europe. As a general introduction to Kafka’s life and work, Mann’s preface was significantly more influential than the often-cited introduction to The 39

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FIGURE 1.2.  Cover design by Emlen Etting for the first US edition of Franz Kafka’s Amerika,

published by New Directions in 1940 and then released in a popular second edition in 1946 at the beginning of the postwar “Kafka craze.” Photo by Maurice Johnson.

Castle written by his famous novelist father a year later.49 Among other things, Klaus Mann’s preface helped lay the groundwork for new antiStalinist readings of Kafka by casting aside the flurry of Marxist readings that had appeared at the end of the thirties. “All such interpretations are, of course, erroneous,” Mann wrote in the introduction, “and utterly fail to define the true substance of [Kafka’s] being and writing.”50 His total rejection of the interwar leftist reading of Kafka was a crucial point of agreement between Mann and the influential cohort of literary intellectuals in 40

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New York City who were busy making amends for the Marxist radicalism of their own early careers. One of these critics was Philip Rahv. When Rahv reviewed Amerika in the Nation in 1940, he quoted directly from Mann’s preface: “Every detail of Kafka’s description of American life is quite inaccurate, and yet the picture as a whole has poetical truth.”51 Like Mann, Rahv was an immigrant to the United States. Born Ivan Greenberg in 1908 in Galicia, a heavily Jewish region of the former Russian Empire, Rahv traveled alone to make a new start in America when he was just fourteen, much like teenage Karl Rossmann in Kafka’s novel. Although Rahv never lost his hard-to-place accent, he was a master of languages and an autodidact, and it took him little more than a decade to grow into the “bear-like” critic who cofounded Partisan Review with William Phillips in 1933.52 At the time, Rahv and Phillips were both members of the Communist Party, and Partisan Review was initially created as the house organ of the radical John Reed Club of New York. Rahv could be a vicious polemicist, but by the end of the thirties, he channeled much of his political passion into literary criticism. And his two favorite interlocutors were Dostoevsky and Kafka. Despite his own biographical parallels with the protagonist of Amerika, Rahv was more drawn to Kafka’s darker fictions. Rahv was not alone in reading Amerika as Kafka’s “lightest” novel. By the time Amerika was translated into English in 1940, it was now common to downplay the novel’s elements of social criticism and the dark side of Kafka’s vision of a hyper-capitalist (and racist) civilization. For instance, in an essay titled “Franz Kafka—Pre-Fascist Exile,” published in A Kafka Miscellany in 1946, Harry Slochower claimed, “It is the only one wherein events are relatively free from eerie, macabre overtones, that contains elements of simple humor, and that ends on a clearly hopeful note.”53 Because Rahv had first read Amerika in the original German edition, he was able to include a brief description of the novel in his early 1939 survey of Kafka’s career, published in the inaugural issue of Kenyon Review. “Its texture and real qualities,” he wrote, “can best be suggested by imagining a movie version by Charlie Chaplin of a novel by Dickens.” For all these reasons, Rahv had trouble assimilating the novel into the schema he was developing to understand Kafka’s other writing. He made this clear in his review of the 1940 translation of Amerika. “One misses in ‘Amerika,’” he writes, 41

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“the profound implications of Kafka’s other works.”54 Rahv preferred Kafka’s narratives that terminated in dead ends, with “no escape for the protagonist.”55 Above all, Rahv was drawn to The Trial. In an accidental convergence between literature and politics, Willa and Edwin Muir’s English-language translation of The Trial had been published in 1937, just as the Moscow show trials were dividing the American intellectual Left. After news of Stalin’s Great Terror had reached the United States, a few publications, including New Masses, had remained loyal to the Communist Party and the cause of proletarian literature. But, in 1937, Rahv and Phillips relaunched Partisan Review with a new anti-Stalinist mandate. As Partisan Review put it in an editorial statement, the little magazine now hoped to “represent a new and dissident generation in American letters.”56 The word “dissident” is doing a lot of work in this editorial statement. Migrating away from its original religious connotations, the word “dissident” was first used to describe political opposition to orthodox Communist Party positions in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.57 In the ideological context of the late 1930s, the editors were now using the word to signal the magazine’s solidarity with the revolutionary generation of Russian intellectuals that had been betrayed during Stalin’s Great Terror. But at the same time, Partisan Review was also declaring their aesthetic commitment to a new conception of literary modernism, with the figure of the alienated and rebellious intellectual at its core.58 This dissident turn in the magazine’s political and aesthetic orientation helped fuel Kafka’s rise among the New York intellectuals. For Rahv, in particular, Kafka’s writing became a central symbol of the magazine’s new commitments. As David Hollinger has pointed out, “It was precisely in the context of Stalin’s betrayal of socialist humanism that Kafka began to eclipse Marx in the interests of Philip Rahv.”59 It was no coincidence that the first issue of the relaunched Partisan Review contained one of the first American reviews of The Trial. A year later, Rahv published his landmark essay, “Trials of the Mind,” in which he argues that it was “not only the old Bolsheviks who are on trial—we, too, all of us, are in the prisoner’s dock.”60 Kafka helped anti-Stalinist critics like Rahv express their intellectual opposition to the Communist Party, as well as their solidarity with the earliest Soviet dissidents, as both an aesthetic and a deeply personal commitment. This formula would serve as a model for many of 42

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the American literary intellectuals who looked to Czechoslovakia and its banned writers during the Cold War era. More broadly, Partisan Review played by far the most important role in establishing Kafka’s critical reputation in the United States during these years. While it’s true that the editors of the magazine promoted a whole range of modernist writers after its relaunch, they were in a unique position to publish a number of Kafka’s writings in English for the first time. In 1938, Partisan Review published a translation of the story fragment “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor” and the first excerpts from Brod’s biography of Kafka. During the war, the magazine published other Kafka stories for the first time in English, including “In the Penal Colony” and “Josephine the Songstress, or The Mice Nation.”61 Because of Partisan Review’s growing influence within American literary culture writ large, the magazine’s preoccupation with Kafka was a major turning point in the writer’s wider American reception. Kafka also became the central figure for a rising cohort of Jewish writers and intellectuals who came of age with Partisan Review in the early forties. Here, the narrative of immigration and assimilation at the heart of Amerika might again be more useful than the political symbolism of Josef K.’s ordeal in The Trial. Although it was rarely made explicit in their writing at the time, Kafka’s Jewishness was a key factor in the New York intellectuals’ critical investment in the Prague author. As the critic Leslie Fiedler observed in 1948, of all the modernist authors of the twenties and thirties, “only Kafka belongs particularly to us.” Fiedler was referring to his membership in a quite specific cohort of “urban, second-generation Jews, chiefly ex-Stalinist, ambivalently intellectual, but for all their anguish insolently at home with ideas and words.” In this group, Fiedler includes writers and critics like Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Karl Shapiro, Isaac Rosenfeld, Saul Bellow, and Paul Goodman. (We might also add “male” to Fiedler’s list of descriptors.) Not only did Kafka become an avatar of intellectual estrangement from mainstream American culture, but he also helped these writers reimagine their alienated, Jewish ideal of masculinity as an essential and universal “condition of the artist.”62 During the Cold War years, a new generation of Jewish American writers nurtured on the writing of the New York intellectuals, including Allen Ginsberg and Philip Roth, would turn to Kafka again as they surveyed the communist world. This was a tradition that began with the New York intellectuals. As 43

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Fiedler put it, their dissenting image of Kafka helped the New York intellectuals “mediate a traditional dilemma of the artist in America, the conflicting claims of allegiance to Europe and to the American scene.”63 No one knew these conflicts better than Hannah Arendt. Moreover, in the coming decades, her work on Kafka would influence how American and Western European writers engaged with writers from the countries of the Eastern bloc. Even though she read Kafka quite differently than did the editors of Partisan Review, it was their shared interest in Kafka that first pulled Arendt into the orbit of the New York intellectuals in the early forties. Rahv first met Arendt at the offices of the Contemporary Jewish Record (a magazine later renamed Commentary) soon after Arendt arrived in New York in 1941.64 Three years later, Rahv and Partisan Review commissioned an essay from Arendt to mark the twentieth anniversary of Kafka’s death. After reading a draft of the essay, Rahv responded, “We don’t at all agree with your interpretation of Kafka, but we think your point of view is interesting and well worth presenting to readers.”65 Despite Rahv’s patronizing note, Arendt’s idiosyncratic reading of Kafka ended up being far more influential than Rahv’s earlier reviews. Kafka had already been important to the development of Arendt’s thinking for a decade. The same year that Arendt published her “Franz Kafka: A Reevaluation” in Partisan Review, she also published an Englishlanguage translation of her essay “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” which was originally published in German in 1933. In the essay, Arendt includes a long discussion of Kafka as one of four Jewish types: the pariah confronted with the “drama of assimilation.”66 When Arendt published her reevaluation in Partisan Review in 1944, she left behind the idea of Kafka as a representative “would-be assimilationist-Jew” in favor of a new anti-totalitarian reading, which would have far more influence during the Cold War period. At the time, Arendt was hard at work on a new project that would transform her into one of the most influential public intellectuals in postwar America: The Origins of Totalitarianism. By the end of 1944, she had already published three essays that would later be included in her landmark book, which wouldn’t be published for another seven years. Lyndsey Stonebridge has explored how reading Kafka helped Arendt develop some of her most influential ideas about statelessness, human rights, and totalitarianism. “Newly arrived in New York, writing furiously 44

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and copiously, about refugees, Jewish politics, the future of Europe and Palestine,” Stonebridge writes, “she used Kafka as a ‘thought experiment’ to think about both the rightlessness she was experiencing and analyzing, and its negative, a different kind of political and ethical community, a possible future.”67 This last point is key. Arendt is often mistakenly credited with helping to establish the idea that Kafka was an early prophet of totalitarianism. But in her Partisan Review essay, Arendt explicitly distances herself from those who read Kafka’s fictions as “so-called prophecies.”68 In Arendt’s reading of The Castle, K. doesn’t just dissent from an encroaching totalitarianism; he is also a positive champion of human rights. Indeed, what is most striking about Arendt’s reading of Kafka today is its perverse optimism. According to Arendt, Kafka’s fictions provide “blueprints” for thinking about the post-totalitarian future. Much had changed about her reading of Kafka since 1933, but Arendt did copy over one key line from “The Jew as Pariah” in her new Partisan Review essay. Here she describes K.’s most important lesson for the villagers: “His story, his behavior, had taught them both that human rights are worth fighting for and that the rule of the castle is not divine law and, consequently, can be attacked.”69 Not only did Kafka help Arendt arrive at new critical theories of statelessness, totalitarianism, and human rights, but his fictions also provided Arendt with an opportunity to think about how we might go about constructing new forms of political community when the authority of law has become corrupted.70 Beyond establishing her anti-totalitarian reading of Kafka, Arendt also played a central role in getting more of his books into the hands of American readers. The German Jewish publisher Salman Schocken had also relocated to New York City in 1941.71 Near the end of the war, he reestablished Schocken Books in New York as an English-language publishing house and hired Arendt as a lead editor. Schocken’s relocation to New York was part of a much wider realignment of global literary culture during the forties, as a number of prominent European publishers relocated to New York and helped make the city into the center of the postwar publishing world. (Kafka’s first German publisher Kurt Wolff had also moved to New York, establishing Pantheon Books in 1942.)72 Schocken Books began reissuing the existing Muir translations, and New Directions released a popular new edition of Amerika. A Kafka publishing boom was officially underway in the United States. 45

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During this era, Arendt’s biggest project at Schocken was preparing Kafka’s diaries for publication. (To assist her, she briefly enlisted the help of a young critic and former Trotskyite named Irving Howe.)73 The Schocken edition of Kafka’s Diaries wouldn’t be published until 1951, the same year that Arendt finally published Origins of Totalitarianism and became a US citizen. But Partisan Review published early excerpts from Arendt’s diary project under the heading “Modern Evidence” in 1946. In the years between Rahv’s first meeting with Arendt in 1941 and the new postwar collaboration between Schocken Books and Partisan Review, a great deal had changed. Both Kafka and the magazine that championed his writing were undergoing a process of cultural institutionalization. Since the publication of Arendt’s Kafka essay in 1944, the circulation of Partisan Review had doubled. Meanwhile, the magazine’s political standpoint was drifting toward a more assertive brand of liberal anticommunism. In the same issue in which Partisan Review published the first excerpts of Kafka’s diaries, the magazine also attacked rival progressive publications in a landmark editorial called “The ‘Liberal’ Fifth Column.”74 The editors charged that publications like the Nation and the New Republic were being much too naive about Soviet intentions in postwar Central and Eastern Europe. Whereas the editors of Partisan Review had once considered themselves to be dissidents from within the fractious world of revolutionary Marxism, they now divided the intellectual landscape into two distinct categories: for or against Soviet totalitarianism.75 Seizing on Arendt’s anti-totalitarian reading of Kafka’s fiction, the editors of Partisan Review now pointed to Kafka as evidence that literary modernism was on their side. The reading of Kafka as an archetypical modernist—and therefore anti-totalitarian—author would remain influential for decades, providing a lens through which American writers and intellectuals interpreted cultural and political developments in the Soviet bloc, and particularly in communist-era Czechoslovakia. But it would be a mistake to assume that Kafka’s influence on Cold War–era literary dissent was only an ideological product of an emerging liberal, anticommunist consensus in postwar America. As Klaus Mann had already observed in his 1940 preface to Amerika, Kafka’s “subterranean influence has proven penetrating and mysteriously strong.”76 In the early years of the Cold War, new underground readings of Kafka’s writing would help shift the 46

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gaze of a younger generation of hipster intellectuals in New York City back toward communist-era Prague. Leopards in the Temple

Just as the New York intellectuals were helping Kafka’s writing break into the literary mainstream in the United States after the Second World War, alternative readings of Kafka continued to circulate just below the surface. One quality that set these subterranean readings apart from previous interpretations of Kafka was their wicked irony. “There is suddenly talk of a ‘vogue’ of Kafka,” Paul Goodman observed in 1947, “and it is asked, why this ‘vogue’?” He then added sarcastically, “This is a puzzler!”77 At the time, Goodman was almost two decades away from becoming the cranky guru of the student New Left, but even at age thirty-five, his skeptical temperament was on full display. Goodman’s observation about the postwar Kafka “vogue” appeared in the preface to one of his first books, called Kafka’s Prayer. Although Goodman acknowledges in his preface that Kafka’s books are spreading across America “like wildfire,” he also points out that even if they reached ten thousand readers, that would represent just “one hundredth of one percent of the reading public!”78 For Goodman, the real question was why more Americans weren’t reading Kafka. If this was finally changing, he believed it was because “the writings of Kafka appear less and less strange and more and more plain reality.” However, as with all his writing on Kafka from this era, Goodman seemed determined in Kafka’s Prayer to cloud over this sudden “climate of easier intelligibility.”79 Edmund Wilson, for his part, was not terribly impressed. In his “Dissenting Opinion on Kafka,” the critical elder statesman singles out Goodman as one of the “sensitive and anxious men” who had turned to the “Kafka cult” out of a sense of “helplessness and self-contempt.”80 But Kafka’s Prayer is not so easily dismissed. Goodman’s antinomian reading of Kafka was an early sign that the Prague author was about to be adopted by a new American counterculture. In the coming decades, this generation’s hip reading of Kafka would only strengthen their attraction to Prague’s subterranean literary scene. Born in Greenwich Village in 1911, Goodman is often written about as a member of the extended family of New York intellectuals, but the truth is he never really made it with the Partisan Review crowd.81 His short stories 47

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were repeatedly rejected by the magazine’s editors, and his bid to join the editorial board in 1943 was rebuffed. Rumor has it he was blackballed by Kafka’s early champion at the magazine Philip Rahv.82 Eventually, Norman Podhoretz would take a risk on Goodman and publish excerpts from his work in progress, Growing Up Absurd, in Commentary magazine in 1960, turning Goodman into one of America’s most famous social critics almost overnight. But in the forties, Goodman was still struggling to make it as an experimental writer. Even among downtown radicals, Goodman was a somewhat marginal figure: his politics were anarcho-pacifist, he was openly bisexual, and his prose style was as disheveled as his appearance. Unlike the editors of Partisan Review, Goodman had never been a Marxist or a Trotskyite in the thirties; and while most of the other critics in postwar New York were dabbling in Freud, Goodman was helping to introduce Wilhelm Reich’s gestalt therapy into the United States.83 However, just like Rahv and his fellow New York intellectuals, Goodman was obsessed with Kafka. It took Goodman almost a decade to gather all of his scattered thoughts about Kafka together in a book-length study. His first attempt to write about Kafka was as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago in the late thirties, when he included a chapter on The Castle in his odd, Aristotelian dissertation.84 Then, in 1946, Goodman wrote a nearly indecipherable preface for the Vanguard Press edition of The Metamorphosis, the first time an English translation of Kafka’s most famous novella was published in book form.85 Goodman likened Kafka to the Russian anarchist Petr Kropotkin, arguing that Kafka had “not forgotten that there is a community of all life and a continuum of the libido.”86 Vladimir Nabokov later dismissed Goodman’s preface to The Metamorphosis as “drivel.”87 But Goodman’s anarchist reading of Kafka is much more legible when read alongside Goodman’s other social criticism from the period, particularly his 1947 book Communitas, a utopian work of urban planning that Goodman wrote with his brother, Percival.88 In 1947, Goodman also published Kafka’s Prayer, in which he expanded on the unorthodox theories from his dissertation to provide a full Reichian analysis of Kafka’s personality and social imagination. Goodman makes it clear right up front that Kafka’s Prayer was never intended to be an “objective study.” Rather, he had set out to write “a kind of polemic and self-defense,” an exploration of the ways in which Kafka had revealed 48

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“my truth.”89 Goodman might have been a Village radical, but he was never a conventional leftist. In the book, he explicitly rejects “the un-marxian Marxist critics of Kafka” with their “great state-socialist schemes.”90 But Goodman’s rejection of Marxism didn’t stop the other New York intellectuals from attacking his book about Kafka. Rahv panned the “utter confusion” of Kafka’s Prayer and complained that “nothing can be more hazardous than the attempt to pile one set of idiosyncrasies on top of another.” In particular, Rahv rejected the book’s “anarchic utopianism” and couldn’t understand how Goodman could possibly still subscribe to the outdated view that Kafka was essentially a religious writer.91 But if Goodman’s reading of Kafka supports any political theology, it is the rebellious cultural tradition known as antinomianism.92 Originally coined by Martin Luther during the Protestant Reformation, the term “antinomian” can be defined as “holding or relating to the view that Christians are released by grace from the obligation of observing the moral law.”93 In the American context, the antinomian tradition is usually thought to extend from Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, ex-communicants from the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony, all the way up through mid-nineteenth-century writers and thinkers of the “American Renaissance,” like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The critic David Bromwich characterizes this peculiarly American strand of anti­ nomianism as the belief in a “conscience to which all society is an encroachment.”94 The term enjoyed another revival among American intellectuals after the Second World War and was later used to help explain the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s. Writing in 1969, for instance, Irving Howe refers to “the tradition of antinomianism in which we had all been raised.” Howe defines “antinomianism” as a tradition of thought that “calls into question not one or another moral commandment or regulation, but the very idea of commandment and regulation.”95 The surprising return of antinomianism in postwar America heralded a new countercultural style that would have wider social consequences in the coming decades. This antinomian reading of Kafka would later help to connect a younger generation of American writers, including Philip Roth, to a dissident strain within Central European literature.96 Goodman helped establish the antinomian reading of Kafka in the late forties through repeated comparisons of Kafka to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Although this connection may seem odd to readers today, Goodman was 49

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hardly alone among midcentury critics in thinking that Hawthorne is the writer “most like Kafka.”97 Rahv had already linked the two writers in his 1940 review of Amerika, as did the New Critic Austin Warren in his essay for The Kafka Problem.98 In the midsixties, Lionel Trilling looked back at this tendency in an essay written to mark the centennial of Hawthorne’s death, noting that Kafka made his largest impression in America in the forties, at a time when Hawthorne was also receiving renewed critical and scholarly attention. According to Trilling, “The name of Kafka had to turn up sooner or later in any discussion of Hawthorne, for our awareness of the later man has done much to license our way of reading the earlier.”99 Trilling argues that Kafka authorized new modernist readings of Hawthorne, introducing the world to “our modern Hawthorne, our dark poet, charged with chthonic knowledge, whose utterances are as ambiguous as those of any ancient riddling oracle, multi-leveled and hidden and ‘capable of endless extensions of meaning and stimulating repeated analysis and interpretation.’”100 Just as the Kafka-Hawthorne comparison authorized new modernist readings of Hawthorne, the invocation of an antinomian Hawthorne also shaped Cold War readings of Kafka in the United States. But New York intellectuals like Rahv and Trilling didn’t have a monopoly on this dual reading of Kafka and Hawthorne. Their ideological rival, the Harvard literary scholar and committed socialist F. O. Matthiessen, also compares the two writers in his American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Whitman (1941), a classic work of US literary history in which Matthiessen sublimated his own political commitments from the Popular Front era into an intellectual labor of cultural nationalism. However, this did not prevent Matthiessen from engaging in frequent acts of literary comparison. In a coda to his discussion of the function of allegory in Hawthorne’s writing, Matthiessen describes The Trial as “an allegorical typification of the horror of unchecked authoritarianism even before the phenomenon of the Nazi state had come into being.”101 The radical American scholar would return to this reading of Kafka during his semester teaching in Prague in the fall of 1947, a visit that would precipitate a falling-out between Matthiessen and the Partisan Review critics over the Harvard scholar’s stubborn optimism about the prospects for democratic socialism in postwar Czechoslovakia. Back in the United States, Paul Goodman pushed the HawthorneKafka connection one step further than any of these critics, insisting that 50

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Kafka expresses the “extreme antinomian position.” In Kafka’s Prayer, he praises Hawthorne as “a genius for the diabolical.”102 And he suggests that the lesson of Kafka’s writing is that evil can be a source of good, as long as it is “your evil.”103 To support his extreme antinomian reading of Kafka, Goodman turns to one of Kafka’s most famous aphorisms: “Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again; finally it can be reckoned on beforehand and becomes a part of the ceremony.” Goodman thought it was “impossible to write more beautifully.” For him, even if Kafka’s leopards represented man’s evil, their appearance was “providential,” and they should be understood as “objects of faith.” Further, if any act considered evil by mainstream society is necessary, if it is an act “from which boundless courage flows,” then it should be welcomed inside the temple.104 Even if Goodman’s reading of Kafka’s aphorism was idiosyncratic, his antinomian image of Kafka was part of the writer’s appeal for a new generation of hipster intellectuals who were beginning to congregate in Greenwich Village after the Second World War. Given that their cultural sensibilities were shaped by magazines like Partisan Review, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this new generation adopted Kafka as their underground prophet. As the critic Alfred Kazin later observed, “In the Village, Franz Kafka was being turned into the only accurate theologian of our time.”105 Like Goodman, the denizens of the new downtown scene subscribed to a very different creed than did Kafka’s earliest religious interpreters. In the late 1940s, their antinomian reading of Kafka was in direct tension with his growing American popularity. Because the fear of going mainstream was a defining anxiety for the new Village subculture that was becoming hip to Kafka in the late forties. There is no better guide to this final phase of Kafka’s postwar American reception than Anatole Broyard’s posthumous memoir, Kafka Was the Rage. In the memoir, Broyard describes how Kafka became the patron saint of the Village literary scene after the war. Like that of the older generation of New York intellectuals, Broyard’s own interest in Kafka was nourished by contact with the Central European émigré intellectuals, who were his teachers at the New School for Social Research, known at the time as the University in Exile, where he enrolled after arriving in New York fresh from the navy in 1946.106 With money he made on the Tokyo black market during the war, Broyard opened a small bookshop on 51

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Cornelia Street, and he quickly discovered that “Kafka was as popular in the Village at that time as Dickens had been in Victorian London.” At first, he had trouble keeping hard-to-find Kafka translations stocked. “They must have been printed in very small editions—and people would rush in wild-eyed, almost foaming at the mouth, willing to pay anything for Kafka.”107 According to Broyard, Kafka was one of a few writers (others included Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline) whom Broyard described as being like “our uncles, our family.”108 Here, Broyard repeats the possessive language used by older New York intellectuals when talking about Kafka, but in Broyard’s memoir there has been a subtle generational shift. Rather than self-identifying with Kafka, Broyard and his Village contemporaries refer to Kafka like an eccentric, bachelor uncle. (The novelist Philip Roth would later indulge a related fantasy in his brilliant counterfactual essay, “Looking at Kafka.”)109 Instead of recognizing himself in Kafka’s fiction, Broyard compares his postwar years in the Village to “a story by a young novelist who had been influenced by Kafka.”110 There is what Broyard calls a “second-removism” in their relationship to Kafka. Another word for this is irony. When Broyard was still running his bookstore and just starting out as a critic, the writer Delmore Schwartz approached him to write an essay on the new phenomenon of the “hipster” for Partisan Review. (Schwartz and Broyard were already downtown acquaintances; as Broyard writes, Schwartz inhabited a literary Greenwich Village that was “part Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg and part Kafka’s Amerika.”111 ) The resulting essay, “Portrait of the Hipster,” published in 1948, is filled with ironic echoes of Kafka’s influence on Broyard in the late forties. At one point, Broyard suggests that the hipster is just “like a beetle on its back,” calling to mind the recent Vanguard translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Even if the hipster had initially been “received in the Village like an oracle,” Broyard suggests that his “revolution of the word” was becoming a “boring routine.” Consider the following lines with Kafka in mind: “The hipster—once an unregenerate individualist, an underground poet, a guerilla—had become a pretentious poet laureate. His old subversiveness, his ferocity, was now so manifestly rhetorical as to be obviously harmless. He was bought and placed in the zoo.”112 According to this description, Broyard’s hipster is a Kafkaesque figure, calling to mind several of Kafka’s animal fictions. Indeed, the argument 52

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of “Portrait of the Hipster” can be summarized as follows: the leopards are already inside the temple. Something similar was happening with Kafka’s cultural reception in New York by the end of the forties. In a line from Kafka Was the Rage that is positively dripping with irony, Broyard describes how “people in the Village use the word Kafkaesque the way my parents used veteran.”113 These were exactly the “chic references” that James Burnham had warned about in his “Observations on Kafka.” In postwar Greenwich Village, Kafka was now part of the ceremony. To recapture a sense of his “old subversiveness,” American writers of Broyard’s generation would have to search for Kafka in communist-era Prague. Prague Interpretations

Rather than traveling to America, the second brother from Kafka’s 1911 diary entry “remained in a European prison.” In this inchoate vision for his American novel, Kafka notes, “A sympathetic word was also said about the brother who was left behind, because he was the good brother.”114 Like Kafka’s first translator, Milena Jesenská, Pavel Eisner remained in Prague during the German occupation of Bohemia. Born to a Jewish family, Eisner had converted to Protestantism well before the arrival of the Nazis. Still, his family background put him in grave danger, and his attempts to flee Czechoslovakia all came to nothing.115 During the war, Eisner distracted himself by working on a Czech-language translation of The Trial, which he completed “in his hideout and in fairly inconceivable conditions,” as he later told Max Brod.116 Two years after Prague’s “liberation” by the Red Army, Eisner’s translation of The Trial was finally being prepared for publication as part of a projected seven-volume Czech edition of Kafka’s collected works, to be based on Schocken’s complete German edition. In 1947, there were tentative signs that Kafka might undergo a parallel Czech-language renaissance. But Kafka’s return to Czech faced several obstacles. First, many of the existing copies of his works had been destroyed or lost during the sixyear Nazi occupation, a period when Kafka was banned across the territories of the Third Reich. The second impediment to Kafka’s postwar reception in Czechoslovakia was the question of whether a Bohemian Jew who wrote in German could now be reclaimed as a Czech author. After all, much 53

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of the renewed interest in Kafka in postwar Czechoslovakia was being fueled by cultural and intellectual trends abroad, from a vogue for French existentialism to Kafka’s rising popularity as a modernist prophet across the English-speaking world. This only increased the temptation to view Kafka as an outsider to Czech literary culture. Although the knotty issue of Kafka’s own cultural identification—as a Bohemian Jew who was famously ambivalent about his own minority status within a multinational Czechoslovak sociocultural milieu—was not so easily resolved, the postwar effort to claim Kafka as a Prague writer would enable him to play a central role in cultural exchange between Czech and American writers during the Cold War era. This latest effort began in 1947 when an eclectic group of Kafka experts, all based in Prague, collaborated on a book called Franz Kafka a Praha: Vzpomínky, úvahy, dokumenty (Franz Kafka and Prague: Memories, reflections, documents), which directly addressed the question of Kafka’s “Czechness” (češství ). This handsomely produced volume included a diverse set of contributions from Czech scholars like Hugo Siebenschein, Emil Utitz, and Petr Demetz, as well as an essay by Kafka’s Englishlanguage translator Edwin Muir, who had moved back to Prague as a representative of the postwar British Council. These four writers approached Kafka from a range of positions: Utitz had known Kafka in his childhood; Siebenschein, a Germanist at Charles University, supported the surrealist reading of Kafka; and Demetz, Siebenschein’s doctoral student, had written a dissertation about Kafka’s growing reputation in the Englishspeaking world, including a chapter comparing Kafka and Melville. Even if the results of their collective inquiry were mixed, Kafka a Praha was a pioneering work of cultural iconography, gathering together literary fragments, atmospheric photographs, and even a map revealing the hidden “topography of Kafka’s Prague.”117 Today, the linkage of Kafka with Prague is almost axiomatic, but Pavel Eisner deserves much of the credit for establishing the influential “Prague interpretation” of Kafka’s writing. Eisner believed that Kafka was “only explicable in terms of Prague,” where his imagination was formed in a cultural situation of “hermetic confinement.” He published the fullest articulation of this argument in an essay for the Czech-language journal Kritický měsíčník in February 1948. The essay was then translated and published in the United States, two years later in 1950, as a slim but influ54

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FIGURE 1.3.  Photograph of Old Town in Prague. Reproduced from Franz Kafka a Praha: Vzpomínky, úvahy, dokumenty (Vladimir Žikeš, 1947).

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ential book called Franz Kafka and Prague. Eisner’s argument about Kafka was therefore addressed to two audiences at once: one Czech, the other American. On the one hand, Eisner was convinced that “foreign critics lack any acquaintance with certain local facts and customs.” As a result, their interpretations of Kafka just “hang in the air.”118 On the other hand, Eisner complained that in Czechoslovakia Kafka remained “a stranger in three senses,” as a Jew, as a member of the bourgeoisie, and as a “German.”119 Eisner also dismissed earlier left-wing readings of Kafka in Czechoslovakia and attacked S. K. Neumann as “a decadent satanist and anarchist” and “literary Communist of the most rigorous persuasion.”120 But, above all, Eisner’s Prague interpretation was a direct response to the central irony in Kafka’s postwar reception: while Kafka was becoming wildly popular outside of Czechoslovakia, particularly in the English-speaking world, he was still relatively unknown in his native Prague. After a long set of delays, the first volumes of a Czech-language edition of Kafka’s collected works were finally set to appear later in 1948.121 But then, just five days after Eisner published the Czech-language version of his essay, the Communist Party seized control of Czechoslovakia. When the Communists took power, one of Kafka’s newly translated novels had already been sent to the printer. Amerika, which had been selected as the opening volume of the collected works, already had a complicated translation history. After the war, Karel Projsa (the husband of Kafka’s niece Věra Saudková) had struggled with the publisher Václav Petr to secure translation rights to Kafka’s first novel. But they weren’t the only ones interested. In 1946, the communist youth press Mladá fronta (Young front) also applied for permission to publish an edition of Amerika, but only Václav Petr’s project gained approval. The Amerika project immediately ran into a series of legal complications—including objections from Eisner—that postponed its scheduled publication until early 1948.122 The delay was fatal to the project. Among the first books pulped by the new regime was Projsa’s recently translated edition of Amerika, the uncompleted novel that Kafka had once called “The Man Who Disappeared.”123 Over the next decade, Eisner’s thesis about Kafka’s cultural confinement only gained more validity, along with new political resonances. The publisher Václav Petr was in the process of typesetting Eisner’s new translation of The Trial in early 1948, but after the Communist Party seized power that February, the book’s publication was put on hold indefinitely. 56

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Within a year, Czechoslovakia’s book industry was nationalized, and the reorganized Ministry of Information and Enlightenment added Eisner’s 1935 translation of The Castle to a list of books that needed to undergo “further review” before they would be allowed to circulate, effectively banning Kafka’s novel for the remainder of the Stalinist era.124 This is where the story of Kafka’s reception in Czechoslovakia usually leaves off, with Kafka vanishing during a post-1948 era of cultural Stalinism, only to briefly reemerge during the gradual cultural thaw of the late fifties and sixties.125 There’s certainly some truth to this version of the story. Eisner’s translation of The Trial was finally approved for publication in 1958, after a decade’s delay. Eisner died the same year, so it was his daughter, Dagmar Eisnerová, who took the task of retranslating Kafka’s American novel into Czech. (All known copies of the Projsa translation were lost after 1948.) The new Czech edition of Amerika was published by SNKLU, the state publishing house for foreign translations. The book was framed by a long foreword by Pavel Reiman, a communist critic who had helped establish Stalinist cultural policies in Czechoslovakia after 1948 before being sidelined in the aftermath of the anti-Semitic Slánský trials.126 In his new foreword, Reiman leaned heavily on radical readings of “The Stoker” from the twenties, as well as S. K. Neumann’s strong leftist credentials, arguing that “Amerika is a book about the hard fate of the working man under the conditions of capitalist civilization.”127 But his foreword makes only passing reference to “Kafka’s early girlfriend, Milena Jesenská, the first translator of his work into Czech.”128 Kafka’s Letters to Milena wouldn’t be published in Czech until 1968; in the early sixties, the ruling authorities still considered Jesenská a dangerous Trotskyist. In 1963, a year after the Czech-language publication of Amerika, both Reiman and Eisnerová joined a group of Marxist critics and scholars at Liblice, a baroque palace in central Bohemia, to “rehabilitate” Franz Kafka.129 One of the main organizers of the conference was Eduard Goldstücker, a prominent Germanist and the first Czechoslovak ambassador to Israel, who had been sent to a prison camp in the fifties and had only recently been rehabilitated by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.130 In the sixties, Goldstücker succeeded in appropriating Eisner’s Prague interpretation of Kafka for the cause of Marxist revisionism, muting Eisner’s original claim about Kafka’s essential cultural Jewishness. At Liblice, and 57

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in his subsequent writing, Goldstücker instead elaborated on the earliest left-wing readings of “The Stoker” after its publication in Kmen.131 This renovated Marxist reading of Amerika helped reform-minded critics establish a new narrative about Kafka for the post-Stalinist era: after his long period of exile abroad, it was finally safe for Prague’s prodigal son to return home to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The Liblice conference is often pointed to as a cultural milestone in Czechoslovakia’s dramatic if uneven liberalization during the sixties, which culminated in the Prague Spring of 1968. But the singular emphasis on this landmark event obscures the subterranean role that Kafka continued to play in Czechoslovakia even after 1948. As Veronika Tuckerova has shown, “a continuous undercurrent stream of Kafka reception, appreciation, scholarship, and interest continued to flow” in Czechoslovakia during the entire communist era, even during periods of extreme cultural regulation.132 For the literary underground that first began to take root during the Stalinist era, it was as if Kafka had never left home. Two years after Kafka’s rehabilitation, Bohumil Hrabal published a story about a character named “Mr. Kafka” in his collection Inzerát na dům, ve kterém už nechci bydlet (Advertisement for a house in which I no longer want to live). In composing the story, Hrabal drew on several texts he had written during the Stalinist era, when there was little chance of them being accepted by an official state publisher. In his 1965 preface, however, Hrabal warns readers that if they are looking for any straightforward condemnation of “the time of the cult of personality,” they would be disappointed. “During this period,” he writes, “I was living with people who felt, or knew, that every era carries in its womb a child in whom one may not only place one’s hopes, but through whom and with whom it would be possible to go on living.”133 The title of the collection’s opening story is “Kafkárna.”134 This untranslatable word, kafkárna, is the closest Czech equivalent to the English term “Kafkaesque.” Like its English-language cousin, the word has origins in an earlier era. As a young writer, Hrabal looked up to the interwar surrealists and their successor group, Skupina 42, who had helped keep the flame of Kafka’s imagination alive during the era of Nazi occupation (while also translating American poets from Walt Whitman to Langston Hughes). Many of these figures were still active during the early years of the communist era, when they continued to stoke underground 58

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interest in Kafka. Take the example of the artist and translator Zbyněk Sekal. At the same time that Sekal was producing state-approved translations of Karl Marx in the fifties, he was also working on secret translations of Kafka, which he then circulated to his close friend, the painter Mikuláš Medek.135 In the mid-1950s, cultural figures like Sekal and Medek began to gather with the experimental poet-artist Jiří Kolář at the Café Slavia, while unofficial writers like Hrabal preferred to meet with this circle in the privacy of Kolář’s apartment in Vršovice. In the fifties, this underground community of writers and artists revived the term “kafkárna,” first used by the interwar avant-garde, to help them describe the disorienting surrealism of everyday life in communist-era Prague. But it wasn’t until after Kafka’s official rehabilitation that the word began to catch on with the broader Czech public. The title of Hrabal’s story, first published in the Brno-based magazine Host do domu in 1964, is therefore one of the earliest known appearances of the word in print. “Mr. Kafka,” the protagonist of “Kafkárna,” is not a writer. Instead, he works in a toy consignment shop and spends his nights wandering the narrow, labyrinthine lanes behind Prague’s Tyn Cathedral, which Hrabal captures with surrealist wonder. (Even if “kafkárna” is a difficult word to define, the atmosphere of Hrabal’s story perfectly evokes its more playful connotation in Czech.) Near the end of the story, Mr. Kafka encounters an old woman selling sausages on U Rybničká Street, on the outskirts of Prague. Entirely out of the blue, Mr. Kafka asks her, “Did you ever know a Franz Kafka?” (Crucially, in the original Czech-language text Hrabal uses “František,” a Czech-ified version of Kafka’s given name, rather than the Germanic “Franz.”) The astonished sausage seller exclaims, “My name is Františka Kafková, and my father, a horsemeat butcher, was František Kafka.” The woman then pauses for a moment to search her memory, before adding, “I knew a headwaiter at the station restaurant in Bydžov who was also called Kafka.”136 Even though the “real” Franz Kafka is nowhere to be found in Hrabal’s story about “the time of the cult of personality,” Kafka’s impostors are everywhere. To my mind, the Kafka doppelgängers in Hrabal’s story recall the many unofficial translations of Kafka’s writing that were circulating underground in Prague in the early fifties. Looking back at the Stalinist era, the poet Jan Zábrana, who would later become Allen Ginsberg’s most important Czech-language translator, recalled: 59

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For the young, non-conforming Prague intellectuals of the 1950s who skulked around the literary scene or who themselves wrote, it was common for each of them to have a couple of Franz Kafka’s short stories at home which they had translated themselves and which they lent to friends and acquaintances or read them out loud at get-togethers. . . . I heard and saw several Kafka stories in perhaps twenty handwritten translations doing the rounds. Where did all these cobbledtogether translations disappear to? For Zábrana, these surreptitious and ephemeral Kafka translations “were an expression, a reflection of the longing for the knowledge of the forbidden, outlawed world of true writing which Kafka at the time embodied for them.”137 Later, the American Beat writers would play a similar role for Zábrana and his friends. But before 1956, as Marek Nekula has pointed out, these subterranean readings of Kafka were “formulated in reaction to the official ideological discourse on Kafka and the exclusion of his writing from the official literary sphere.”138 Because American literary visitors to Prague during the communist era were much more aware of the official ban on Kafka’s writing than they were of these alternative readings, they were primed to discover a Kafkaesque world of unfreedom. What they discovered, however, was often closer to kafkárna. In either case, the symbolic association between Kafka and Prague’s besieged literary underground would only grow stronger in the coming decades. The Disappearing Bridge

In Kafka’s original manuscript for his American novel, there is a peculiar moment when Karl Rossmann looks back at New York harbor and sees an impossible bridge, joining two distant cities. “The bridge connecting New York to Boston,” Kafka writes, “hung delicately over the Hudson and trembled if one narrowed one’s eyes.” Kafka’s stunning description, as recently translated by Mark Harman, continues: It appeared to bear no traffic, and a long, smooth, lifeless strip of water stretched out underneath. In both of these giant cities 60

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everything appeared empty and erected to no avail. And there was scarcely any difference between large and small buildings. Down in the invisible depths of the streets life probably went on as usual, but all they could see above them was a light haze that was motionless yet seemed easy to chase away. Peace had even descended on the harbor, the largest in the world, and only here and there—perhaps influenced by the memory of vessels seen from close up—could one see a ship dragging itself forward a little. Yet one could not follow it for long; it escaped one’s gaze and disappeared.139 After Kafka’s death, Max Brod assumed that Kafka’s reference to a bridge connecting cities that are hundreds of miles apart was a simple geographic error. The Muir translation of Amerika from 1940 preserves Brod’s correction to Kafka’s manuscript: “The bridge connecting New York with Brooklyn hung delicately over the East River.”140 Like Harman, I prefer Kafka’s original, antirealist description. Kafka’s disappearing bridge can help us visualize the unlikely connective role that Kafka went on to play in the history of literary dissent between the United States and Czechoslovakia throughout the Cold War era. When Kafka was officially banned in Czechoslovakia, especially during the earliest years of the communist era, it may have appeared as if his writing bore little cultural traffic between Prague and New York. But if you looked closely enough, “down in the invisible depths of the streets,” you could locate the subterranean readings of Kafka that were being generated even during the Stalinist era. These underground readings would only gain more significance in the coming decades. During the period of uneven cultural de-Stalinization after 1956, “here or there” you could also spot “a ship dragging itself forward a little,” gradually closing the distance between American and Czech literary cultures. I imagine these “ships” as works of translation, following new routes of circulation in the late fifties, or as the American writers who traveled to Prague during this era. Many of these writers, “perhaps influenced by the memory” of Kafka’s city finally seen “up close,” would form new solidarities with their banned Czech counterparts in the decades after 1968. To be sure, this reading of Kafka’s strange passage from Amerika indulges my own fascination with his cultural legacy during the Cold War era. As with all 61

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of Kafka’s best metaphors, this impossible bridge disappears if you stare at it for too long. But Kafka’s dissident image remains. Even after the Prague author was banned again in the 1970s and 1980s, his writing continued to serve as a kind of lingua franca for the American and Czech writers trying to communicate across the Iron Curtain. For the dissenting writers of Václav Havel’s generation, Kafka’s writing represented an alternative to both official discourses of socialist realism and a more parochial vision of Czech literary nationalism. In this context, Kafka’s uncomfortable fit within communist-era Czechoslovakia’s reconstituted literary tradition was a resource rather than a liability. Because Kafka had become Prague’s most well-known writer outside of Czechoslovakia, banned Czech writers from Milan Kundera to Ludvík Vaculík could look to Kafka as a potential model for reaching a wider, cosmopolitan readership. At the same time, many of these same writers hoped that by adapting Kafka’s famously elusive and parabolic style, they might avoid reductive political interpretations of their work in the West. Ironically, as the literary scholar Alfred Thomas points out, their intense identification with Kafka only reinforced the Cold War–era image of Kafka as “a dissident avant la lettre, a prophet who predicted the plight of the intellectual in the Communist state.”141 After 1968, this dissident image of Kafka helped mediate the Western reception of banned writers not just from Czechoslovakia but from the entire East­ ern bloc. Their American audience was already well prepared by Kafka’s postwar reception. During a latter phase of the Cold War era, Kafka’s hipster-intellectual appeal would attach itself to Czech writers as different as Kundera and Havel. But even earlier, dissenting literary intellectuals in the United States turned to Kafka’s antirealist and antinomian parables as an attractive alternative to the domesticated American modernism being exported by American cultural diplomats during the early years of the Cold War. From the late 1940s until the end of the 1980s, Kafka provided many of these writers with an entry point to the wider social worlds of Prague’s dissenting literary subcultures. But even if Kafka’s writing was a keystone in the bridge that connected dissenting literary cultures on both sides of the Iron Curtain, that bridge had other foundations. Next, we will explore the efforts of the American literary scholar F. O. Matthiessen to establish one of these other 62

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foundations in postwar Central Europe. In 1947, on the eve of the Communist Party’s takeover of Czechoslovakia, Matthiessen traveled to Prague with the goal of promoting a “dissenting tradition” within American literature and culture. He too had written about Kafka, in his 1941 masterwork American Renaissance, but it was another kind of symbolic bridge that initially attracted Matthiessen to Prague: the quickly fading dream of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism.”

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Chapter Two

BE H IN D TH E GO L D CU RTA IN F. O. MAT T H I E SSE N O N THE C ZEC H OSLOVAK ROAD TO SOC I A L IS M

In the fall of 1947, F. O. Matthiessen traveled to Prague to teach his dissenting canon of American literature. Matthiessen is still best known as the author of American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), a groundbreaking work of aesthetic criticism and cultural history that furnished American universities with a new set of nationalist myths just as the United States was preparing to enter the Second World War. Despite his patrician exterior and tenured position at Harvard, Matthiessen was a committed socialist and closeted gay man who had always struggled to reconcile the many tensions that ran through both his life and his work. Now, six years after the publication of American Renaissance, the Harvard professor had been invited by Charles University to spend a semester in Prague delivering a series of lectures and seminars on classic works of American literature, from Ralph Waldo Emerson up through the present. This invitation arrived at a critical juncture not only in Matthiessen’s own life but also in the postwar history of 64

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Czechoslovakia. In just a few months, in February 1948, the Communist Party would seize control of Czechoslovakia. Two years later, Matthiessen would leap to his death from a rented hotel room in Boston. It was suicide by defenestration. “In this city of Kafka,” Matthiessen observed soon after arriving in Prague, “wherever you go, whenever you turn any wide corner, you find before you or behind you the Castle on its hill.”1 The Faculty of Arts had given Matthiessen a study looking directly across the Vltava River to the terraced walls of Prague Castle, the centuries-old seat of Bohemian political authority. It was no wonder, Matthiessen reflects in his travelogue, that Kafka had become so fixated on the castle, transforming it “through the obsessive force of his imagination” into “the dominant image of a whole novel.”2 Back at home, a Kafka craze had taken hold of American literary culture. But in Prague, Matthiessen learned that Czech translations of many of Kafka’s most important works had yet to appear. He found it ironic that “in his whole strange career of isolation,” Kafka “is now almost unread here by the new generation, at the very moment when his command over the allegories of the inner life has given him such a vogue in England and America, has made him an influence upon nearly every younger writer determined to escape the surfaces of current realism.”3 Matthiessen wouldn’t live long enough to see Kafka play a strikingly similar role for the young writers of Czechoslovakia’s cultural underground during the Stalinist fifties. While Kafka’s Bohemian renaissance was still pending in 1947, Matthiessen discovered that American literature was now coming into vogue across postwar Central Europe. Matthiessen traveled to Prague via occupied Austria, where he had spent the summer teaching at the inaugural Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization. As George Blaustein shows in his illuminating work on the first Salzburg Seminar, Matthiessen had originally gone to postwar Austria “to reaffirm the democratic and aesthetic thrust of American Renaissance, but found himself prioritizing reception as much as creation—the European reader as much as the American writer.”4 Indeed, this is one key difference between Matthiessen’s earlier masterwork, American Renaissance, and the travelogue he produced soon after his return from Prague, which he titled From the Heart of Europe (1948). Both its political sincerity and its radical receptivity set the latter work apart. Those same qualities would end up getting Matthiessen into 65

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hot water after the book’s publication. Because it wasn’t only Matthiessen’s desire to view American literature through Central European eyes that drew him to Prague in 1947. Like many other left-wing intellectuals in postwar America, Matthiessen was desperately attached to the dream of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism.” Ever since the end of the Second World War, Czechoslovakia had been governed by a coalition of left-leaning parties known as the National Front. Right-wing parties, accused of collaborating with Nazi occupiers during the war, were excluded from participation, leaving the Czechoslovak Communist Party in the strongest position in the new government. In the 1946 elections, the Communists commanded 40 percent of the popular vote in Czechoslovakia, the highest level of support any national communist party had ever received in a free election. But they did not yet hold a monopoly on power. Later the same year, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald announced the party’s plan for the country’s future: they promised to pursue a distinctly “Czechoslovak road to socialism,” a peaceful and parliamentary route to state socialism that—in contrast to the Soviet model—would build gradually on the democratic foundations of the First Czechoslovak Republic.5 For many Western leftists, including Matthiessen, Czechoslovakia now looked like a last resort of democratic socialism in a world being pulled apart by growing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Ernest T. Simmons, a Tolstoy scholar and founder of Russian area studies in the United States, recalled one of his final conversations with Matthiessen, which took place in 1946: We took a long walk and talked much of old friends, of literary interests, and of the political future. Czechoslovakia and [President] Benes’s middle way of compromise between the Soviet Union and the democracies of the West dominated his thoughts like a bright light in the gathering gloom. He was tired and discouraged; he wanted to get away from Cambridge and go to Czechoslovakia the following year. Could I help him get an invitation to teach over there so he could see for himself how a country and people solved the problem of friendly relations with the Soviet Union and remained politically democratic? I obtained the necessary invitation for him.6 66

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As his friends knew, Matthiessen’s longtime companion, the painter Russell Cheney, had passed away in 1945, triggering new bouts of depression. Another ally at Harvard, the radical economist Paul Sweezy, received a letter from Matthiessen in Prague in November 1947. An upbeat Matthiessen reported, “It’s very invigorating to live in a country where the majority of people are committed to the belief that socialism will work.” According to Sweezy, Matthiessen was convinced that Czechoslovakia was building a model of democratic socialism that would preserve and extend “bourgeois freedoms” into the “sphere of economic relations.” By 1947, the polarizing effects of the escalating US-Soviet rivalry were making such a synthesis increasingly difficult to imagine anywhere else in the world. And yet, as Sweezy notes, “while traveling this road, the Czechs were providing a really effective channel of communication, a bridge, between the socialist East and what was still progressive in the capitalist West.”7 It was precisely this idea—Czechoslovakia as a bridge across the emerging Cold War divide—that attracted Matthiessen to Prague in the autumn of 1947. But two years later, Czechoslovakia was a one-party dictatorship, and Matthiessen had taken his own life. After his death, Matthiessen’s legacy quickly became entangled with the domestic politics of Cold War culture in the United States. Almost immediately, Matthiessen’s allies on the American Left claimed him as one of the first academic martyrs of a new Red Scare, while the anti-Stalinist New York intellectuals sought to cleanse his nationalist literary canon of its earlier radical (i.e., socialistinternationalist) associations.8 Matthiessen was never entirely forgotten. In the 1980s, a new generation of revisionist scholars charged that Matthiessen was somehow complicit in silencing his own dissenting viewpoint—and “closeting” his homosexuality—to fit an emerging liberal Cold War consensus.9 As these blinkered Cold War–era arguments have now receded into the past, a veritable Matthiessen renaissance is well underway in American studies, the academic field that Matthiessen helped inspire.10 However, only recently have scholars begun to consider the wider ramifications of Matthiessen’s cultural project outside of American academia, let alone beyond the borders of the United States.11 When viewed from Prague, the larger meaning of Matthiessen’s life and work looks very different. While his political misjudgments come into even sharper focus, Matthiessen’s postwar cultural project takes on even greater significance. Indeed, despite Matthiessen’s own naive optimism 67

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about the Communist takeover, he would be remembered by his students in Prague for professing what he called the “dissenting tradition” in American literature and culture. These students were part of a rising generation in Czechoslovakia that had been radicalized by the experience of the Second World War. And in the fall of 1947, they still saw no contradiction between their cultural attraction to American literature and their political commitment to building a socialist future for Czechoslovakia. By bringing the stories of Matthiessen’s Czech students—including their trajectories after 1948—back into the picture, we can begin to reassess the wider resonance of Matthiessen’s dissenting canon beyond the borders of Cold War America. But first, we need to understand what exactly Matthiessen thought his dissenting canon could accomplish in Prague in the autumn of 1947. Like many of his students, Matthiessen believed that a new cultural and political synthesis was still possible in postwar Czechoslovakia. Neither he nor his students realized that their time was already running out. The Dissenting Canon

Soon after Matthiessen arrived in Prague, he laid out his new postwar vision for a dissenting canon of American literature. Matthiessen’s inaugural lecture at Charles University was treated as a major event by his hosts. His ceremonial entourage included the entire faculty of the English Department, as well as Jan Kozák, the dean of the Faculty of Arts, “who put his traditional gold chain around his neck and led us in procession to the lecture hall.”12 Kozák’s participation in the event connected Matthiessen’s visit to a much longer tradition of Czech-American cultural exchange. During the interwar years of the First Republic, Kozák had been one of founding president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s famous “Friday Men,” a group of influential writers and intellectuals who met with the president every Friday. He had also been chair of the Social Club in Prague, set up to entertain foreign diplomats and dignitaries. As Andrea Orzoff has shown, Kozák was at the heart of a network of literary intellectuals and semipublic institutions that worked to convince Western European and American elites that Czechoslovakia was an “island of democratic values, rationalism, and fair mindedness amid a Europe falling quickly into the thrall of authoritarianism and fascism.”13 This cultural-diplomatic 68

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strategy had been adapted since the end of the Second World War, as moderate intellectuals like Kozák began promoting Czechoslovakia as an island of “socializing democracy” in a region increasingly dominated by Soviet-style communism. The promotion of the country’s fundamentally democratic values to outsiders like Matthiessen was therefore a part of an ongoing cultural battle within Czechoslovakia over the definition of Czech national character and the future direction of socialism. Matthiessen had walked into a “struggle for the soul of the nation.”14 Back in the United States, Matthiessen had been engaged in a parallel set of debates about the meaning of “Americanness” since the 1930s. When Matthiessen began work on American Renaissance during the era of the Popular Front against fascism, he had been searching for a “usable past” to help build a radical democratic future.15 In his preface, Matthiessen claimed that the “common denominator” uniting nineteenth-century American writers as different as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman was “their devotion to the possibilities of democracy.”16 Matthiessen’s own political activism signals what he had in mind by this rather open-ended phrase: a form of democratic socialism built on the foundation of the labor movement. But Matthiessen was also allergic to doctrinaire Marxism; as he liked to insist, he was both a Christian and a tragic idealist. However idiosyncratic, Matthiessen’s left-wing social commitments shaped his revision of American literary tradition. Indeed, much of Matthiessen’s critical genius lay in his ability to adapt the organicist poetics of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T. S. Eliot, two figures beloved of conservative literary critics, to the cultural goals of the American Left.17 Coleridge, in particular, provided Matthiessen with a theory of “esemplastic” imagination that held out the possibility that literature could serve as a common ground for the reconciliation of opposing forces within a democratic culture. This theory of imagination was particularly attractive during an era when opposing liberal-left political factions were attempting to unite in a global struggle against fascism. But by the late forties, his internationalist ideal of “common ground” had already become an anachronism in the United States, along with the coalitional politics of the Popular Front era. In postwar Prague, Matthiessen therefore attempted to reconceive his canon of nineteenth-century writers as part of a long tradition of American dissent. 69

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A closer look at Matthiessen’s inaugural lecture at Charles University can help us understand why Matthiessen thought his dissenting canon might still serve as a bridge between the United States and Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s. Matthiessen began by establishing some common ground with his Czech hosts. As he told his audience, he had come to Prague as “a student in professor’s clothing,” because he believed Czechoslovakia was a “test-case” for an alternative American future. Matthiessen then recounted the two countries’ shared history of democratic revolution. During the First World War, T. G. Masaryk, the philosopher and future president, had composed the Czechoslovak Declaration of Independence from Washington, DC, where he earned the strong support of Woodrow Wilson. As Matthiessen also pointed out, Masaryk first read the founding document aloud on the steps of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in 1918. Now Matthiessen wanted to observe how Czechoslovakia “was carrying forward its political revolution into the economic sphere, supplementing the revolution of Wilson and Masaryk with that of Marx and Lenin.” For Matthiessen, the real test was therefore whether it was still possible to “fuse and preserve elements of both” revolutionary traditions. “The most vital creations in American culture had depended on open assimilation of ideas from all sources,” Matthiessen suggested. But now he worried that a new cultural nativism was taking hold in America and that a “conservative status quo of so-called free enterprise” was isolating the American people “behind a heavy gold curtain of our own making.”18 Matthiessen let the phrase “gold curtain” hang in the air for a while before explaining its significance to his Czech audience. Matthiessen intended the image of a “gold curtain” to counter Winston Churchill’s recent assertion that an “iron curtain” had descended “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.” As Matthiessen liked to point out, Churchill had listed Prague as one of “the capitals of the ancient states” now under the control of Moscow, even though Czechoslovakia, unlike some of its neighbors, was still an independent democracy when Churchill delivered his famous remarks in Fulton, Missouri, the previous year. Matthiessen argued that the American news media was complicit in promoting Churchill’s misleading picture. He singled out a recent article in Time magazine— which, he noticed, was readily available on Prague newsstands in the autumn of 1947—for its multiple distortions about “the sinister conditions ‘behind the iron curtain.’”19 According to Matthiessen, these distortions 70

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ran in both directions. He also rejected the golden image of America being publicized abroad in “promotion literature, spread-eagle orations, sales talk, slick propaganda, the obsessive development of advertising techniques, the phony standardized picture given by the news magazine.”20 By that point, Matthiessen had a long personal history with Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines. The two men had been close acquaintances as undergraduates at Yale, where they were both members of Skull and Bones, but they were now ideological rivals.21 Whereas Luce believed that the global circulation of American culture would pave the way for a more aggressive economic and military role in the world, Matthiessen believed that the function of classic American literature, “from Emerson to the Steinbeck of Grapes of Wrath,” was to “burn through the official version of American life” being promoted by Luce’s popular magazines.22 As Matthiessen told his audience in Prague, one of the animating tensions in American literary history was between the themes of “expansion” and “dissent.”23 On the one hand, American literature and culture had been shaped by the formational experiences of the frontier, territorial conquest, and the explosive growth of industrial capitalism. But on the other hand, alongside these narratives of expansion, Matthiessen argued that American culture also contained a “residue of protest” and “ethical fervor” that could be traced back to antinomian strains of American puritanism. We have seen how the return of “antinomianism” in postwar American intellectual culture shaped dissenting readings of Kafka in the United States. Now, in front of a Czech audience, Matthiessen was calling on this same antinomian tradition to help him expound an American literature of democratic dissent. The same themes from Matthiessen’s opening lecture ran through all his lectures and seminars on American literature in Prague. The syllabus that Matthiessen used to profess his dissenting canon included a now-familiar list of writers: Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Hart Crane, and T. S. Eliot. Despite their many aesthetic and political differences, Matthiessen emphasized the “continuities” among these writers, arguing that “American literature, both in its great affirmations and its great protests, 71

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had always been a literature intensely critical of the status quo.”24 Even if this roster does not strike one as particularly diverse today, Matthiessen’s elevation of “dissent” as a keyword in American literary studies continues to shape the field, even as his canon of white male authors has undergone multiple cycles of revision, expansion, and critique. In postwar Czechoslovakia, Matthiessen’s canon also represented a significant revision to preexisting ideas about American literature. For much of the late nineteenth century, the writers of the so-called “Local Color School,” literary regionalists like Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Bret Harte, were popular in Czech translation, as were “Fireside Poets” like William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Following trends in the United States, a revolt against gentility arrived in the early twentieth century, and Matthiessen’s American Renaissance authors were gradually making their way into Czech.25 At Charles University, Matthiessen surveyed the “layers and accretions” of the library’s haphazard American literature collection, but the Prague university was actually at the vanguard of the European movement to study American literature in an academic setting. The English Department at Charles University had recently hired Zdeněk Vančura to “the first professorship of American literature to be established in Central Europe, and the third, after the Sorbonne and Upsala, in the Eastern Hemisphere,” as Matthiessen noted.26 Otakar Vočadlo, also a member of the English faculty, had already written a pioneering Czech-language study of recent American literature, published in 1934 by Laichter, focusing on the period “from the election of President Wilson through the great economic crisis.” Vočadlo also gave Matthiessen a copy of his condensed “Modern American Literature,” a descriptive survey that mirrored the approach of American progressiveera scholars like V. L. Parrington, the author of the 1927 classic Main Currents in American Thought. Although Matthiessen had been directly influenced by the progressive generation, his stated goal in American Renaissance had been to do nearly the “opposite” of what Parrington had done in Main Currents.27 While Parrington had studiously avoided questions of aesthetic evaluation in his multivolume work of cultural and intellectual history, Matthiessen was convinced that formal criticism was the key to making connections between the literary past and the social demands of the present. 72

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This was precisely what Matthiessen was trying to achieve with his dissenting canon in Prague. In the preface to American Renaissance, he had argued, “Works of art can be best perceived if we do not approach them only through the influences that shaped them, but if we also make use of what we inevitably bring from our own lives.”28 By now this “unorthodox postulate” has become a cliché of the undergraduate literature curriculum, but in postwar Prague this radically subjective approach to the study of American literature enabled Matthiessen to locate his American Renaissance authors in a dense network of personal, political, and aesthetic associations.29 This is also how Franz Kafka became entangled with Matthiessen’s dissenting canon of American writers. As Mark Greif has pointed out, Matthiessen conceived of his five American Renaissance authors—Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman—as being part of a “double canon,” in which each nineteenth-century writer was paired with a figure from the modernist era.30 In this context, Matthiessen analyzed Kafka alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne, a surprising connection that many other midcentury American critics would soon reinforce. Matthiessen believed that Kafka’s allegorical imagination was “symptomatic of the emerging era” and that his writing was providing a model for young writers trying to “break through the surfaces of the realistic tradition.”31 Matthiessen returned again to the Kafka-Hawthorne connection in his lectures at Charles University. He was convinced that once new translations of Kafka appeared, Czech readers “could hardly fail to respond, especially to The Trial, with its terrifying image of Fascist controls, projected before the Nazi movement had even come into being.” He even speculated that Kafka’s works might be able to furnish the Czech nation with a new set of experimental myths to help them move forward from the experiences of the Nazi occupation. Here, Matthiessen was also proposing a connection between Kafka and another of his American Renaissance writers: Walt Whitman. As he reflected in From the Heart of Europe, Whitman had once “endowed” the United States with a “heroic myth” of the democratic future.32 What writer could now play a similar role for the Czechs? As it turns out, after the end of the Second World War, a section of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass had become one of the first works to be translated from any foreign language into Czech. “For You O Democracy” was published in 1945 as Demokracie, ženo 73

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má! (Democracy, ma femme!), and it’s not hard to imagine the attraction that Whitman’s poetic invitation held for a Czech readership at the geographic heart of war-torn Europe: Come, I will make the continent indissoluble, I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades, With the life-long love of comrades. Matthiessen was able to write and speak much more openly about Whitman in Prague than he ever had before.33 In his inaugural lecture at Charles University, Matthiessen proposed Whitman as the “central figure” of the American democratic “sensibility,” but he also pushed back against the nationalist readings of Whitman that would soon eclipse socialist readings of the poet in the United States. Matthiessen’s Whitman remained a poet for labor movements everywhere and “for affirmers of democracy in other lands,” including in Czechoslovakia. With Matthiessen’s help, this radical reading of Whitman would persist in Prague well into the fifties. Of course, Kafka’s fate in Czechoslovakia after 1948 was somewhat different. In a fascinating coincidence, the Czech translator of Whitman’s “For You O Democracy” was none other than Pavel Eisner, who had also been working on his Czech translation of Kafka’s The Trial during the war years. This was actually the rumored translation that spurred Matthiessen’s reflections on the regenerative potential of Kafka’s “experimental myths” in his native land. At the time, Matthiessen had no way of knowing that the publication of the Eisner translation of The Trial would soon be delayed indefinitely after the Communist Party takeover in February 1948. As a result, Kafka’s novel would take on an entirely different set of political associations when a Czech translation was finally published in 1958. During the uneven cultural thaw of the late fifties and sixties, dissenting intellectuals across the Eastern bloc would imagine new symbolic links between Romantic and modernist writers from their own national traditions as part of their critique of Stalinist cultural repression.34 But in the autumn of 1947, Matthiessen still believed that his own dissenting canon, juxtaposing writers as different as Whitman and Kafka, could serve as a democratic-socialist common ground in Prague, despite the curtain being 74

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drawn between the United States and the Soviet-aligned states of Eastern Europe. With the Love of Comrades

From Salzburg to Prague, Matthiessen’s dissenting canon also held a strong attraction for his Central European students, who were still working to reconstruct both their lives and their societies in the wake of the Second World War. Not everyone, however, thought Matthiessen’s influence on this rising generation of students was a positive development. The American literary critic Alfred Kazin, who taught alongside Matthiessen at the Salzburg Seminar in the summer of 1947, recalled that before he left for Prague Matthiessen “seemed wired to go off like a bomb.”35 Decades later, in his classic memoir New York Jew, Kazin claimed that he had “never known another teacher whose influence on students had so many harsh personal and political consequences.” Kazin’s damning portrait of Matthiessen was, in part, motivated by personal animus—the two men would have a falling-out after the publication of From the Heart of Europe in 1948—but his comments still reveal the perceived stakes of Matthiessen’s project in postwar Central Europe. Kazin goes on to describe the “undercurrent of intensity” that pulsed through Matthiessen’s lectures on American literature that summer. “The tension, the unforgettable fixity of his manner and voice in that seemingly mild-looking Harvard professor,” Kazin recalled, “became a need to bind that audience to himself, to find affinities.” In Prague, Matthiessen succeeded in finding affinities with many of his students. Many of these students would go on to play a role in the history of literary exchange between the United States and Czechoslovakia during the communist era, as translators, academics, or dissidents. And at least two of these students strongly disagreed with Kazin’s assessment. Jaroslav “Jarka” Schejbal studied with Matthiessen in both Salzburg and Prague. After Matthiessen’s suicide, Schejbal would submit his own recollection for the memorial issue of Monthly Review. “The tragedy of Professor Matthiessen’s mind,” Schejbal insisted, “was never reflected in his relationship to his students.” Schejbal continued: “I am sure there were tens, hundreds of students like me, asking him for books, for advice, because he was the greatest teacher and the greatest man I have 75

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FIGURE 2.1.  F. O. Matthiessen conversing with a student at the Salzburg Seminar in American

Studies during the summer of 1947. Salzburg Global Seminar Archives/CC BY-NC -ND 2.0.

ever met.”36 Another of Matthiessen’s star pupils in Prague was Zdeněk Stříbrný. Years later, Stříbrný would remember Matthiessen as a “charismatic, friendly, but serious and demanding teacher,” whose “exacting” lectures were attended by hundreds of his fellow students in Prague. Stříbrný recalled, “He was not only deeply immersed in his subject, but also strongly interested in his students and their cultural and social background and political future.”37 Both Schejbal and Stříbrný were among the thirty students who participated in Matthiessen’s seminar focused on the five writers of American Renaissance. Matthiessen noticed that his Czech students had certain 76

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wartime experiences in common, and many of them were now studying both English and Russian, which he took as further evidence that many young Czechs were seeking some form of cultural synthesis between East and West. Matthiessen describes Schejbal, “with his endless fund of energy,” as being “like a boy on any Middle-Western campus, making the basketball team and Phi Beta Kappa with the same undistracted drive.”38 But unlike that of his undergraduate counterparts in the United States, Schejbal’s impressive “drive” was a result of the fact that he had been robbed of nearly three years of his life during the Nazi occupation, doing forced labor at an armament factory outside of Prague. Now he was studying both English and Russian as part of an overloaded course schedule, while also tutoring beginner students to supplement his family’s income. Like Schejbal, Stříbrný had enrolled at Charles University soon after the war to study both English and Russian literature. Another of Matthiessen’s students was Dagmar Eisnerová, the daughter of Pavel Eisner, the Czech translator of both Kafka and Whitman. By the time Eisnerová enrolled in Matthiessen’s seminar, she had already translated Poe’s “The Raven” into Czech and was “very well read also in Russian and French.”39 Because of her intense interest in Poe, Eisnerová’s dream was to become a university instructor in Richmond, Virginia. As fate would have it, she would never make it to Virginia after the Communist Party came into power. But, as we have seen, she would go on to translate Kafka’s novel Amerika into Czech after the end of Stalinism. One reason Matthiessen came away from Prague so optimistic about the “Czechoslovak road to socialism” was that his primary vantage point was the politically active world of Prague’s university students. First, the broader Czech intelligentsia supported the Communist Party in much higher numbers than either university faculty or students did.40 Prior to 1948, the Communist Party remained relatively uninvolved in Czech higher education, especially when compared to communist parties in neighboring countries. In fact, after the electoral victories of 1946, the Communists had actually relinquished control of the Ministry of Education to focus on consolidating other state bureaucracies, like the Ministry of the Interior. Czechoslovak universities were therefore highly autonomous, and students played a large role in determining the direction of postwar higher education. And while the Communist Party commanded 40 percent of the national popular vote in 1946, less than 10 percent of 77

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Prague’s university students were active Communist Party members when Matthiessen arrived in Prague. Young Communists therefore fared relatively poorly in student council elections, even when allied with Social Democrats.41 Meanwhile, the relatively “conservative” faculty of Charles University was mostly composed of “National Socialists,” the unfortunate moniker of the centrist party in the National Front coalition, which was itself committed to an expansive form of social democracy. Even when Matthiessen did get away from the university, his primary guides to Czechoslovakia’s vibrant left-wing political culture were two of his students: Jan Štern and Petr Koubek. Both Štern and Koubek had already studied with Matthiessen at the Salzburg Seminar. Štern was a young and ambitious poet. Because his father was Jewish, he and his entire family had been sent to a concentration camp during the war. His father, a well-known Social Democrat, had been executed at the camp. By the time Štern arrived in Salzburg, he had become a “vigorous Communist” and one of the seminar’s most dynamic and popular students. In his travelogue, Matthiessen describes Štern as “big and husky and somewhat nearsighted,” bumping around “like a Saint Bernard puppy.”42 Two months later, in Prague, Matthiessen found Štern thriving. He had recently obtained permission to study in the Soviet Union and was working as the poetry critic for Mladá fronta (Young front), a communist youth paper staffed by a group of energetic writers and editors in their twenties. A few months later, Štern would be promoted to an editorial position at Tvorba (Creation), the leading communist cultural weekly. “Here was one of the most devoted of the young Communists,” Matthiessen observed in his travelogue. “And his mind, instead of being fixed in a hostile pattern, was as curious for new experience as any I have ever found at home.”43 When Matthiessen visited Štern’s family home, he was relieved to find a “modernist abstraction” hanging on his bedroom wall and a desk filled with drafts of Štern’s translations of the Russian writer Vladimir Mayakovsky. Earlier that summer, Štern and Matthiessen had argued about the well-known case of another Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, who had come under attack by the Soviet cultural czar Andrei Zdhanov. Matthiessen worried about a “hostile pattern” developing in Štern’s thinking.44 At the time, Štern had defended the Zhdanovite position, telling Matthiessen that “melancholy could not be afforded in a country that had to summon all its energies to rebuild after the terrible destruction of war.” 78

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Ever the tragic idealist, Matthiessen disagreed. “Anyone who has ever truly felt a poem or play, even Hamlet,” he notes in his travelogue, “knows the function of such art is not further to depress but to release.”45 In the moment, however, Matthiessen held his tongue, instead listening with curiosity to his student’s more doctrinaire viewpoint. Matthiessen’s second guide in Prague was Petr Koubek, a twentyseven-year-old Social Democrat who had just completed his education after the long interruption of the war. During the occupation, Koubek had been sent to work in a radio factory in Germany, where he had joined an underground resistance organization. He was eventually arrested and spent the final months of the war as a prisoner at Buchenwald. Although his stay in the camp was relatively brief, he lost more than fifty pounds and emerged from the war with damaged eyesight. When Matthiessen first met Koubek in Salzburg, the Czech student had finally completed his degree in economics, while also working as a government economist. He told Matthiessen that he was proud to be “on good terms with both Russians and Americans.” But by the time Matthiessen arrived in Prague, Koubek was between jobs, hesitant to tie his career to the fortunes of his divided political party. With his newfound free time, Koubek dedicated himself to showing Matthiessen around Prague, guiding Matthiessen around the maze of Old Town and taking him to a traditional beer hall, where they joined in the revelry of a group of student mining engineers.46 In his travelogue, Matthiessen draws out a comparison between Koubek and Štern to make a larger argument about the relationship between the two major left-leaning factions of the National Front government. According to Matthiessen, what distinguished the Communists and the Social Democrats was “no fundamental divergence in aims, but, just as between Jan and Petr, a difference in temperament, a different emphasis on means.”47 There is a great deal of truth to this statement, as both parties publicly supported the National Front’s postwar Košice Program and were committed to Czechoslovakia’s ultimate transformation into a socialist state. But Matthiessen’s statement may be most revealing because of what it obscures: the very real differences between the cultural positions being taken by democratic socialist and communist intellectuals in postwar Czechoslovakia. By the fall of 1947, the Communist and Social Democratic Parties were in open political conflict. And yet, throughout his travelogue, Matthiessen repeatedly downplays or qualifies his own disagreements 79

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with rising communist intellectuals like Štern, even though he signals a much stronger affinity with the worldview of democratic socialists like Koubek. Indeed, it was among Koubek and his friends that Matthiessen witnessed his dissenting canon coming to life. In the most Whitmanesque passage from Matthiessen’s travelogue, Koubek invites his visiting American professor to a party at his canoe association, the Varjag Club, “to witness the final ceremony of the year: saying good-bye to the boats for the winter.”48 With wine bottles in hand, Koubek and Matthiessen travel a short distance down the Vltava River to the Varjag clubhouse. When they arrive, Matthiessen is welcomed by a group of Koubek’s comrades singing “John Brown’s Body.” In the travelogue, Matthiessen speculates that this must be the only American song the group knows. Their revelry is just getting started. In the middle of the night, they bundle Matthiessen up in extra layers and paddle him down the river to view Prague’s towers against the moonlight. When they return to the club, Matthiessen is treated to a series of campy skits, one featuring a cross-dressing Esmeralda “having so much difficulty in preventing her improvised breasts from sliding down to her belt that most of her hypnotized answers were drowned in laughter.” Later, four members of the Varjag Club throw Matthiessen up in the air in celebration of his Czech name day. “After this all the men shook hands with me,” Matthiessen writes in his travelogue, “I was kissed by the girls, and felt that I was really in.”49 At the conclusion of Matthiessen’s exuberant night on the Vltava, the entire canoe club gathers on the roof of the clubhouse to sing “one final salvo” of “John Brown’s Body.”50 A group of Czech canoe enthusiasts spontaneously singing a Civil War–era anthem to a visiting American professor: what’s going on here? Part of the answer might lie in the history of the song itself. The tune of “John Brown’s Body” is nothing if not adaptable. Cultural historians have long noted the improvisational character of “John Brown’s Body” and traced how the song was attached to a wide range of political and religious causes—both radical and conservative—across racial, class, and geographic lines.51 The melody of “John Brown’s Body” began as a hymn played at revivalist camp meetings during the early nineteenth century before becoming the Union Army’s most popular marching song during the Civil War. The lyrics were adapted to celebrate the millenarian abolitionist John Brown, whose failed raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 brought the country to 80

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the brink of disunion and civil conflict. Chronologically, Brown’s raid immediately followed the “extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression” that Matthiessen called the American Renaissance, and Thoreau became one of Brown’s most vocal champions after his capture and execution. Even after Julia Ward Howe rewrote a song about radical dissent as a nationalistic anthem and retitled it “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the song’s lyrics were still animated by millennial and apocalyptic imagery. The next iteration of “John Brown’s Body,” however, was very likely its most popular and far-reaching: in 1915, Ralph Chaplin, a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, or the Wobblies, as they are better known, reinvented the song as “Solidarity Forever.”52 By the time that Matthiessen arrived at the Varjag Club, the radical tune of “Solidarity Forever” had spread all over the world thanks to a politically rebellious cast of Wobblies, trade unionists, socialists, and communists. As a result, it would seem much more likely that the version of “John Brown’s Body” being sung in Prague was “Solidarity Forever,” but Matthiessen did not mislabel the song in his travelogue. The lyrics of “John’s Brown Body” had been translated into Czech during the interwar period, and the song’s popularity was on the rise again after the Second World War thanks to the international prominence of the radical singer Paul Robeson. By the 1930s, the Popular Front had also adopted John Brown as part of a larger nationalist strategy that culminated with Earl Browder and the Communist Party of the United States proclaiming that “Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism.” Beginning with Mike Gold’s Life of John Brown in 1924, many on the American Left had looked to abolitionists—often alongside American Renaissance writers like Thoreau and Whitman—in order to locate a usable past for left cultural radicalism. Even though this strategy had largely disappeared in the United States along with the Popular Front, the radical antinomian image of John Brown still held great appeal for Matthiessen in 1947, as it long had for the international Left.53 Indeed, the dissenting canon that Matthiessen was promoting in Prague grew out of this tradition. The singing of “John Brown’s Body” at the Varjag Club is therefore a reminder that Prague was already fertile ground for Matthiessen’s dissenting canon when he arrived in the autumn of 1947. For Matthiessen, scenes like this seemed to embody—that is, give firsthand social content to—the aesthetic and political ideals that he had been working to realize 81

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his entire career. But even if the affinities that Matthiessen discovered through his Czech students were reciprocated, his desperate attachment to the fading dream of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism” may have blinded him to some of the more ominous signs that surrounded him. The Joke about the Bridge

Matthiessen felt at home in Prague. “You begin to feel that you belong to a city when some of its sights and sounds are no longer strange,” he writes in his travelogue. He notes that bookstores were “as plentiful as bars in an old-time Western American town” and recalls “the pungent whiff of sausages sputtering in their fat,” which was so “unmistakably Prague.”54 He liked walking around a city where he saw “few signs of wide separation between rich and poor.”55 Even the city’s public spaces seemed to confirm Matthiessen’s hope that Czechoslovakia might still serve as a bridge between East and West. Matthiessen had noticed two new public monuments when he arrived in Prague. The first was a rock garden, set up near the main train station, arranged in the image of the United States and Czechoslovak flags. The makeshift monument was on the former site of a “gleaming white” statue of Woodrow Wilson that had been torn down by the Nazi occupiers. But was a fusion between Wilsonianism and MarxismLeninism really still possible? The second memorial, just outside the window of Matthiessen’s study at the Faculty of Arts, was an enormous red star made of geraniums, planted to celebrate the Soviet liberation of Prague at the end of the Second World War. From his study, Matthiessen watched as “the gardeners spaded up the soil for the winter,” predicting that “the star will bloom again in tulips in the spring.”56 Matthiessen did get away from the Faculty of Arts during his time in Prague, working to meet with people across the social and political spectrum. He traveled to the countryside to meet the working-class families of his students. He also delivered public talks about his dissenting canon well outside the traditional university classroom. For instance, Matthiessen was invited by the young Social Democratic politician and intellectual Jiří Hájek to give a lecture on “Progressive Forces in America Today” at Prague’s Jack London Club. Matthiessen spoke to the mixed group of trade unionists and politically active students in front of a large banner that read “Workers of the World Unite” in Czech (or so Matthiessen assumed, 82

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recognizing only the word proletáři ).57 He presented alongside a Communist politician named Vladimír Procházka, who, Matthiessen later learned, had recently translated Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath into Czech. Their subsequent panel at the Socialist Academy was attended by an audience of more than five hundred, and afterward Matthiessen’s conversation with a group of workers spilled over into a nearby beer hall. The Ministry of Information arranged a tour of local artists’ studios, reinforcing Matthiessen’s sense that the National Front government still valued the contributions of the artistic avant-garde. Notably, his tour guide was Jiřina Hauková, a young poet and the translator of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (along with her husband, the art critic Jindřich Chalupecký), who was now turning her attention to Emily Dickinson. During the communist era, Hauková would become one of the most prolific translators of American literature into Czech, also translating works by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath. Hauková introduced Matthiessen to members of Skupina 42, a collective of artists and poets that had formed during the war. In addition to being influenced by the Czech surrealists, who passed on their taste for Kafka’s fictions, Skupina 42 was also enamored with American literature and culture, particularly the poetry of Whitman and Eliot.58 Many of the members of Skupina 42 were also on the political Left, and Matthiessen was struck by how far their work departed from the Soviet-dictated formulas of socialist realism. At the studio of the painter František Gross, Matthiessen acquired a strikingly modernist cityscape that he felt perfectly evoked the industrial quarters of Prague. “In the artist’s combination of grimness and energy,” Matthiessen observed, “there is the suggestion of new life pulsating up from wreckage, as the workers set themselves to try to build a state that might save man from chaos.”59 Matthiessen’s visit with Skupina 42 provided him with further evidence that the old dream of a proletarian avant-garde, long abandoned in the Soviet Union, might still be alive in postwar Czechoslovakia. Matthiessen came away from Prague convinced that “the Czechs are uniquely fitted in their minds and by their experience to mediate between Eastern and Western values.”60 Rather than aligning him with Czech communists, however, this view was actually much closer to the arguments being put forward by Czechoslovakia’s leading democratic socialist intellectuals after the Second World War. Take the prominent literary critic 83

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Václav Černý, a professor of comparative literature at Charles University. Ever since the end of the Second World War, Černý had been struggling to articulate an exceptionalist thesis about why the Czechs were in a special position to synthesize cultural influences from the East and the West. According to Bradley Abrams’s useful summary of Černý’s postwar political writing, Černý attempted to locate “Czech culture historically in the Western camp, called for Czech intellectuals to synthesize the thought of both East and West while remaining critical of both, and mirrored the messianic rhetoric of his communist opponents in proclaiming this synthesis the highest task of ‘Češství,’ a term embodying all the qualities of the Czech character.”61 What this meant in practical terms was often quite ambiguous, especially in contrast to the communist intellectuals who argued in much clearer terms for a cultural reorientation toward the Slavic and socialist East. Communist intellectuals successfully attacked Černý’s delicate balancing act as the “Hamletesque meditation of a divided soul and language.” Matthiessen was no stranger to the maddening ambivalence of Hamlet, a play he discusses at great length in American Renaissance. And, strikingly, his own ambiguous stance toward the Communist Party mirrored the public positions being taken by Czech left-wing intellectuals like Černý. But by the time Matthiessen arrived in Prague in the fall of 1947, the Czechoslovak Communist Party was already winning the cultural argument with their democratic socialist rivals. The breakdown of Marshall Plan talks between the United States and Czechoslovakia over the previous summer had made the intermediate political position of the Social Democrats appear far less tenable. Meanwhile, the Communist Party had been working to sever cultural ties between Czechoslovakia and its former allies in the West for some time, in part by stoking feelings of Czech, and indeed pan-Slavic, nationalism. (This task was made easier by the still-raw memory of Western betrayal at Munich in 1938.) Although such appeals to ethnonationalism were seemingly in conflict with the ideal of socialist internationalism, the Czechoslovak Communist Party had settled on a tidy new formulation by late 1947: “Patriotism and internationalism are merely two sides of the same coin.” This new slogan, echoing the postwar ideology of “national Stalinism,” appeared in the magazine Tvorba and was authored by Matthiessen’s gifted communist student Jan Štern.62 84

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Matthiessen was so intoxicated by Prague that he seems to have barely picked up on some of the more troubling signs around him—with one notable exception. “A favorite joke here,” Matthiessen records in his travelogue, “is that Czechoslovakia is sick of being called ‘the bridge between East and West,’ since a bridge is something everyone walks over.”63 Matthiessen actually picked up this joke from a piece of Communist Party propaganda that he brought back with him from Prague. As its worn cover shows, the booklet was produced by Orbis, an official publishing arm of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Orbis was originally created during the interwar period to help persuade Western allies of Czechoslovakia’s strategic importance. However, by 1947 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had come under increasing Communist Party control.64 As a result, the booklet reproduces much of the Communist Party’s official narrative about Czechoslovakia’s inevitable development toward state socialism. As the closing section of the booklet, titled “Facing the Future,” announces, [Czechoslovakia] is not a bridge between the East and the West, for a bridge has a thankless task: it is trodden on and at all times is only a means of transit. Czechoslovakia, is, in truth, a workshop of the new European order, a melting pot where the old is destroyed and the new is formed. . . . Therefore today, when many of the nations of Europe and of the whole world stand undecided at the crossroads of destiny, Czechoslovakia, true to its moral ideals, has entered on the path leading humanity to the fulfillment of those ideals, the path of Socialism.65 Matthiessen seems to have barely noticed that, by the end of 1947, nearly everyone across Czechoslovakia’s political spectrum—including President Edvard Beneš—was tiring of the image of their country as a geopolitical bridge between emerging Cold War blocs. A very similar joke about the bridge metaphor even made it into a feature on Czechoslovakia in the New York Times Magazine that October. (The Times modified the punch line to make it more menacing: “They do not want their country to become a thoroughfare for rival armies.”)66 But even this well-traveled joke didn’t persuade Matthiessen that it was too late for Czechoslovakia to serve as a bridge between American democracy and Soviet communism. 85

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Instead, after recording this joke in his travelogue, he reiterated his conviction that the Czechs were in a unique position to mediate between Eastern and Western values. However, shortly before returning home to the United States, Matthiessen did hedge a bit: “If [Czechoslovakia] can continue to advance into socialism, without the authoritarian coercions of the one-party state,” he told an audience of Czech workers, “it will have demonstrated the bases for possible fusion between the traditions of the East and the West.”67 Matthiessen left Prague just before Christmas. On his first night back in Boston, he awoke in a cold sweat, realizing that he was no longer the privileged observer he had been in Prague. Instead, Matthiessen was now “back in an uncertain battle.” Soon after his return, he learned that his previous political activities were being investigated by the US attorney general as “subversive.” Reflecting on his new situation, Matthiessen composed a closing reflection for From the Heart of Europe on New Year’s Day, 1948, in which he describes how his Central European journey had “renewed” his strong sense of the “responsibility of the intellectual.” He further argues that “if you believe in democratic socialism, you must act accordingly, and work for it,” even if that sometimes meant aligning yourself with the Communist Party.68 Meanwhile, back in Prague, many of his former students would soon be forced to decide whether they were willing to make a similar compromise. Words, Words, Words

“And Now, the Czechs,” announced the March 1, 1948, issue of Time magazine. Henry Luce’s anticommunist newsmagazine reported that on a cold night in late February, the “police of Communist Vaclav Nosek’s Interior Ministry, armed with tommy guns and bayoneted rifles, surrounded most government offices and the Prague radio station.”69 In fact, the political maneuvers and counter-maneuvers that occurred over the course of February 1948 were significantly more complex than the American press’s image of a sudden and shocking coup d’état. The dramatic events of late February were actually the culmination of months of political infighting among the rival factions of the National Front government. And by the time Matthiessen had arrived in Prague in October, many of these conflicts had already broken into the open. As the historian John Connelly argues, 86

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“No one who read newspapers in 1947 could have illusions about a gentler Czechoslovak road to socialism.”70 But Matthiessen wasn’t the only one caught off guard. Even the US Embassy in Prague had been remarkably sanguine in the weeks leading up to the Communist takeover.71 The Communist Party, meanwhile, was well prepared for the political crisis they had helped engineer. When a dozen noncommunist members of the National Front government’s cabinet resigned in protest of Nosek’s attempt to tighten his control on the national police force, the Communist Party quickly mobilized its supporters, organizing street demonstrations by armed workers’ brigades and a massive general strike. By February 25, the ailing President Edvard Beneš had acceded to all of Klement Gottwald’s demands and a new Communist-led government was in power. Back in Boston, Matthiessen struggled to keep up with the dramatic events unfolding in Prague over the course of 1948. He obsessively clipped news articles about the Communist takeover, even from the Luce publications he despised.72 But Matthiessen also had access to information that most other Americans did not. Just days after the takeover, Matthiessen began receiving letters from his former students and contacts in Prague with reports about how conditions were changing on the ground in Czechoslovakia. This dramatic correspondence between Matthiessen and his former students provides an invaluable record of how a group of young Czechs—left leaning but still attracted to American literature and culture—responded to this period of rapid political change. Through the experiences of these students after February 1948, we can see how the Communist takeover immediately made cultural exchange between the United States and Czechoslovakia much more difficult. Matthiessen tried to provide material support to his former students in any way he could. He sent hard-to-find scholarly books (including copies of his own monographs). He continued to work to secure fellowships for his former students with American foundations and universities so that they could still study American literature and culture through exchange programs in the United States. As a show of solidarity, he arranged for his students at Harvard to send CARE (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe) packages to their counterparts in Prague. He even supplied one Czech woman with at least five shipments of nylon stockings and cans of coffee, both of which had become much more difficult to procure in Czechoslovakia since February. As Matthiessen learned from one former 87

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student, periodicals from the United States were now just as scarce as nylons in Prague. “Not even the old stand-bys, TIME & LIFE, are naturally sold here,” the student wrote to Matthiessen. “And much as you despise them as slick stuff, we hated to see them go.”73 As a substitute, Matthiessen tried to arrange overseas subscriptions to less bellicose publications, like Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker, but only the latter was cleared for delivery by Czechoslovakia’s mail censors. In return, Matthiessen received frequent updates from his students about what they experienced in the wake of the takeover. Writing in April 1948, Jarka Schejbal was clearly still in shock. “I was able to see it as a film, as a picture, clearly fixed in my mind,” Schejbal wrote to Matthiessen. His letter goes on: The February events were shocking for many people in my country. They were shocking even for me. The immediate impression to see rows of civilists [sic] marching with rifles along the streets was not pleasant indeed, because the thought that Czech people are ready to use weapons against other Czech people was able to stop my breath for a while. The streets were deadly quiet. There echoed only the steps of the armed Factory Guards on the pavement. Many people were unable to believe it as late as it was over. Before the Communist takeover, Schejbal had identified as a socialist, but, much like his teacher, he had reservations about hard-line Marxism. Now Schejbal saw only two options: to outwardly embrace the revolution while continuing to harbor his own private doubts, or to resolve to fully accept communism in his heart and take an active part in the socialist transformation of Czechoslovakia. “This is a period of paradoxes, paradoxes in the official life, paradoxes in the private lives. The paradox of my case is a typical one, I think.”74 Resigned to the situation he now found himself in, Schejbal, like many of Matthiessen’s former students, decided to join the Communist Party. Schejbal’s close friend Zdeněk Stříbrný was less philosophical. Within days of the Communist takeover, Stříbrný had sent Matthiessen a detailed report on the developing situation in Czechoslovakia. Stříbrný went to great pains to justify the actions of the Communist Party, arguing 88

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that they had no other option but to eliminate “rightist” elements in the government. He knew Matthiessen thought that the “Communists are too radical,” so he wanted to reassure his old professor that no other course was possible. Stříbrný claimed there “was not a Communist dictatorship” in Czechoslovakia, no matter what the Western media was reporting, but he also warned that the more “reaction and anticommunism” the new regime faced from the United States, “the harder and more terrible will be the revolution.” Stříbrný also told Matthiessen about the rapid formation of “Action Committees” across Czechoslovak government and society. With remarkable speed, the Action Committees were moving to purge political opponents, or anyone else deemed an enemy of the new Communist state. “So we have finally managed to rid ourselves of people, who wanted dissension and what is worse, who discredited all good and honest criticism,” Stříbrný wrote to Matthiessen. “Under the name of criticism, they acted as agents provocateurs.”75 At least one of Matthiessen’s former students was willing to sacrifice his peers’ right to political dissent. Stříbrný informed Matthiessen that some former political opponents of the Communist Party, like Jan Kozák, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and a National Socialist, had participated in the formation of the Action Committees. In the coming months, Matthiessen would learn more about how the work of the Action Committees was playing out in the Czechoslovak higher education system. One of the first tasks of student-led Action Committees in the universities was to identify and expel all of the students who had actively protested the Communist takeover. To reassure Matthiessen, Stříbrný assured him that even as vocal an opponent of the Communist Party as Jan Kozák, who had introduced Matthiessen at his inaugural lecture at Charles University, had participated in the formation of the university’s Action Committees. Matthiessen uncritically passed this news on to an audience at Harvard in early March: “Only yesterday I had learned with great relief that Professor Jan Kosak, a strong National Socialist, is not only still Dean of the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University but has also been a key figure in organizing the action committees.”76 But the reality was much more disturbing. In late February 1948, several thousand students had marched to Prague Castle, one of the only visible counterdemonstrations against the Communist Party.77 A small minority of radical students played a leading role in the Action Committees’ subsequent purges, with almost everyone else falling 89

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in line, including many of their frightened professors. Between 1948 and 1953, when the central party authorities finally began to take a more direct role in university administration, more than eight thousand students were expelled in Bohemia and Moravia alone, including a fifth of all students enrolled in the academic year 1948–49.78 Most of these students were reassigned to industrial labor. These purges in higher education were among the harshest in the postwar communist world, giving rise to a period of “studentocracy” (studentokracie) in Czechoslovakia’s universities.79 This was the feverish atmosphere depicted by Milan Kundera—who studied at Charles University and was expelled from the Communist Party during this era—in his 1967 novel Žert, later translated into English as The Joke and included in Philip Roth’s Writers from the Other Europe series in the 1970s. The new atmosphere had a direct impact on the study of American literature in Czechoslovakia. One letter Matthiessen received from a former student in April began by reiterating her appreciation for Matthiessen’s course, “still our chief source in dealing with the American classics,” but she also reported that “there are many changes going on at our faculty now, some of them good, some less.”80 Canceled magazine subscriptions were just one example of the smaller “changes and innovations” students were experiencing. “According to rumors which are very possibly partly true,” another student reported, “ours will be about the last PhD degrees as no more theses are supposed to be accepted after July 15.”81 The rumor turned out to be false, but thesis topics did now have to conform to the requirements of scientific Marxism. Another student was confident that his own thesis on American fiction during the Great Depression would still be workable but worried about his friend Jarka Schejbal’s more solipsistic topic: “The Feeling of Loneliness in Literature of the American Renaissance.” Matthiessen had encouraged the topic when Schejbal had proposed it in the fall, but now Schejbal wrote to Matthiessen that “members of the Committee told me it would not be accepted if it were not written from the Marxist point of view.” He sheepishly asked Matthiessen to send him “a book on American Letters, written on the Marxist basis.” Matthiessen obliged by sending copies of Granville Hicks.82 Another student shifted her thesis topic from the plays of Eugene O’Neill to the subject of “the American Negro in literature,” while yet another turned to the American proletarian novel, topics that were still rarely, if ever, encountered in 90

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English departments in the United States. As for their teachers, Zdeněk Vančura, who eventually joined the Communist Party, was able to remain on the English Faculty throughout the worst years of Stalinism, but Otakar Vočadlo was forced into retirement.83 After 1948, official cultural exchange between the United States and Czechoslovakia was also effectively shut down. Many of Matthiessen’s former students were now unable to obtain permission to study in the United States as they’d long planned. Although Schejbal had received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to study in the United States, he now feared he would be suspected as either a defector or a spy: “Your Authorities will not allow me to come to your country to study your Literature and History. . . . On the other hand my Government would be afraid that I want to escape.”84 Meanwhile, Stříbrný had been awarded a grant to study at Brandeis University (in part because Stříbrný had attended high school in Brandýs nad Labem, the ancestral home of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis), but ultimately the government did not allow Stříbrný to study so close to the enemy “center of imperialism.”85 It wasn’t just Czechoslovak authorities who were preventing these exchanges. Dagmar Eisnerová, Pavel Eisner’s daughter, who had already translated Poe, had received fellowships from Temple University and the Rockefeller Foundation to study the poetry of Emily Dickinson in the United States. However, the American consulate in Prague asked Eisnerová to appear at an additional interview at the consulate in London, where she was subjected to “a most humiliating cross-examination.” As she wrote to Matthiessen in early 1949, “I was told that working for international cultural understanding is not important, as long as you cannot prove a strongly anticommunist attitude.” When asked to sign “a statement of my attitude against our government,” Eisnerová refused.86 Even after obtaining letters of support from several of her father’s well-known contacts in America, including Thomas Mann and Roman Jakobson, the US State Department condemned her visa application to administrative purgatory. Those few students who did receive permission to travel outside of Czechoslovakia were able to write even more freely to Matthiessen. Schejbal was allowed to return to the Salzburg Seminar in the summer of 1948, even though other Czech students hadn’t been able to obtain permission. As Matthiessen learned from the seminar’s newsletter, “There were a few students selected who for other reasons were, at the last minute, unable 91

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to attend, and five from Czechoslovakia were, so far as we know, unable to obtain passports, but their case is a separate one.”87 Once he was in Salzburg, Schejbal informed Matthiessen, “It is easier for me to write from here than from Prague.” He explained that the selections for the Salzburg Seminar had been made on a strictly political basis. The only other student from Charles University at the seminar was “too overscared to say anything” and had requested that other students not ask her any “compromising” questions. “I describe this not only to show you the difference between the members of the Czech delegation last year and this year,” he informed Matthiessen, “but as an illustration of the changed conditions in my country.”88 As the year 1948 progressed, the view continued to darken. Even Stříbrný, who had initially been swept up in the enthusiasm of “Victorious February,” confessed to Matthiessen several months later, “Here in Czechoslovakia life is a merciless teacher, giving its pupils very little time to study its lessons and requiring from them almost every day definite and binding answers.”89 Stříbrný had been allowed to travel outside Czechoslovakia that summer, and his letter to Matthiessen from London is written in a direct but wary tone. On the one hand, Stříbrný was proud of the new government’s “great achievements,” including further nationalization of industry and agriculture, aggressive land reforms, punitive taxes on wealthy property owners, and new theater subsidies and controls. But on the other hand, he also admitted that the evolutionary and parliamentary road to socialism had come to a definite end. The Social Democrats had been officially absorbed into the Communist Party, and Czechoslovakia was now effectively a one-party state. Matthiessen fell out of touch with Štern, who was now already a rising party intellectual, but he continued to receive letters from Koubek, the former Social Democrat who had sung “John Brown’s Body” with Matthiessen to the Varjag Club the previous autumn. “It is generally accepted,” Koubek wrote to Matthiessen, “that there is no alternative to the one party system with its refusal to permit organized political opposition to the new political and economic order.” In a follow-up letter, he enclosed a copy of Czechoslovakia’s new “Ninth-of-May Constitution,” which claimed continuity with the democratic constitution of 1920 but officially handed over political authority to the Communist Party. Koubek ended his letter to Matthiessen with a cryptic reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “When 92

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Hamlet was asked by Polonius what he has read he made the response, ‘Words, words, words.’ Well the constitution is full of words, wonderful quotations, which have to be transformed by laws into a base for a better life.”90 Matthiessen, a devoted Shakespearean, seems to have missed the irony behind Koubek’s words. Since February 1948, the possibility of democratic dissent in Czechoslovakia had all but disappeared. The Defenestration of F. O. Matthiessen

On March 10, Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, was found dead, still dressed in his pajamas, on the cobblestones below his bathroom window in Černín Palace. The newly installed government claimed that Masaryk had died by suicide, but their opponents (and some historians) have claimed that Masaryk was more likely assassinated by an agent sent from the Soviet Union.91 Masaryk’s death is sometimes referred to as the “Third Defenestration of Prague,” a particularly resonant phrase in Bohemian history. Defenestration, the act of throwing someone out a window, had already played a decisive role on two other occasions, only amplifying the symbolism of Masaryk’s death. In both cases, defenestration had been a prelude to a cataclysmic war: first, the Hussite Wars in 1419 and then, two centuries later, the Thirty Years’ War.92 Now, in the spring of 1948, the Truman administration was seizing on the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia to manufacture a new war scare in the United States, and the suspicious death of Masaryk, who was half-American by birth, only added fuel to the fire. The typically mild-mannered secretary of state George Marshall held a press conference announcing that Czechoslovakia had now fallen under a “reign of terror.” Congressional opposition to the Marshall Plan evaporated, and the Truman administration pushed ahead with a rapid peacetime mobilization.93 There was now little doubt that the United States was engaged in a Cold War. In the days after Masaryk’s death, a dejected Matthiessen made a statement to the Harvard Crimson, which read, “The suicide of Jan Masaryk is a great blow to those who hope that Czechoslovakia can continue to fuse elements from the East and the West.”94 But rather than condemn the Communist Party’s antidemocratic seizure of power in Czechoslovakia, Matthiessen blamed the Truman Doctrine.95 Matthiessen’s accommodationism now trumped all other concerns. In the 1948 presidential 93

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campaign, Matthiessen became a prominent supporter of Henry Wallace, whose own views on Czechoslovakia helped derail his third-party candidacy. As Thomas Devine has shown, Wallace’s tepid response to the alarming developments in Czechoslovakia, combined with his unpopular reaction to the Berlin Blockade, discredited his accommodationist foreign policy toward the Soviet Union. For many of Wallace’s supporters, “the Communist takeover in Prague dealt a crippling blow to the fundamental precepts of the Popular Front liberalism,” destroying their image of Czechoslovakia as “an ideological Garden of Eden for progressives.”96 But just as Matthiessen clung to the image of Czechoslovakia as a bridge between East and West, he stuck with Wallace, giving the seconding speech for his nomination at the Progressive Party convention in July 1948. Matthiessen did not make any significant revisions to the impressions he’d recorded in his travelogue before From the Heart of Europe went to press, but he did include two new footnotes that quoted extensively from the first letters he received from his students in the weeks after the Communist takeover. One of these letters was from Zdeněk Stříbrný and focused on the subject of Jan Masaryk’s death. Stříbrný’s letter repeated the official Communist Party line being pushed by Moscow that Masaryk had been driven to suicidal despair by his former friends in the West. (Masaryk had indeed come under heavy criticism for not stepping down after February 1948, but some historians speculate that he was on the verge of stepping down when he was assassinated.) “They simply rejected him,” Stříbrný claimed in the letter. “And so, in a minute of great mental contradiction, he took to the fatal decision.” Stříbrný is also “perfectly frank” in the letter about the sacrifices he and his fellow students were now willing to make in support of the socialist revolution. “Every student was shaken by the events to his roots,” Stříbrný reported, but they were also prepared to give up a measure of their freedom. He suggested that Matthiessen should return to Prague and write a sequel to his travelogue, “about Czechoslovakia suffering but not despairing, afflicted by evil and believing in good, limiting freedom and democracy for only some to give it back, revived and strengthened, to all. I think you would understand.”97 Matthiessen reproduced Stříbrný’s letter without comment, giving his former student the final word. The attack on Matthiessen began as soon as the first reviews of From the Heart of Europe began to appear at the end of summer. In September, the first harsh assessment appeared in the Nation. “Perhaps mankind on its 94

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torturous way will have to pass through another period of slavery,” Franz Hoellering concluded, “but no admirer of Shakespeare and Melville ought to help us into it, however innocently.”98 The critic Malcolm Cowley wrote one of the only positive reviews of Matthiessen’s book, but even Cowley expressed serious reservations to his old friend in private.99 Predictably, Time magazine’s review was the most vicious among mainstream publications. “Seldom has the gullibility and wishful thinking of pinkish academic intellectuals been so perfectly exposed as in this little book,” the magazine charged. The unnamed Time critic also referred to Matthiessen as “a bald, mild-mannered little bachelor,” a hint of the thinly veiled homophobia that shaded so much of the era’s red-baiting. In private correspondence, Time’s publisher, Henry Luce, struck a more genteel pose. Luce told Matthiessen that he’d “like very much, if agreeable to you, to have a leisurely talk” about their disagreement the next time he was in Cambridge. “I am genuinely puzzled,” Luce added, “by the radically different conclusions which can be reached by some Americans today who seem to start out from similar major premises.”100 Despite their shared embrace of an increased role for American culture in the world, it was Luce’s brand of hard-line anticommunism that had won out in the United States. But the review of From the Heart of Europe in Luce’s magazine was still not the harshest. In October, Partisan Review published Irving Howe’s scathing essay “The Sentimental Fellow-Traveling of F. O. Matthiessen.” The magazine’s editor William Phillips had initially asked the libertarian socialist critic Dwight Macdonald to write the takedown of Matthiessen. Phillips felt that Matthiessen had been “getting away with his politics because most people still think he’s just a literary man—a little dopey but just a literary man.”101 When Macdonald declined the hatchet job, Howe agreed to write the review instead. “Here, then, is the political portrait of our outstanding literary fellow-traveler,” Howe wrote: a literary critic succumbing to the most abominable totalitarian movement of our time; a man of literary refinement insensitive to half a continent of victims and charmed by the pseudosocialist rhetoric of those who grind these victims . . . a writer who calls himself a democratic socialist while apologizing for the regimes that have jailed, exiled, and murdered democratic socialists.102 95

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Matthiessen knew Howe’s takedown was coming. In fact, he had sent Howe a copy of the book several months earlier in the hope that Howe would be sympathetic as a fellow democratic socialist. But instead Howe wrote back to warn Matthiessen that he was planning to write a “very harsh and polemical” review of the book. He explained to Matthiessen, “It seems to me nothing short of tragic that you, who are one of the few literary intellectuals left still aware of the need to be concerned with politics, should fail to take the inescapable minimum stand for democratic socialism: total rejection of the Stalin dictatorship, its satellites and its supporters.”103 Howe’s review of From the Heart of Europe also precipitated a fallingout between Matthiessen and Alfred Kazin, Matthiessen’s fellow teacher at the Salzburg Seminar in the summer of 1947. In his journal, Kazin recorded that From the Heart of Europe “sickened me by its compromises and bad faith.”104 After the book’s publication, Matthiessen sent Kazin several letters, vacillating between apology and self-defense. It is worth quoting one of these letters at length because it contains perhaps the most direct statement of what Matthiessen thought it meant to be a dissenting intellectual in the aftermath of the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948: I put on record my political opinions largely because I believed that it was time for an American intellectual, feeling as I did in our fear-ridden culture, to make as concrete as possible what he affirmed. I expected controversy, and I knew, for instance, that you would be opposed to many of my specific conclusions. But I am basically concerned, not with opposing, but with cutting through the thinker’s alienation from society to as broad as possible a common ground. I’m aware how difficult that is in the present state of tension between the USA and USSR. But out of my own experience I know, for example, that if I were in Czechoslovakia now, I would go with Peter Koubek in supporting the new government while criticizing it freely, as he continues to do. For I am concerned with active participation in politics, which involves specific choices, and I don’t see that in the pressures between the Truman Doctrine and the Cominform any other choice was viable for the Czech left. 96

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Matthiessen’s conception of dissent, and his rejection of “the thinker’s alienation,” was a clear rebuke to the intellectual style of Partisan Review in the late 1940s.105 Although Matthiessen did concede that political protest was becoming more difficult now that Czechoslovakia was a one-party state, he believed that meaningful criticism was also becoming much more difficult in the United States, thanks to anticommunist publications like Time and increased harassment from the House Un-American Activities Committee. In another letter, Matthiessen also added Partisan Review to this group: “I’m not surprised at what PR has done, since, from the end of the war on, I have come increasingly to regard that group as the most vicious cultural force in the country.”106 The New York intellectuals were not content with just attacking Matthiessen’s politics or even his personality; they also seized the opportunity to cleanse his dissenting canon of its corrupted Popular Front associations. In the very next issue of Partisan Review to appear after Howe’s review of From the Heart of Europe, Richard Chase published his essay “Dissent on Billy Budd,” an influential reinterpretation of Herman Melville’s novella and also a veiled attack on Matthiessen.107 Chase was just getting started. In the preface to his pioneering book Herman Melville: A Critical Study (1949), Chase charges Matthiessen with adding “an unresolved religious strain to the earlier progressivism.”108 But Chase also uses Melville to attack the entire Henry Wallace wing of the fracturing New Deal coalition. Whereas Matthiessen had presented Moby-Dick to his Czech students as a work of literary dissent against excessive American individualism and capitalist acquisitiveness, Chase now presented the novel as a rejection of “totalitarian” leftism. With Chase’s help, Moby-Dick soon became a central text of the era’s “new liberalism,” espoused by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and others.109 A final blow to Matthiessen’s reputation, and his Popular Front–era conception of the dissenting canon, came at the infamous Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1949. The conference, organized by American progressives with the blessing of Cominform, was one of the first flashpoints in a new “cultural Cold War.”110 Matthiessen appeared on a high-profile panel alongside other radical writers and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Louis Untermeyer, Shirley Graham, Howard Fast, and Norman Mailer. In his remarks, Matthiessen defended his reading of the dissenting canon by drawing on his experiences in Czechoslovakia: 97

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I wondered, when I lectured civil disobedience and Thoreau in the [Charles] University in Prague in the fall of 1947, whether it would seem too innocent to contemporary Czechs. Most of my students had spent two, three, four years in forced labor camps, in concentration camps, or in the resistance movement. I wondered whether Thoreau would seem so far away as to be meaningless to them. Not at all. They recognized in Thoreau a challenge of principle, the power of the mind, and responded to him in that way. At the same time they laughed at an issue of Life magazine with its deluxe pictures of Walden today. They perceived the gulf separating what Life stood for and what Thoreau stood for.111 A group organized by the philosopher Sidney Hook calling themselves the Americans for Intellectual Freedom, a forerunner of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was waiting in the audience. When Matthiessen finished speaking, he was immediately challenged by Mary McCarthy, who asked from the crowd, “What does Mr. Matthiessen honestly think would have happened to Emerson if he went around organizing liberty in the Soviet Union?”112 Matthiessen resorted to both-siderism, responding that he didn’t think Lenin would do so well in twentieth-century America either. The next week, Life magazine ran a hit piece about the Waldorf conference entitled “Red Visitors Cause Red Rumpus.” The first page of the article included a large photo of protesters outside the Waldorf Hotel with the following caption: “PRAYER FOR CZECHS is offered at the WaldorfAstoria by women dressed in the national costumes of their immigrant forbears. Many of the pickets were of families from countries now behind the Iron Curtain.”113 The report included a two-page photo spread, with images of “dupes and fellow travelers” arranged like mug shots. A picture of Matthiessen was included alongside other prominent cultural figures like Arthur Miller, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Albert Einstein, Clifford Odets, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Norman Mailer, Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann, and Lillian Hellman. “They are not the most notorious 50 but a representative selection ranging from hardworking fellow travelers to soft-headed do-gooders who have persistently lent their names to organizations labeled by the US Attorney General or 98

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FIGURE 2.2.  Lead image in an article about the Cultural and Scientific Conference for

World Peace held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1949. The article, titled “Red Visitors Cause Rumpus,” was published in LIFE magazine on April 4, 1949. The original caption for this photograph reads: “A PRAYER FOR CZECHS is offered at the Waldorf-Astoria by women dressed in the national costumes of their immigrant forbears. Many of the pickets were of families from countries now behind the Iron Curtain.” Never mind that these protestors appear to be Slovak. Photo by George Silk/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock. 99

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other government agencies as subversive.”114 The entire attack was overseen by Matthiessen’s old friend Henry Luce. By 1950, Czechoslovakia had become “a psychic symbol of defeat” for Matthiessen. According to his old friend Ernest Simmons, the “Czechoslovak road to socialism” had been revealed as a “last illusion that had seemed the only way out of an aching ideological impasse.”115 Matthiessen took the spring semester off from teaching at Harvard to work on his new book about the now-unfashionable novelist Theodore Dreiser, who was about to become the key antitype of Lionel Trilling’s Liberal Imagination, published later the same year. The book on Dreiser was almost complete when, on April Fool’s Day, just after midnight, Matthiessen jumped to his death from the twelfth-floor window of the Hotel Manger, across from the old North Station in Boston. Matthiessen’s cause of death was reported in the New York Times as “exhaustion brought on by literary research and depression inspired by world conditions.”116 Alongside the obituary, the Times also printed a statement from the left-wing novelist Howard Fast: “Professor Matthiessen is as surely a victim of the cold war and the Truman-Acheson foreign policy as those who face blacklists, jail and academic witchhunts. He, however, paid with his life.”117 It had taken just one day for Matthiessen to be turned into a symbol. Matthiessen’s own suicide note, left on the desk at the Hotel Manger, included a short postscript: “How much the state of the world has to do with my state of mind I do not know. But as a Christian and a socialist believing in international peace, I find myself terribly oppressed by the present tensions.”118 Among the personal effects discovered in Matthiessen’s bureau was a clipping of Time magazine’s review of From the Heart of Europe. The clipping is now preserved in Matthiessen’s archive, along with his certificate of membership in Petr Koubek’s canoe club—the handwritten dedication reads “Varjags Do Not Forget.”

Bílá velryba, or “The White Whale”

Following Matthiessen’s death, one of his former Czech students, Jarka Schejbal, reflected, “Every death is a signal of a new creation, and however paradoxical it may sound, I am sure his death, which I understand, is a stimulus to many of his students, to me among them.”119 Even if Matthiessen’s dream of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism” was now dead, scholars 100

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have shown how “many of the intellectual projects linked to this context became part of the alternative cultural-political canons” in communistera Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, “inspiring the critical thinking of the 1970s and 1980s.”120 In the years to come, Matthiessen’s dissenting literary canon would serve as another kind of usable past: an alternative bridge connecting American and Czech literary cultures across the newly erected Iron Curtain. By following the trajectories of Matthiessen’s students even deeper into the Cold War period, we can see how Matthiessen’s visit to Prague in the autumn of 1947 wasn’t only the end of something; for his Czech students, it was just the beginning. Before Matthiessen had even left Prague, Jan Štern was well on his way to becoming one of the leading communist intellectuals in Czechoslovakia. As Justin Quinn writes in his study of Anglo-Czech poetic relations, Štern was among a small group of hard-line critics who “channeled Zhdanovist theory into Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, creating awful consequences for writers who didn’t get into line immediately.”121 One of his early victims was the poet and artist Jiří Kolář, a leading member of Skupina 42, whom Štern attacked in the pages of Tvorba, in part because of Kolář’s dangerous attachment to Kafka.122 (Kolář’s subsequent arrest didn’t prevent him from later collaborating with Zdeněk Urbánek on state-approved translations of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Song of Myself, both published in 1955.) But Štern eventually became disenchanted with the Stalinism of his youth and embraced the cause of reform communism during the Prague Spring. After the Soviet invasion, Štern was denounced along with hundreds of other leading intellectuals by the new post-1968 regime. Forced to work at a water plant during the ensuing period of “normalization,” Štern ultimately turned to human rights activism and published samizdat material under the pseudonym “Bohemicus.” Štern’s evolution from hard-line ideologue to outspoken dissident was dramatic but not entirely uncommon for disillusioned intellectuals in Czechoslovakia after 1968. For instance, Jiří Hájek, the young Social Democrat (and, sources now reveal, undercover Communist) who had invited Matthiessen to speak at the Jack London Club in 1947, was later a founding member of the Charter 77 movement. In the 1980s, Štern himself became a spokesman for the Chartists. In contrast to Štern’s dramatic transformation, Zdeněk Stříbrný’s long career as Czechoslovakia’s leading Shakespeare scholar was 101

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characterized by a series of political compromises, many of which he struggled to justify later in life. After 1989, Stříbrný reflected back on the letter he had written to Matthiessen that was reprinted in From the Heart of Europe: “This can be read now with hindsight as the naïve effusion of a romantic student, but then I could not know or anticipate the full extent of the brutal totalitarian methods that started to be applied gradually in the whole society.” A year after Matthiessen’s death, Stříbrný earned his doctorate in English, teaching briefly at Charles University before leaving for the quieter ideological atmosphere of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and Arts. While continuing to develop a specialization in Shakespearean drama, he completed a book arguing for Howard Fast as “the forefather of socialist realism in the United States.” In the sixties, Stříbrný returned to Charles University and became chair of the Faculty of English, a position he held until 1969. He succeeded in rehabilitating his old teacher Otakar Vočadlo, but after the onset of normalization, Stříbrný was fired and expelled from the Communist Party.123 After renouncing his former “counterrevolutionary” views, he was allowed to work at the College of Mathematics and Physics as a translator of English-language cybernetics publications. In 1971, he was registered as an informant with the state security forces under the code name Zlato, or “Gold.” In order to continue traveling to conferences and publishing on Shakespeare, he also signed a statement against Charter 77. Looking back on his life in 2006, Stříbrný remained convinced that Matthiessen, “a man of exceptional integrity and courage,” would have avoided many of the compromises that Stříbrný himself had made in the decades after February 1948.124 We will never know. But Stříbrný’s complex life story also connects him to several of the other American writers who followed in Matthiessen’s footsteps, traveling to Czechoslovakia during the Cold War in search of an alternative bridge between East and West. After travel restrictions were relaxed for Czechoslovak citizens in 1963, Stříbrný finally had the opportunity to travel to the United States as he’d hoped to do years earlier. After arriving in San Francisco via Greyhound bus, Stříbrný met Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Bookstore and with his help later tracked down Allen Ginsberg in Greenwich Village. Stříbrný and his wife, Mariana, offered to arrange an invitation for Ginsberg to come to Prague as a guest of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union. When Ginsberg did come to Prague two years later, it was Stříbrný who invited him to read “Howl” in front of hundreds of enthusi102

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astic students at Charles University—in the same auditorium where Matthiessen had given his inaugural lecture on the dissenting canon almost twenty years earlier. In the midseventies, Stříbrný hosted yet another American writer, the novelist Philip Roth. Stříbrný introduced Roth to his friend Věra Saudková, Kafka’s niece. According to Stříbrný, a character in Roth’s 1977 novel The Professor of Desire is based on him. Roth’s character is an aging Czech academic forced into retirement during the period of normalization because of his political views. The old scholar has adopted a rather perverse form of cultural protest against the new regime: he is endlessly laboring at a translation of Melville’s Moby-Dick, even though a perfectly serviceable Czech-language edition already exists. (Moby-Dick had in fact been translated and published in Czech as Bílá velryba [The white whale] in 1947, the same year that Matthiessen lectured on Melville at Charles University.) As the Czech professor confesses to his American visitor in Roth’s novel, “the futility of what I’m doing would appear to be my deepest source of satisfaction.”125 Of course, there were many other options on the wide spectrum between dissent and collaboration. Jarka Schejbal would choose emigration in 1968, rather than living through the disappointments of another failed socialist revolution. Ironically enough, the student who Matthiessen had once described as being “like a boy on any Middle-Western campus” would spend the latter half of his career as a beloved professor of American literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before he left Czechoslovakia, however, he contributed an essay for the Thirty-Fourth Congress of PEN International in New York in 1965, in which he describes how Matthiessen shaped the reception of American literature in Czechoslovakia: After the War Czechoslovak publishing houses were influenced in no small degree in their decisions to bring out new translations of works already translated by the contemporary assessment of their authors in the United States itself. Here we may cite a typical example: the preoccupation of the great five humanistic writers of the middle of the 19th century— Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman—with the possibilities of democracy in the United States, as formulated by F. O. Matthiessen in his American Renaissance. A kind of renaissance of the works of these authors has taken place 103

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also in Czechoslovakia. The critical examination to which they subjected Puritanism, their insight into the duality of good and evil in man, their high recognition of man’s power to face up to his own imperfections and the imperfections of the world, the courage with which these great representatives of socially critical literature penetrated to the core of the individual and of society, fearlessly exposing its unplumbed and often terrifying depths—these are the qualities for which the works of American humanistic writers will always find a large and appreciative reading public in Czechoslovakia.126 Fifteen years after Matthiessen’s suicide, Schejbal could now publicly reaffirm the influence of Matthiessen and his dissenting canon of American literature in Czechoslovakia. During a period of uneven cultural liberalization, Schejbal had become an important translator, introducing the writing of Ralph Ellison, John Hersey, John Steinbeck, and Nathanael West into the Czech language. He also contributed essays on American literature to a groundbreaking new journal called Světová literatura (World literature), which had an immediate galvanizing effect on Czech literary culture after its founding in 1956. One of Schejbal’s allies at Světová literatura was the writer Josef Škvorecký, who would use the journal to smuggle his own dissenting canon of American literature into late-fifties Czechoslovakia, with explosive results.

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Chapter Three

T HE COWA RDS’ GU IDE TO WO RLD LITE RAT U RE JOSE F ŠK VO R ECKÝ ’ S

A ME R I C A N   EP I G RAP H S

At the end of a tumultuous decade, a leading Stalinist literary critic named Ladislav Štoll stepped up to the dais at the 1959 Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union. Near the conclusion of his long-winded speech on the precarious state of the country’s socialist literature, Štoll zeroed in on his target: “And finally, I wish to mention a book that does not belong to the category of the work of the artists I have just mentioned.” He continued solemnly: “It is a book by Škvorecký, which I would prefer not to deal with at all, because its whole spirit is profoundly alien to our beautiful democratic and humanistic literature. It is an artistically dishonest thing, untrue and cynical.”1 The book in question was the debut novel of an up-andcoming writer, editor, and translator named Josef Škvorecký. Perhaps Štoll had avoided naming this book in his speech because Škvorecký had chosen a provocative title for his first novel, which he had no idea would become one of the most infamous Czech-language works of the entire communist era: Zbabělci, or The Cowards. 105

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Štoll’s speech was the culmination of a swift and coordinated attack on The Cowards after its publication in late 1958, which resulted in the novel being banned for the next five years and Škvorecký being firing from the groundbreaking literary journal Světová literatura (World literature).2 After the Communist Party takeover in 1948, Štoll had played a leading role in the Stalinization of Czechoslovak literary culture. A decade later, he was now the deputy chairman of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and rector of the Institute of Social Sciences. His primary goal at the 1959 congress was to undo the cultural damage done in the three years since Nikita Khrushchev had denounced the personality cult of Josef Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. This was the beginning of a period known as “the Thaw” in the Soviet Union, when Stalinist-era censorship policies were relaxed and Western cultural imports reshaped Soviet society.3 In Czechoslovakia, where political reforms came slowly after 1956, The Cowards and new publications like Světová literatura would test the limits of cultural liberalization. The story of The Cowards matters to the history of literary dissent across the Iron Curtain not only because of what the novel’s scandalous reception can tell us about the shifting boundaries of socialist literature in Czechoslovakia after 1956 but also because of the distinctive role that Škvorecký played as a cultural mediator between American and Czech literary cultures for much of the Cold War era. By the time The Cowards was published in 1958, Škvorecký was already well on his way to becoming one of the most influential editors and translators of American literature in communist-era Czechoslovakia, thanks in large part to his work at Světová literatura. In the years after 1956, a period of uneven cultural deStalinization, Škvorecký participated in a golden age of literary translation in Czechoslovakia, with many previously banned or ignored works by US writers suddenly back in play. In his own fiction, Škvorecký worked to realize a new synthesis between Czech and American literary influences, an updated version of F. O. Matthiessen’s dream of a cultural “fusion between the traditions of the East and the West,” but with one major difference: Škvorecký had little interest in the left-internationalist political commitments that once animated Matthiessen’s dissenting canon. Instead, after 1956, Škvorecký worked from within state-socialist literary institutions to promote hybrid cultural forms that dissented from the puritanical values that had dominated Czech literary culture during the Stalinist era. 106

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The first strike against The Cowards was that it contradicted earlier socialist-realist representations of the liberation of Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War. The novel takes place in a small northern Bohemian border town called Kostelec (closely modeled on Škvorecký’s hometown of Náchod) in the closing days of the war.4 The Nazi occupation forces are retreating to the west; refugees and war prisoners stream in from camps recently liberated to the east. The Red Army is expected to arrive any day. Meanwhile, the bourgeois townspeople of Kostelec prepare their uprising by conducting militia drills without any weapons, retreating into their homes at the first hint of danger. The novel is narrated from the close, first-person perspective of Danny Smiřický, a local teenager obsessed with American culture and Dixieland jazz. All Danny cares about is impressing his crush, Irene, and playing saxophone with his irreverent group of friends at their local hangout, a jazz bar called the Port Arthur.5 As Danny admits early in the novel, he’s been a self-absorbed daydreamer since the ninth grade. “That’s when I fell in love with Judy Garland and that’s when it all began,” Škvorecký writes. “I thought about myself and about her, but mainly about myself, and I thought about how things would be if.”6 This is just one of many autobiographical parallels between Škvorecký and his protagonist Danny: it was a boyhood crush on Judy Garland that first drove him to learn how to read and write in English. A related charge against The Cowards was that it was corrupted by dangerous American literary influences. Even before the novel was published, the Slovak novelist and committed socialist-realist Vladimír Mináč criticized Škvorecký and his generation of writers for emulating foreign literary models, especially American modernists like Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos. (Mináč also attacked this generation for their attachment to a more local modernist: Franz Kafka.) A few months after The Cowards was published, several critics who had cautiously thrown their support behind Škvorecký’s novel suddenly reversed course. In January 1959 the influential communist critic Jiří Hájek recanted on his initial praise for The Cowards, offering the following backhanded compliment: “Under its excessively ostentatious and flashy literary stylization, gleaned from contemporary American prose and including many unpleasant details, I nevertheless find intentions more serious than a mere youthful attempt to cause a literary scandal, break a few windows, and find fame with certain provincial proclaimers of internationalism.” Hájek 107

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now detected in Škvorecký’s novel the “odor of decay of the Golden Youth and the breath exuded by the concoction of American contemporary literature.”7 The very next day, the Czechoslovak Army’s paper Obranu lidu (Defense of the people) attacked The Cowards for its foreign expressions drawn from “penny dreadfuls, the illicitly distributed pornography, and the even more illicitly circulating trashy American literature.”8 Given the immediate backlash against The Cowards, we might be forgiven for wondering, how did Škvorecký’s novel ever make it past the censors in the first place? According to a theory advanced by Michael Schonberg, it was all a setup. After three years of cautious liberalization, a conservative faction within the Writers’ Union, led by hard-liners like Štoll, needed a pretext for a broader cultural purge, and Škvorecký was the perfect fall guy: a hip, young intellectual from a bourgeois background, Škvorecký lacked party credentials and was already a conspicuous promoter of contemporary American literature and jazz culture. This is an enticing theory, but as the Czech scholar Petr Šámal has pointed out, there is little evidence in the archives that this was a premeditated scandal. Instead, as Šámal shows, the publishing history of The Cowards is a perfect illustration of the significant gaps, inconsistencies, and factionalism that characterized Czechoslovakia’s state censorship system in the late 1950s.9 And even if there was a coordinated attack on Škvorecký’s novel after it was released, the plan backfired spectacularly. The scandal surrounding the debut of The Cowards would help turn it into one of the most popular Czech-language novels of the entire communist era. In just a few short years, the political winds shifted yet again, and a second edition of The Cowards was approved for publication in 1964, during a second wave of de-Stalinization.10 As the book historian Jiřina Šmejkalová points out, during the communist era, “the stamp of ‘previously forbidden text’ was perhaps the best advertising to attract an audience to a book.”11 By the end of the decade, total sales of The Cowards would reach over one hundred thousand copies, a staggering number in a country of less than ten million. It’s true that Škvorecký was required to make several revisions to the new edition—mostly related to the novel’s negative (not to mention racialized) representation of Soviet soldiers—and he was obliged to provide a new author’s preface defending his novel against its former charges. But he did this, characteristically, by appropriating the socialist and nationalist terminology of his hard-liner critics. For instance, 108

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he assured readers that he had never intended to debase “concepts sacred to the Czech and Slovak people,” like “homeland” or “revolution.” As he further explained, “Danny and his friends do not insult the revolution, but mock the way the bourgeoisie play at making them.”12 Such paratextual maneuvers were common during the entire communist era, but particularly for the new and rebellious generation of writers, editors, and translators who were attempting to navigate the shifting boundaries of official literary culture in the period after 1956. As for the charge of American cultural influence, Škvorecký made an even stronger claim of affiliation in the 1964 edition of his novel. While the 1958 edition of The Cowards had opened with just a single quotation, from the celebrated French writer Romain Rolland, the revised edition incorporated two additional epigraphs. The first was from Hemingway, by far the most popular US writer in the Soviet bloc during the Thaw era and one of Škvorecký’s key stylistic models. The second was from a much more improbable figure: the Jewish American jazzman Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, a mediocre musician, gifted raconteur, and prolific marijuana dealer who claimed to have literally transformed himself into a Black man. Every epigraph is an act of appropriation. But this was particularly true of literary works produced amid the ravenous translation culture of the Thaw era. Although I use the term “Thaw” throughout this chapter, the period after 1956 looked very different in each Eastern bloc state. In Czechoslovakia, where major political reforms would come much later, literary culture became a major battleground in the late fifties and early sixties. Through his work as a writer, editor, and translator after 1956, Škvorecký worked to expand the boundaries of socialist realism by introducing alternative forms of vernacular modernism from the United States—from Hemingway’s hard-boiled prose to Mezzrow’s jazz-inflected slang—into Czech-language literary culture. Against the Stalinist-era ideal of revolutionary purity, Škvorecký and his colleagues at Světová literatura championed a new cultural hybridity, working to integrate literary and cultural resources from abroad that might reinvigorate Czechoslovak literature and culture. And through his epigraphs to The Cowards, Škvorecký has inscribed the history of this effort into one of the central texts of postwar Czech literature. What follows, then, is an epigraphy of The Cowards—the story of a pivotal moment in the history of literary 109

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dissent between the United States and Czechoslovakia as told through the history of a novel and its epigraphs. Literary Trash

“Any work of art that lives was created out of the very substance of its times,” begins the lone epigraph to the first edition of The Cowards, published in 1958. “The artist did not build it himself. The work describes the sufferings, loves, and dreams of his friends.”13 It’s tempting to dismiss this epigraph, taken from the French socialist writer Romain Rolland, as a red herring. Rolland is best known for his ten-volume Jean-Christophe cycle, written between 1904 and 1912, an ambitious expansion of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman form. Whereas The Cowards celebrates its adolescent narrator’s suspended development, Rolland’s protagonist Jean-Christophe Krafft is a German-born musical prodigy closely modeled on Beethoven. In 1915, the Jean-Christophe cycle earned Rolland the Nobel Prize in Literature, “as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings.”14 A socialist and a pacifist for much of his life, by the end of the 1930s Rolland had become one of Europe’s most prominent intellectual apologists for Stalinism.15 As a reward for his loyalty to the Soviet project, Rolland’s books were widely translated and published in popular mass editions that circulated throughout the Soviet bloc well into the fifties, including in Czechoslovakia, where he was already wellknown. It’s possible that Škvorecký believed an epigraph from Rolland might provide his debut novel with a measure of ideological cover. The available evidence, however, suggests that Škvorecký’s quotation of Rolland was entirely sincere. The first typewritten draft of The Cowards, from 1951, actually included two epigraphs, one from Rolland and the other from Jan Drda, one of the most celebrated and powerful communist writers in postwar Czechoslovakia. Drda was the author of a 1946 book called Němá barikáda (The silent barricade), a heroic account of the Prague Uprising that marked the end of the Nazi occupation of Bohemia in May 1945. As Škvorecký confided to his close friend Lubomír Dorůžka, a fellow jazz enthusiast and later a translator of American literature, he had only included the Drda epigraph out of pure “maliciousness.”16 Indeed, as the literary historian 110

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Pavel Janousek has pointed out, Škvorecký envisioned his own wartime novel “as a polemic against the conception of literature represented by Drda’s ‘Silent Barricade.’”17 But by the time The Cowards was finally published in 1958, Drda had swiftly risen through the Communist ranks, serving as chairman of the Writers’ Union before ascending to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Škvorecký wisely decided to remove the Drda epigraph from his manuscript. The Rolland epigraph, however, would remain in all future editions of The Cowards. Škvorecký’s decision to preserve the Rolland epigraph opens itself up to both a sentimental and a Marxist reading. As Škvorecký also informed Dorůžka in his 1951 letter, the Rolland epigraph (which Dorůžka had first suggested) reflected his genuine hope that his novel would speak to the experiences of their own generation during the war—to the “sufferings, loves, and dreams” of their friends.18 Indeed, in the first version of his manuscript, Škvorecký used the real names of friends and acquaintances from his past in Náchod.19 But even if The Cowards is set during the Second World War, it is also a novel profoundly shaped by the material conditions of the revolutionary era in which it was produced: the turbulent decade between 1948 and 1958, when many young Czech writers like Škvorecký were still adjusting to cultural life under state socialism. As we will see, this was also a period when the official status of American literature in Czechoslovakia underwent several major shifts, with significant consequences for the shape of Škvorecký’s early career. As the Rolland epigraph signals, The Cowards is a novel created out of the very substance of its times. Škvorecký began drafting The Cowards in 1948, while he was still an undergraduate at Charles University in Prague, studying English and American literature. Like F. O. Matthiessen’s students, Škvorecký was a part of the wartime generation that rushed into Prague’s reopened universities immediately after the end of the Second World War. Although there is no evidence that he participated in Matthiessen’s seminar on his American Renaissance writers, it’s very likely that Škvorecký attended at least part of the visiting scholar’s popular lecture series on American literature during the fall of 1947. Škvorecký’s mentor during these years was Zdeněk Vančura, one of the first academic specialists on American literature in Central Europe and Matthiessen’s official host in Prague. It was in one of Vančura’s seminars on American literature that Škvorecký first met his lifelong friend and collaborator Dorůžka. Škvorecký wrote a 111

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FIGURE 3.1.  A young Josef Škvorecký at his desk. ABCzech.cz.

paper on Ernest Hemingway; Dorůžka chose F. Scott Fitzgerald. Škvorecký would also write his undergraduate thesis on his beloved Hemingway, followed by a doctoral dissertation on the subject of Thomas Paine and “his significance today.” During his student days, Škvorecký also wrote fiction. A collection of his early stories, called “The New Canterbury Tales,” won a university-wide contest, which came with a promise of publication. But Škvorecký would have to wait more than a decade to see any of these stories in print, as his promising start as a writer was interrupted by the Communist Party’s takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948. We can get a sense of how Škvorecký and his friends experienced the dramatic days surrounding the Communist takeover from his early story “Spectator on a February Night.”20 Written in the months following “Victorious February” but not published for many years, the story takes place over a single night as Prague is gripped by political demonstrations and counterdemonstrations. We are introduced to a group of students, pro-Western but leaning socialist, who take shelter inside the American Institute located above the Prague YMCA. The institute’s neon glass sign 112

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has recently been shattered by rocks, evidently thrown by young comrades from the nearby Communist Party headquarters on Náměstí Republiky. Meanwhile, inside the institute, the students “hold the fort,” striking a series of self-conscious Hollywood poses and interspersing their conversation with slang borrowed from American books and movies.21 An American flag hangs on the wall alongside posters of Truman and Roosevelt, and the radio is tuned in to an American broadcast. One student, the secretary of the Young Czech Socialists, leafs through a brochure for Pan American Airways, planning his escape. The story’s protagonist, Joe, poses as an apolitical cynic. (In this respect, he is an autobiographical prototype for Danny, the protagonist of The Cowards.) As the Communist Party’s putsch unfolds, Joe feels a “perverse kind of pleasure” and realizes that this is the first time that he’s felt truly alive since the end of the Nazi occupation. But he is also still considering the option of fleeing the country.22 This was a common dilemma for many Czechs and Slovaks in the late forties: in 1948 alone, tens of thousands would choose emigration over yet another change of regime. By the end of the story, Joe has talked himself into escaping across the Czech-German frontier in a wealthy Jewish friend’s Packard, in part for the adventure and in part so he can hit on the young socialist leader’s girlfriend, who is along for the ride. For their nighttime journey across the border, Joe can bring only one suitcase, so he selects his most stylish outfit, “a suit tailored from the fabric of American army officer’s uniforms, dyed dark brown.”23 In reality, Škvorecký would not emigrate for another two decades, until a year after a Soviet-led invasion put a final end to the Prague Spring in 1968. Instead, after graduating from Charles University in 1951, Škvorecký was conscripted into a tank division of the Czechoslovak Army for compulsory military service, an experience that would later inspire his novel Tankový prapor (The tank battalion; the novel would be published abroad as The Republic of Whores after Škvorecký’s departure in 1969). As Škvorecký lamented to his friend Dorůžka, they still hadn’t managed to escape “the shadow of the war.” To make matters worse, all of the new “inconveniences” since 1948 (a euphemism for methods of Stalinist repression) were interfering with their ability to enjoy the “better things in life,” which Škvorecký listed to Dorůžka as Hemingway novels, jazz records, and girls. Škvorecký instead projected all of these obsessions into the manuscript of his novel in progress, which he typed up and sent to Dorůžka during his 113

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year of military service. In another letter to Dorůžka, Škvorecký admitted that he wasn’t exactly sure what kind of novel he’d produced. “Whatever it is,” he wrote, “it is definitely not a spiteful, camouflaged defamation of revolution or revolutionaries.”24 Škvorecký was quoting a critical attack on the recent Czech translation of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, published by one of their former university teachers. Whatever kind of novel Škvorecký had produced, he knew he had to tread carefully. In the early fifties, the young Communist state was still working to institute a strict regime of cultural regulation, supervision, and censorship based on the Soviet model. As Shawn Clybor has described, the institution of Stalinism in the first years after 1948 was “fragmented, haphazard, and improvisational.”25 But in 1953, the Central Committee created several new institutions that gave the state significantly more control over national literary culture. The most powerful of these institutions was the Hlavní správa tiskového dohledu (Main Administration of Press Supervision), known by the acronym HSTD. Initially operating in secret, the HSTD combined the functions of the Soviet Union’s two most notorious censorship agencies: Glavlit (short for General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press) and Goskomizdat (which focused particularly on the ideological control of literature). Unlike in many of the other Eastern bloc countries, however, Czechoslovakia’s central censorship agency was ominously housed within the Ministry of the Interior, in close institutional proximity to the secret police. Of course, the censors who worked at the HSTD likely conceived of their mission in more positive terms.26 The Communist Party’s stated goal during this era was to boost mass readership while also working to establish a new corpus of socialist literature that incorporated ideologically acceptable texts from within both Czech and Slovak nationalist literary traditions. But as Jiřina Šmejkalová points out, “the whole system had the effect of reducing the variety of accessible texts, thus unifying, conserving, and protecting canons.”27 In other words, state censorship was also a process of socialist canon formation. As part of this process, the availability of American literature in Czech translation was significantly restricted during the Stalinist period, particularly after the creation of the HSTD. Soon after its creation, the HSTD began enacting strict controls on the national library system, creating a new “List of Hostile, Unsuitable, Antiquated, and Undesirable 114

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Literature” (Seznam nepřátelské, závadné, zastaralé a nežádoucí literatury) that explicitly banned many texts by US writers, including Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (categorized as “cosmopolitan”), Richard Wright’s Native Son (“politically objectionable”), William Faulkner’s A Light in August (“decadent” and “morally objectionable”), and T. S. Eliot’s poetry and John Steinbeck’s novels (both categorized as “formalists,” that exceptionally flexible Marxist-Leninist category). In some cases, the HSTD had to invent a special category for a writer, as when the work of the obscure author H. G. Carlisle was rejected as “American bourgeois literature feigning puritanism” (Americká měšťácká literatura předstírající puritanismus).28 Not everything about the Communist Party’s approach to cultural regulation was entirely unprecedented in Czechoslovakia. Take, for example, the official campaign against literární brak, or “literary trash.”29 By the time the Communist Party seized power in 1948, the term “brak” had long been used in Czechoslovakia to denigrate popular literary genres, like detective novels and Westerns, especially those imported from abroad. Not only did the Communist Party’s campaign against brak have immediate antecedents in the period of the Nazi occupation, but it also drew on older strains of Czech literary nationalism that promoted discourses of cultural purity. Conservative elites in Bohemia had long feared that Czech literary culture, conceived as a native tradition of belles lettres, would be overwhelmed by the rising popularity of both pulp genres and foreign translations. As Pavel Jánaček points out, according to the logic of brak, “the existing literary periphery was depicted as a parasitical system, a malignant tumor, a dangerous aggressor, which like a virus penetrates Czech literary culture from without, causing it to disintegrate.”30 After 1948, the Communist Party was very successful at co-opting these conservative, nationalist discourses. Although a new cadre of party officials had replaced the old bourgeois elite, the cultural battle against brak was easily translated into the puritanical language of Stalinist cultural theory.31 Well into the fifties, when Škvorecký was still revising The Cowards, ideologues in Czechoslovakia continued to argue that contamination from abroad, especially literary trash from the United States, was a great danger to the construction of a new socialist culture. Although no American detective novels would be published in Czechoslovakia until after 1956, another form of genre fiction did begin to fill the country’s bookshelves during the Stalinist years: socialist 115

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realism. Years later, Škvorecký would point out how the typical socialist-realist novel of the postwar era was really just “a type of socialist western”: I always compared so-called socialist realism with the American western, because they are the same types of formulaic fiction. The original western, for example, features a ranch, a band of desperadoes stealing cattle from it, a local sheriff who’s an incompetent, and a stranger who appears out of nowhere. The stranger is fed up with the desperadoes, and decides to take care of them himself, which he does. He also winds up marrying the daughter of the ranch owner, and off they go together into the sunset. Compare that to the socialist-realist novel: here there’s a collective farm, a band of saboteurs or lazy workers slowing down production, local authorities who are incompetents, and a Party Secretary from the district capital who appears out of nowhere. He exposes the saboteurs and saves the farm. Then he marries the local school teacher, and off they go together for someplace else.32 All that was missing was “the rising and setting sun.”33 By the early fifties, Škvorecký was already well acquainted with both these genre formulas. As a teenager, he had submitted several of his own stories to the Czech-language pulp weekly Rodokaps, an abbreviation of “Románů do kapsy” (Pocket novels). During the Second World War, Rodokaps became a primary target in the Czech cultural establishment’s battle against brak. Despite the Communist Party’s ongoing campaign against literary trash during the fifties, it’s important to point out that American literature did not disappear entirely from Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1956. Even during the Stalinist years, a select group of classic American writers continued to be published, studied, and discussed in Czechoslovakia. In 1953, the same year that the Communist Party created the HSTD, they also established a publishing house specializing in foreign literary translations, called Státní nakladatelství krásné literatury, hudby a umění (State Publishing House for Belles Lettres, Music, and Art), better known by the acronym SNKLHU.34 In its first few years of existence, SNKLHU reprinted 116

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works by several of F. O. Matthiessen’s beloved American Renaissance writers, including Hawthorne and Melville. (Emerson and Thoreau were ignored, while Whitman was now published by a state publishing house administered by the Czechoslovak military, with a more liberal editorial policy but only limited distribution.) During these years, scholars and critics in Czechoslovakia did their best to redescribe American literary history according to official Communist Party ideology. For instance, in 1953, Škvorecký’s former professor Zdeněk Vančura published a volume entitled “The Literature of American Colonial Struggle and Liberation War in the Eighteenth Century” (Literatura amerického koloniálního odporu a osvobozenecké války v 18. století ), which recast American Revolutionary literary culture in Marxist-Leninist terms.35 While a dead, nineteenth-century writer like Mark Twain could still be published as part of SNKLHU’s popular Library of Classics series, editors were more selective when it came to contemporary US writers. Early twentieth-century “critical realists” like Theodore Dreiser and Jack London, both of whom SNKLHU published in the mid-1950s, were also considered safe. But their experience with promoting Howard Fast offered a cautionary tale. In 1953, SNKLHU published a study of Fast called Průkopník socialistického realismu v U.S.A. (The pioneer of socialist realism in the U.S.A.), written by Zdeněk Stříbrný, a classmate of Škvorecký’s at Charles University and one of Matthiessen’s former pupils. But the communist world’s love affair with Fast was short-lived. After the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, Fast publicly broke with the Communist Party, and SNKLHU was forced to cancel a planned edition of his collected works after just one volume. This sudden reversal demonstrates why SNKLHU’s editors were so cautious about publishing works of contemporary American literature. The problem with living writers, even those on the left, was that they sometimes changed their minds. Still, the SNKLHU editors’ discretion underscores an important point: because responsibility for implementing censorship policies was dispersed across several institutions, the Communist Party’s ideological control of Czechoslovak literary culture was never total, even at the height of the Stalinist era. Furthermore, as scholars of censorship across many different historical regimes have shown, state regulation of cultural life often has the paradoxical effect of generating new zones of unofficial culture. 117

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In the midfifties, several of Škvorecký’s typewritten drafts started making the rounds among the denizens of Prague’s new subterranean literary scene.36 On the strength of his story “Spectator on a February Night,” Jindřich Chalupecký, an influential critic and theorist of avant-garde culture, agreed to read the entire manuscript of The Cowards. Although Chalupecký was turned off by the novel’s “unliterary” prose style and found the draft, at over eight hundred pages, much too long, Škvorecký had more luck impressing the avant-garde circle of writers and artists who gathered at Jiří Kolář’s apartment in Vršovice. These were the heirs to Skupina 42, those devotees of Franz Kafka and Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot and Langston Hughes. In 1956, Kolář and Josef Hiršal organized a very early samizdat anthology featuring work by several young up-and-coming writers, including Bohumil Hrabal, Jan Zábrana, and Václav Havel. Their volume, which they called Život je všude: Almanach z roku 1956 (Life is everywhere: An almanac from the year 1956), also featured a contribution from a young writer identified only by the pseudonym “Josef Pepýt.”37 The story, entitled “One Day in May,” was the opening chapter of The Cowards. Škvorecký may have still felt the reach of the censor in 1956, but soon he would have an opportunity to publish a novel under his own name. A year later, in 1957, the editors at Československý spisovatel, the country’s most prestigious state publishing house, were bold enough to put forward a novella by Škvorecký called “Konec nylonového věku” (The end of the nylon age).38 The phrase “nylon age” referred to the brief postwar period between 1945 and 1948, when young Czechs like Škvorecký could still thrill to the rhythms of American jazz music. At the heart of Škvorecký’s novella, originally titled Sadness in the Land of Socialism, is a love triangle that plays out at a ball hosted by the same American Institute featured in his story “Spectator on a February Night,” except a year has passed since the Communist takeover. “The End of the Nylon Age” was considered a safer choice to submit to the censors than The Cowards, in part because the novella avoided the politically sensitive topic of the Soviet liberation of Bohemia. And even though Danny—the protagonist of The Cowards—is also one of the main characters of “The End of the Nylon Age,” Škvorecký’s novella is narrated from the more ideologically acceptable third-person perspective. “The End of the Nylon Age” had little trouble making it through the initial approval process at Československý spisovatel. The book’s 118

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release was even promoted in the publisher’s catalog for the upcoming 1958 season with the following description: A novel by an as yet unknown author, in which the story of a few people during a single night, an evening at a ball, reveals the face of a young generation spoiled by war, a picture of youngsters who view life and the world through a delicate veil of nylon fabric. Formally, the author strikes a new tone in our prose, above all through his sense of poetic realism.39 But before the book could be typeset, it needed to undergo one additional round of review at the HSTD. A minor scandal broke out when the censor assigned to the case strongly objected to both the book’s prurient subject matter—Škvorecký’s characters seemed to only care about jazz, drinking, and sex—and its highly unusual prose style, peppered with phrases borrowed from American slang. Although the plan to publish “The End of the Nylon Age” was ultimately scrapped, the censors at the HSTD and the editors at Československý spisovatel arrived at a last-minute compromise with Škvorecký: the editors could substitute a less objectionable work for publication in the upcoming 1958 season. Ironically, the book they hastily agreed on was The Cowards.40 Nearly a decade after Škvorecký began drafting The Cowards, his novel was finally ready to come up for air. But after so many years of Stalinist-era cultural regulation, were Czech readers ready for The Cowards? Here, Škvorecký would also play a key role in clearing the way for his own novel’s reception. During the first years of the Thaw era, he joined a new generation of editors, translators, and critics in Czechoslovakia that was working to create a more open critical context in which new and unorthodox novels like The Cowards could not only be published but perhaps even be celebrated. But first, Škvorecký and his allies would need to reclaim the literary trash of American culture as world literature. World Literature

In 1956, Škvorecký published an essay in one of the first issues of Světová literatura (World literature) called “The Literary Opinions of Ernest Hemingway.” In the brief critical essay, which is structured around quota119

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tions drawn from across Hemingway’s works, Škvorecký argues that pravda, or “truth,” is the “fundamental axiom” of Hemingway’s entire theory of art and the “highest authority” in all of his work. He then pointedly quotes Hemingway to argue that it is necessary for a writer to seek the truth irrespective of their own moral or political views and “regardless of whether the truth discovered threatens the artist’s reputation, social status, or even personal security.”41 Promoting this idea in the immediate aftermath of the revelations of Khrushchev’s secret speech, Škvorecký was stepping right into Thaw-era debates about the meaning of truth and sincerity in a socialist literary culture. The essay also includes the Hemingway quotation that Škvorecký would eventually use as an epigraph to the second edition of The Cowards: “A writer’s job is to tell the truth.”42 Škvorecký’s source for all these quotations about truth was Hemingway’s introduction to a book called Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time, a thousand-page anthology of war writing also edited by Hemingway. Men at War was first published in 1942, and revised paperback editions were released in both 1952 and 1955, each with subtle edits to Hemingway’s original anti-fascist introduction to make the anthology more suitable for the United States’ new confrontation with Soviet communism. It is not clear whether Škvorecký picked up a copy of the unwieldy first edition, perhaps left behind by a passing American soldier at the end of the Second World War, or whether he came across a later edition in the restricted section of one of Prague’s communist-era libraries. Both Cold War editions preserve the most famous quotation from Hemingway’s original introduction, which Škvorecký would later feature as an epigraph to the second edition of The Cowards. The Hemingway epigraph was therefore a callback. Two years before the first edition of The Cowards was published in 1958, Škvorecký had already included this quotation in “The Literary Opinions of Ernest Hemingway.” Indeed, the Hemingway quotation served as a kind of mission statement for Škvorecký’s early work as an editor, critic, and translator at Světová literatura. The establishment of Světová literatura was one of the most important cultural developments of the entire Thaw era in Czechoslovakia. Created by SNKLHU in 1956, the journal was envisioned as a Czechlanguage corollary to the Soviet journal Inostrannaya literatura (Foreign literature), established the previous year.43 After 1956, new Soviet bloc 120

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FIGURE 3.2.  Cover of the first edition of Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time, edited

by Ernest Hemingway and published by Crown Books in 1942. Penguin Random House LLC.

journals like Inostrannaya literatura and Světová literatura introduced an entirely new attitude toward European and American literature to the readers of the communist world. Not only did Světová literatura provide the first major aesthetic challenge to socialist realism in Czechoslovakia after 1948, but the journal also provided a view of cultural life in 121

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the West that had been largely unavailable during the Stalinist era. And they did this largely through the work of translation—both linguistic and cultural.44 By translating contemporary works of literature from around the world, Škvorecký and the other editors of the journal expanded the boundaries of what could be published, read, and discussed in Czechoslovakia in the late fifties. Not everything the journal put out was new: Thaw-era literary culture was also shaped by processes of rehabilitation and republication, by the rediscovery of lost cultural continuities. In the first years after 1956, Světová literatura reintroduced a number of major writers who had been either banned or simply ignored during the Stalinist era. One of these writers was Franz Kafka, who had not been published in the Czech language since before the Communist takeover of 1948. In 1957, a full five years before Kafka was officially rehabilitated by Marxist critics at Liblice Castle, Světová literatura published a Czech-language translation of Kafka’s story “The Burrow.” Škvorecký would later claim it was he who recommended this story for inclusion in one of the earliest issues of the journal. In an essay titled “Franz Kafka, Jazz, the Antisemitic Reader, and Other Marginal Matters,” Škvorecký describes how he first discovered Kafka’s writing as a jazzobsessed adolescent during the Nazi occupation, the primal scene of all Škvorecký’s autobiographical writing, fictional or otherwise.45 After coming across an article attacking Kafka and his Jewish literary peers in an obscure volume of wartime propaganda called “The Anti-Semitic Reader” (Protižidovská čítánka), Škvorecký tracked down a copy of “Der Bau” (the original German title of “The Burrow”). As he discovered, “it was simply the story of someone caught in a burrow who is being slowly, implacably cornered by a powerful and deadly enemy seeking his life.”46 Škvorecký next spotted a banned copy of the Czech translation of Kafka’s The Castle in the shop window of the avant-garde Mánes Gallery in Prague. At the time, Škvorecký was playing hooky from his conscripted job at a munitions factory in northern Bohemia to attend an amateur jazz festival in Prague, another risky activity during the Nazi occupation. “So, early in my acquaintance with Kafka,” he explains, “a strong associative link was formed between what I loved most, jazz music, and the mysterious figure from Prague Old Town.”47 Škvorecký would bring both interests with him to his work at Světová literatura. 122

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Alongside Pavel Eisner’s translation of “The Burrow,” Škvorecký commissioned a portrait of Kafka by the artist František Tichý, whom he remembered as the illustrator of a Czech-language edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The same issue also published a critical essay by Eisner, elaborating on his influential “Prague Interpretation” of Kafka’s literary imagination. As Veronika Tuckerova has shown, Eisner’s critical effort to locate Kafka’s writing within the relative cultural isolation of Prague’s Jewish ghetto would prove influential not only to Marxist-revisionist critics in the 1960s but also to theorists of underground culture, like I. M. Jirous, after 1968.48 A year after the appearance of “The Burrow” in Světová literatura, Eisner’s full translation of The Trial would finally be published by Československý spisovatel—but, like The Cowards, only after a ten-year delay. The irony was never lost on Škvorecký that the Prague writer first had to be reintroduced to Czech readers in a journal of world literature. But Škvorecký’s primary beat as deputy editor in chief of Světová literatura was not kafkárna. It was English-language literature, with a specialization in contemporary American writing. As Škvorecký puts it, “For the most part we compiled lists of dubious authors, such as Evelyn Waugh, William Faulkner, Alfred Jarry, Henry Miller, and so on, and devised ways to smuggle them into the pages of our journal.”49 In late 1956, a few months after his first essay on Hemingway appeared in the magazine, Škvorecký published an even bolder essay called “Some Views on American Literature.” Despite its understated title, Škvorecký’s essay was the strongest signal yet that the status of contemporary American writing was undergoing a major shift in post-1956 Czechoslovakia. The occasion for Škvorecký’s essay was the publication of František Vrba’s Czech-language translation of Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea. A year earlier, the appearance of a Russian translation of The Old Man and the Sea in the pages of Inostrannaya literatura had been a major event in the USSR. Before the Second World War, Hemingway had been one of the most celebrated American authors in the Soviet Union. In the late thirties, Soviet critics (not to mention, later, the KGB) had been openly solicitous of Hemingway, who they believed had strong leftist sympathies on the basis of his activities during the Spanish Civil War. They would ultimately be disappointed. While Soviet critics embraced Hemingway’s reportage from the Civil War and his anti-fascist play The Fifth Column, 123

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the Russian translation of For Whom the Bell Tolls was rejected for publication because of its negative portrayal of Comintern officials in Spain.50 Between 1939 and 1955, Hemingway’s work couldn’t be published in the Soviet Union. The Russian-language publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1955 was therefore a signal to critics across the Soviet bloc that it was once again acceptable not only to discuss Hemingway’s writing openly but even to express a degree of admiration.51 In “Some Views,” Škvorecký goes even further. He sets up his reading of The Old Man and the Sea by arguing that the recent Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, and the subsequent reevaluation of Stalinism, also meant that it was time to rethink the previous era’s criticism of American literature and culture. According to Škvorecký, what had been passed off as literary criticism in Czechoslovakia prior to 1956 was “in the best cases incomplete, and in the worst cases irresponsibly fraudulent.” And these errors could not simply be justified by ideology: “In our efforts to create a socialist culture it was not necessary to harm and often criminally disorient our readers.”52 As a prime example, Škvorecký pointed to the divergent critical reception of For Whom the Bell Tolls across the Soviet bloc. Unlike in the Soviet Union, a popular Czech translation of For Whom the Bell Tolls had been published in three editions between 1946 and 1947.53 Even though the novel was banned in Czechoslovakia in the early fifties, Czech readers were in a much better position than their Russian counterparts to spot the distortions and misrepresentations of the novel that had appeared in Soviet criticism before 1956. But Škvorecký’s primary foil in “Some Views” is not some Stalinist critic from either the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia. Instead, his main critical adversary is Milton Howard, a left-wing American journalist and editor of the US-based communist magazine Masses & Mainstream.54 During the 1950s, Masses & Mainstream was one of the only American publications allowed to circulate in Czechoslovakia, so when Howard published a review of The Old Man and the Sea in the magazine in 1952, he had an outsize influence on how Hemingway’s latest work was presented to Czech readers. The Old Man and the Sea had first appeared earlier the same year in Henry Luce’s popular Life magazine, and Howard uses Luce as a stand-in for his entire capitalist class, those “planners of the national betrayal of America.” According to Howard’s crude Marxist analysis, because Luce and his associates had been unable to find their next “Business Man 124

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As Hero,” they were now trying to appropriate the working-class protagonist of Hemingway’s novella. Or, as Howard puts it, “they will now try to hijack a Cuban fisherman, Santiago, as their Siegfried, and they will hold him up before their eyes and paint his picture maybe on their jetbombers.”55 According to Howard, Hemingway was complicit in the capitalist cooptation of his novella. The Old Man and the Sea, he writes, is “full of that ambiguity which makes it acceptable to the horror-men of the jelly bomb and the premeditated atomic massacre.” For Howard, Hemingway’s modernist commitment to formal ambiguity and his abstract ideal of heroism are strategies of evasion, enabling him to avoid the “concrete heroism of the social struggle.”56 In “Some Views,” Škvorecký acknowledges that Hemingway had been subject to a degree of “bourgeois” absorption, but he also points out that the same was true of many of the most celebrated Czech writers from the pre-communist era. As examples, he lists Czech writers as politically and aesthetically distinct as the national revival icon Božena Němcová, the realist storyteller Jan Neruda, the surrealist poet Vítězslav Nezval, and the anti-fascist writer Karel Čapek, celebrated for both his science fiction and his social satire.57 Škvorecký argues, “The ideologues of the ruling class have naturally always tried to appropriate great and humanistic writers.” To further defend Hemingway, Škvorecký strategically invokes new discourses of Marxist humanism, which were coming into vogue during the Thaw era. Along those lines, Škvorecký asserts that The Old Man and the Sea “does not function in the manner of a social novel, but in the manner of a lyrical generalization, which does not aim to depict social reality, but rather captures the essential dignity of man.”58 Škvorecký’s larger goal in “Some Views” was to use the example of Hemingway to argue for a wider reintegration of contemporary American writing into Czech literary culture. But as with all of his work at Světová literatura, Škvorecký was also helping to create a new critical context in which his own work would eventually be received. When The Cowards was first released in 1958, it was therefore inevitable that his debut novel would be associated with Hemingway’s influence. The American writer was everywhere that year: yet another Czech-language edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, this time translated by Jaroslav Schejbal, was released in 1958, alongside Škvorecký’s own translation of A Farewell to Arms.59  Škvorecký had admired the latter novel ever since he first read an English-language 125

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edition near the end of the Nazi occupation. Indeed, Hemingway’s famous rendering of the retreat from Capretto—which was also excerpted and included in Hemingway’s Men at War anthology—was clearly a model for the stream of soldiers and refugees that pass through Kostelec in the middle section of The Cowards. Škvorecký has also acknowledged that A Farewell to Arms was a major influence on the controversial dialogue of his debut novel. According to Škvorecký, Czech literature in the first half of the twentieth century still employed a formal version of his native language, usually referred to as spisovná čeština, “without contractions, distortions, or slang.”60 Elsewhere, Škvorecký has described literary Czech at the end of the Second World War as being analogous to pre-Twain American English.61 Although this is a simplified (and self-interested) account of the development of Czech literary prose, it is true that Škvorecký’s distinctive vernacular style, which more closely reflected the way Czech was actually spoken in his native region of Bohemia, set his writing apart from most Czech-language fiction of the early communist era. The Hemingway epigraph is therefore overdetermined. It is both a callback to Škvorecký’s work at Světová literatura and a stylistic mission statement for his own writing since the end of the Second World War. But its eventual inclusion in the second edition of The Cowards is also a source of significant intertextual irony, highlighting the novel’s satirical elements. Both Men at War, the source for the Hemingway epigraph, and The Cowards are books centrally concerned with the issue of cowardice. But Škvorecký’s novel subverts many of the same martial virtues that Hemingway promotes in his wartime anthology, which incorporates the experiences of “fighting men” from Julius Caesar up through Winston Churchill.62 In a section of Men at War dedicated to the theme of courage, Hemingway included the entirety of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, which is a very useful counter-text to The Cowards. (Indeed, Škvorecký wrote the foreword for Jiří Valja’s Czech translation of Crane’s novel in 1958.) The Cowards proceeds as if the opening camp scene from Red Badge of Courage were repeated for seven straight days. The final battle with the Nazi occupiers is repeatedly deferred, as if Škvorecký never wants the Soviet liberators to arrive. Near the end of the novel, however, Danny and his friends join the communist partisans and attack a band of retreating Nazis. A German tank is destroyed. It is therefore tempting to read the final section of 126

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The Cowards as a failure of nerve on Škvorecký’s part, a partial betrayal of the subversive spirit of the novel’s earlier chapters and a reversion to genre formula. Even so, the ending is a hybrid affair: one part Western, the other socialist realist. At its conclusion, we are even treated to a setting sun. The result is a highly ambivalent text. And unlike Red Badge of Courage, Škvorecký’s novel never answers the question its title invites: Who exactly are the cowards? Are they the members of the jazz band who avoid military service? Or the “bourgeois” citizens who pull their tricolor flags back into their windows at the first sign of Nazis? There are many candidates in the novel, but Škvorecký later claimed that he wasn’t even sure of the answer when he wrote The Cowards: “Cross my heart and hope to die, I don’t know. I don’t know why and I don’t know who. It just occurred to me, that’s all. Maybe it’s a challenge to take a look at the truthfulness of the bathos of lofty words (like the word cowards).”63 If anything, it is the ideological rhetoric of heroism that Škvorecký is satirizing in The Cowards, a modernist tactic he may have picked up from Hemingway’s early fiction. By the time Hemingway edited Men at War, however, his writing too was filled with the bathos of lofty words. Across the entire Soviet bloc, Khrushchev’s Thaw would ultimately change how the Second World War was remembered and represented in literature, film, and art. As one recent history puts it, “Going against the debunked socialist realist canon, the question of heroism became one of the most recurrent cultural topics of the 1960s.”64 In Czechoslovakia, The Cowards would pave the way for such classic works as Bohumil Hrabal’s 1965 novel Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky), which Jiří Menzel turned into one of the central films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1968. But the first edition of The Cowards wasn’t published in the midsixties. Instead, Škvorecký’s debut novel was released at the end of 1958, immediately preceding a moment of Stalinist cultural retrenchment. The battle over the “truthfulness” of socialist representations of the Second World War was still being fought. When the Communist Party ideologue Ladislav Štoll attacked Škvorecký at the annual Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union in 1959, he referred to The Cowards as “an artistically dishonest thing, untrue and cynical.” He also drew on the nativist discourse of literární brak, declaring that “unhealthy influences” from abroad would not be allowed to “deflect our literature from the path already 127

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embarked upon.”65 In the wake of Štoll’s speech, Škvorecký was fired from his job at Světová literatura, and The Cowards was pulled from bookshelves. As part of the hard-liner backlash against The Cowards, liberal-minded editors were purged from the new and daring literary journal Květen (May) and from the state publishing house Československý spisovatel, which had taken the risk of publishing Škvorecký’s debut novel. But this was hardly the end of Škvorecký’s career as a writer, or as an influential editor and translator of American literature. Although Škvorecký was now forced to publish his own fiction (and some of his translations) under a pseudonym—including a series of pulpy detective novels written with the poet-translator Jan Zábrana—he was still able to retain an editorial position at the prestigious publishing house SNKLHU. Among the new translations he produced over the next five years were two popular collaborations with his old friend Lubomír Dorůžka, on Czech-language editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and William Faulkner’s A Fable. When Hemingway died by suicide in 1961, two obituaries appeared in the official Czech-language press, both written by Škvorecký under his own byline. By then, it had been five years since Škvorecký had first drafted Hemingway into Thaw-era critical debates about the meaning of “truth” and the value of contemporary American writing in a post-Stalinist literary culture. And even if Škvorecký and his allies had been defeated in their early battle over the publication of The Cowards, they had already opened up a second front on the slippery terrain of cultural authenticity. Really the Blues

After being called in front of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in December 1963, Škvorecký learned that a second edition of The Cowards would be approved for publication the following year. Alongside the epigraphs from Rolland and Hemingway—both winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature—Škvorecký decided to open the new 1964 edition of The Cowards with a third quotation from a more obscure cultural figure, an American jazzman named Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow: There was a revolution simmering in Chicago, led by a gang of pink-cheeked high school kids. These rebels in plus-fours, huddled on a bandstand instead of a soap-box, passed out riffs 128

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instead of handbills, but the effect was the same. Their jazz was a collectively improvised nosethumbing at all pillars of all communities, one big syncopated Bronx cheer for the righteous squares everywhere. Jazz was the only language they could find to preach their fire-eating message. These upstart small-fries . . . started hatching their plots way out in . . . a wellto-do suburb where all the days were Sabbaths, a sleepy-time neighborhood big as a yawn and just about as lively, loaded with shade-trees and clipped lawns and a groggy-eyed population that never came out of its coma except to turn over. . . . They wanted to blast every highminded citizen clear out of his easy chair with their yarddog growls and gully-low howls.66 The source for this epigraph was a 1946 book called Really the Blues, an autobiographical collaboration between Mezzrow and the leftist writer Bernard Wolfe, who had briefly served as Trotsky’s secretary during his exile in Mexico.67 If Hemingway’s celebrated prose style represented one form of the vernacular modernism that Škvorecký was attempting to reintroduce to Czech readers during the Thaw era, Mezzrow’s jazz-inflected slang represented yet another. During the fifties, Škvorecký turned to African American literary figures like Langston Hughes to help him reintegrate cultural forms associated with Black Harlem into Czech literary culture. Ironically, as one of his interlocutors Škvorecký also turned to a White man who claimed to be a “voluntary negro.” “The Mezz,” as he was later called, was actually born Milton Mesirow to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in Chicago, “on a windy night in 1899, along with the Twentieth Century.”68 As Mezzrow describes in Really the Blues, early brushes with anti-Semitism along with his love of jazz led him to relocate to Harlem, where he began to self-identify as a Black man—with only a trace of irony. In Really the Blues, Mezzrow claims to have existed in a kind of racial “no man’s land,” which enabled him to serve as Harlem’s “Link between the Races.”69 Although Mezzrow was only ever a passable jazz clarinetist, he did become a prolific marijuana dealer and regular supplier to some of Harlem’s greatest jazz performers, including Louis Armstrong. When Mezzrow was finally arrested for drug possession and sent to Riker’s Island in 1940, he demanded to be put in the “colored” section of the prison, in part because he figured there was a much higher propor129

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tion of actual criminals among the prison’s White population.70 An article in Ebony magazine from 1946 describes Mezzrow as follows: “He has been color-conscious for a long time; so much so that years ago he crossed the color line, married a Negro girl and became a Negro officially and for the records. His draft card even reads: ‘Race, Negro.’”71 What are we to make of Škvorecký’s secondhand appropriation of Harlem jazz language via a White cultural figure as eccentric as Mezzrow? Really the Blues has been explored both as a midcentury artifact of White hipster appropriation of Black culture and as a strange, new twist on the much older tradition of the African American passing narrative. Scholars still debate whether Mezzrow’s cross-racial performance was a doomed quest for Black authenticity or “a platform of resistance against a tranquilized America and Jewishness.”72 Even if much of the original cultural, and indeed racial, context of Mezzrow’s “experiment in identity” was left behind when the text of Really the Blues crossed the Iron Curtain, African American jazz writing helped Škvorecký stake out a position that celebrated cultural marginality within communist-era Czechoslovakia. On a purely technical level, Really the Blues was an invaluable resource for a writer-translator like Škvorecký who was attempting to reintroduce the language of jazz to Czech literary culture during the Thaw era. Wolfe and Mezzrow had conceived Really the Blues with a mainstream, White American audience in mind, so they included several appendixes at the end of the book: one features a standard-English translation of a chapter composed entirely in jive, while another offers an extensive glossary of jazz slang and hipster phrases. Even with these resources in hand, translating Mezzrow’s flamboyant prose into Czech was no easy task. In his translation of the Mezzrow epigraph, Škvorecký chooses to render an expression like “yarddog growls and gully-low howls” as a more generic Czech phrase, something closer to “honk and howl and bellow.”73 Beyond Mezzrow’s language, there was also the challenge of conveying the unfamiliar contexts of Chicago and Harlem jazz scenes. As the ellipses in the Mezzrow epigraph signal, Škvorecký decided to excise many of Mezzrow’s more local references in order to transpose his “fire-eating message” about the subversive potential of jazz into a very different cultural, political, and racial context.74 By the late 1950s, jazz already had a long and tumultuous history in Bohemia. During the interwar era of the First Republic, Prague was recog130

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nized as one of the easternmost capitals of jazz in Europe. But during the Second World War, jazz music—and particularly swing music—was prohibited across the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, giving rise to new discourses about jazz as a form of cultural resistance. The Cowards is set at the conclusion of this period of prohibition, which was also the dawn of a new golden era for jazz culture in Czechoslovakia. The end of the war inaugurated the so-called “Nylon Age,” which shaped Škvorecký’s cultural sensibilities, including his affinity for American jazz writing.75 But for Škvorecký’s wartime generation, “jazz” would continue to refer to the swing and big band music of the thirties and forties well into the communist era. Before new and avant-garde forms of jazz, like bebop, could take root in Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party seized power and drove Prague’s once-thriving jazz scene underground. During the Stalinist era, the Communist Party treated jazz as the musical equivalent of brak: the foreign musical form was attacked in the official press, and the few Czech publications dedicated solely to jazz were converted to samizdat. Nationalization of the recording industry, along with new restrictions on public performance venues, led many of the country’s most talented jazz musicians to emigrate as professional opportunities dried up. The conditions for jazz culture in Czechoslovakia improved slightly after the deaths of Stalin and Czechoslovak Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald in 1953. But even after 1956, Czechoslovakia’s cultural authorities remained, at best, ambivalent about jazz culture. In 1958, the same year that The Cowards was first released, Škvorecký and Dorůžka put together an anthology of writing about jazz, called Jazz 1958, which was printed in an edition of five thousand copies. But before Jazz 1958 could reach the public, the entire print run was seized and destroyed. Around the same time, Škvorecký turned to a safer model for writing about jazz: Harlem’s most famous poet, Langston Hughes. Even during the Stalinist era, Hughes remained a celebrated poet in Czechoslovakia. His poetry had been translated into Czech ever since the end of the interwar period, when African American writing, and particularly the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, first began to make a discernible impact on Czech literary culture. In 1938, Hughes was included in an influential Czech-language anthology of African American writing called Litanie z Atlanty, or “A Litany of Atlanta,” after the poem by W. E. B. Du Bois.76 A number of the writers included in the anthology had been fellow 131

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travelers during the thirties, and some, like Hughes, had even visited the Soviet Union.77 After the onset of the Cold War, Black writers, musicians, and artists who were critical of American race relations were still afforded a great deal of prestige in communist countries, particularly if they were also seen as sympathetic to the cause of class revolution. In 1958, for example, Du Bois received an honorary degree from Charles University.78 He was welcomed at the podium by Zdeněk Vančura, F. O. Matthiessen’s host in Prague more than a decade earlier. In a speech entitled “The American Negro and Communism,” Du Bois commended Czechoslovakia, along with East Germany and Yugoslavia, for the strides the country had made toward achieving what he calls “complete socialism.”79 The embrace was mutual: that same year, Du Bois appeared on a Czechoslovak postage stamp. A year later, the performer and activist Paul Robeson also visited Prague after the US government finally reinstated his passport after years of travel restriction. Although the Czechoslovak government was happy to embrace prominent African American dissenters, figures like Du Bois and Robeson were far less popular with Škvorecký’s circle because of their public embrace of Soviet-style communism. Despite Hughes’s own left-wing politics, he was much more skeptical about the limits placed by the Communist Party on cultural freedom, and on jazz in particular. Throughout the fifties, Hughes was therefore the rare American writer who was celebrated by both the official Communist establishment and the nonconformist writers, artists, and jazz musicians of Škvorecký’s underground milieu. For communist ideologues, Hughes was still useful for evoking the close relationship that had once existed between the certain artists of the Harlem Renaissance and the Old Left. But Hughes’s jazzinflected writing was also popular among remnants of the pre-communist avant-garde, including Skupina 42. By the late fifties, Hughes had been influencing Czech poetry for several decades. Lines from his poem “Homesick Blues,” included in the 1938 anthology Litanie z Atlanty, were quoted by a range of major Czech poets from Ivan Blatný to Miroslav Holub. In 1951, a Czech translation of Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks became one of the only single-authored works of American literature to be published in Czechoslovakia during the entire Stalinist era. In late 1958, Škvorecký published his own translation of Hughes in Světová literatura, within a few weeks of the initial release of The Cowards. 132

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In fact, the literary magazine reproduced, in its entirety, a book called The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a mixed-media collaboration between Hughes and the photographer Roy DeCarava. Best known for his stunning images of jazz greats like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and John Coltrane, DeCarava was a Harlem native who had cut his teeth making posters for the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. In 1952, he became the first African American photographer to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. DeCarava immediately set out, as the critic Peter Galassi later put it, “to fill a gaping hole in the world’s image of Harlem: its image of itself.”80 After DeCarava spent the next several years photographing the lives of Harlem’s Black residents, he and Hughes agreed to collaborate on a book. Hughes was responsible for arranging DeCarava’s images to create a narrative progression and for crafting an accompanying text, narrated in Black vernacular by a fictional narrator, Sister Mary Bradley. Hughes also helped secure a publishing contract with Simon and Schuster, who released the result of their collaboration in 1955, under Hughes’s suggested title The Sweet Flypaper of Life. When Světová literatura reproduced the entirety of Sweet Flypaper in its pages three years later, Škvorecký provided the translation of Hughes’s text along with his own critical commentary.81 Presumably, he was behind the entire project. Several factors may have drawn Škvorecký to Sweet Flypaper. First, Hughes’s famously colloquial style of writing provided another model, alongside both Hemingway and Mezzrow, for rendering modern vernacular language in literary prose. One might further speculate that Hughes’s deployment of African American vernacular language as an alternative form of cultural protest held a special appeal for a writer like Škvorecký in the fifties. Like many of Hughes’s invented characters, the narrator of Sweet Flypaper is “signifying,” following a Black cultural strategy of subversive wordplay that would not be unfamiliar to writers working under strict censorship regimes in the Soviet bloc.82 But that same strategic ambiguity also presented Škvorecký with a challenge: How could he make the text of Sweet Flypaper legible to his Czech readers? In his commentary, Škvorecký draws on tropes of racial primitivism, describing Harlem as being filled with “children, lots of children, everywhere little black children with pink palms, with the white teeth of the African race, with the large eyes of the poor.” At the same time, he seeks to domesticate the figure of Sister Mary Bradley, referring to the invented 133

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FIGURE 3.3.  First page of Josef Škvorecký’s Czech translation of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a

multimedia collaboration between Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava, published in Světová literatura in 1958.

narrator of Sweet Flypaper as a “Harlem grandmother from the family of another of Hughes’s heroes, the Švejk of Harlem, Jesse Semple.”83 In the fifties, Hughes was best known to many readers, both inside and outside the United States, for his serialized character Jesse B. Semple, a Harlem mischief-maker whose voice Hughes also renders in Black dialect. Škvorecký attempts to familiarize these Harlem characters to Czech 134

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readers by comparing them to the eponymous protagonist of Jaroslav Hašek’s interwar classic The Good Soldier Švejk. To help him appropriate a new set of vernacular resources for Czech literary culture, not to mention his own writing, Škvorecký emphasizes both the exotic and the familiar in Sweet Flypaper. Beyond Hughes’s companion text, Škvorecký was clearly attracted to DeCarava’s striking images of midcentury Harlem and their arrangement in Sweet Flypaper. When his collection of photographs was first published in the United States in 1955, DeCarava had regretted the book’s small format, at just five by seven inches. Reproduced in Světová literatura three years later, the book’s images appear even more crowded on the page. In his commentary on Sweet Flypaper, Škvorecký describes the sense of claustrophobia and confinement evoked by DeCarava’s photographs, as well as their placement on the page: “Everyone here is crammed in to a few square kilometers of black ghetto,” he writes, “like fish caught in a net, like black flies on flypaper.”84 As with Eisner’s writing about Kafka, the ghetto was already becoming an important trope for many nonconformist writers, musicians, and artists in Czechoslovakia during the fifties. Škvorecký was daring his Czech readers to recognize their own situation in DeCarava’s aestheticized images of social segregation and cultural isolation. In his 1956 essay “Some Views on American literature,” Škvorecký had included an anecdote about a conversation overheard on a bus transporting textile workers between villages. Two elderly women, both wearing traditional headscarves, are discussing Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, which was translated into Czech in 1947. After Wright published his famous essay about his final disillusionment with communism in Richard Crossman’s The God That Failed in 1949, Wright was subjected to vicious attacks by Soviet bloc critics, including in Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless, Native Son remained in circulation in Czechoslovakia. In “Some Views,” Škvorecký describes how he listened as the two women discussed their own interpretation of Wright’s novel. He suggests they “perfectly understood the moral and social sense of the work” and were filled with indignation about the system that had deformed Bigger Thomas. But they also drew a comparative lesson: “Quite spontaneously the book led to an unwitting comparison between our situation and this inhuman racism.”85 Did Czech readers of Sweet Flypaper draw a similar comparative lesson? 135

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DeCarava’s photographs actually traveled to the Soviet bloc in two very different forms during the Thaw era, one emphasizing the local setting of Harlem and the other proposing a more universal, humanist context for DeCarava’s art.86 Edward Steichen included four of DeCarava’s photographs in his blockbuster photography show The Family of Man, which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955 and then traveled the world on a wildly popular international tour. One of DeCarava’s photographs, a haunting image of the bassist Edna Smith, made it into both Family of Man and The Sweet Flypaper. Thanks to the sponsorship of the US Information Agency, the Family of Man show traveled to over thirty countries between 1955 and 1959, drawing an audience of over nine million.87 Steichen envisioned the traveling show as an attempt to use photography to transcend Cold War divisions, but the exhibition also became one of the US government’s most successful cultural diplomacy efforts of the entire Thaw era.88 According to one contemporary report summarizing the response to the show in Moscow, “In the case of Soviet citizens in the summer of 1959, the collection’s overtones of peace and human brotherhood evidently had an added significance as symbolizing a lifting of the overhanging danger of atomic war, in the spirit of the forthcoming exchange of visits between President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev, and this meaning seemed to be grasped especially by students and other intellectuals in Moscow.”89 At the end of the fifties, The Family of Man also traveled to Poland and Yugoslavia, but the exhibition never made it to Czechoslovakia. Instead, Czech audiences got Škvorecký’s translation of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, with his emphasis on the cultural isolation of Harlem’s residents. But in his own writing, Škvorecký was just as drawn to the idealized image of Harlem as a cultural crossroads. At one point in Really the Blues, Mezz Mezzrow describes the intersection of 131st Street and Seventh Avenue, located at the heart of Harlem, as “a whole atlas by itself—the crossroads of the universe.” This is one of the most important functions of the Mezzrow epigraph that opens the second edition of Škvorecký’s recently banned novel: to remind readers that The Cowards too is a book located at a crossroads. The Cowards is set at a crossroads in at least two senses. Geographically, the fictional town of Kostelec (like Škvorecký’s native Náchod) is located in the northern Bohemian borderland, situated between Poland 136

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and the contested Sudetenland. This liminal setting drives much of the novel’s action. But the novel’s setting is also temporal. The Cowards is a novel about a world in flux, a brief interregnum when the future of Czechoslovakia was still up for grabs. This is also the most powerful function of jazz in the novel: to remind us that The Cowards is not just an ironic story about Danny’s adolescence during the last days of the Nazi occupation; it is also a novel about a stolen future. The novel ends with Danny blowing his saxophone on a bandstand erected to welcome the Red Army to Bohemia. As the sun sets to the west, Danny watches a group of young “jiving couples” and “zootsuiters” dancing ecstatically to the music, and he innocently imagines all the jazz his future in Prague will hold.90 An epigraph is also a threshold. In 1955, on the eve of a new era, Škvorecký helped organize the first jazz revue to be staged in Prague after the Communist takeover. Škvorecký and his band Pražský dixieland (Prague Dixieland) were only able to get official approval because the show was fronted by a pair of American defectors, Herbert and Jacqueline Ward, who had been granted political asylum in Czechoslovakia because of their pro-Soviet views. They advertised the show with the tagline “Music, Vocals, and Poetry of the Black People of America.” According to Škvorecký, “Since Herb’s terribly shouted blues had anti-American lyrics and because Jackie’s skin was not entirely white, the authorities didn’t dare protest, and left us alone with our towering success.” On this last point, Škvorecký was being sarcastic: the show was actually canceled after just a few performances because of a money dispute. But while it lasted, they called their short-lived revue Opravdu blues, or “Really the Blues.” As Škvorecký would later realize, “Really the Blues was the end of the beginning.”91 The Cool World

During his exile in Toronto, Josef Škvorecký recorded an anecdote about his close friend and collaborator, the poet-translator Jan Zábrana, who traveled to the Soviet Union in 1957 to do research for a series of Isaac Babel translations. The story can tell us something about the perceived value of three different forms of contraband in the Soviet bloc during the Thaw era. To help finance his trip, Zábrana decided to smuggle a small supply of fashionable Czech brassieres and plastic rain jackets (known, colloquially, as špecáky, or “condom coats”) into the Soviet Union. 137

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According to Škvorecký, “To divert the attention of the Soviet customs officers from his valuable black-market goods, he displayed, on top of his belongings in his luggage, a British edition of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The ruse worked: after a long discussion, the customs officers confiscated only the Hemingway novel, leaving his other contraband undetected. When Zábrana reached the port city of Odessa, Babel’s birthplace on the Black Sea, he traded his last condom coat to “a group of modish-looking young men” hanging around the old harbor. As payment for his black-market goods, Zábrana received an illegal jazz recording.92 Škvorecký’s anecdote about Zábrana may very well be apocryphal. Indeed, one of the major challenges of writing about Škvorecký is his lifelong habit of stretching the truth in order to tell a good story.93 (“Well, memory is both reliable and unreliable,” he admits in his essay on Franz Kafka and jazz.)94 Even if the Zábrana anecdote isn’t strictly true, it indicates how Škvorecký conceived of his own role as both a novelist and a cultural intermediary during the early years of the Thaw era. As we’ve seen, Škvorecký’s decision to open the second edition of The Cowards with a quotation from Hemingway was more than just an acknowledgment of the American writer’s influence on his own prose style: it was a callback to his work at Světová literatura after 1956. But the Mezzrow epigraph, with its nostalgic invocation of Czech jazz culture, is even closer to the subversive heart of the novel. For Škvorecký’s readers, meanwhile, the symbolic fascination with African American culture in Harlem continued well into the liberalizing 1960s. In 1963, the same year that both Škvorecký and Kafka were rehabilitated, SNKLHU published a novel called Prezydent krokadýlů, or “President of the Crocadiles” [sic], one of the most popular American novels to appear in Czech translation that decade. Set in Harlem, Prezydent krokadýlů is narrated entirely in Black vernacular, making it yet another difficult text to render in translation. In fact, the original English-language title of the novel was The Cool World. The title had to be changed in translation because, in the early sixties, there wasn’t a good Czech-language equivalent for the word “cool.”95 The novel’s author was Warren Miller, a committed leftist who authored two best-selling novels about gang life in Harlem. Written by a White American author in Black dialect, and then translated into Czech as “President of the Crocadiles,” The Cool World is an example of a novel that was quickly forgotten in the United States and 138

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yet, through the vicissitudes of cultural translation and reception, is still well-known in the Czech context.96 When Prezydent krokadýlů was first published in 1963, Škvorecký’s friend Zábrana was listed as the sole translator. But a few years after Zábrana’s death in 1984, Škvorecký made a dubious claim that, in fact, he was really the novel’s translator.97 The subsequent debate over who really translated The Cool World into Czech was never fully resolved, but as Justin Quinn has pointed out, the controversy still reveals the complicated politics of translation and authorship in Czechoslovakia during the fifties and sixties.98 Whoever translated the novel, the example of The Cool World also demonstrates how the idiosyncratic interests of an individual figure—or, indeed, a small circle of friends—could have an outsize influence on what forms of culture circulated between Cold War blocs. It certainly helped that Miller was associated with Masses & Mainstream and that The Cool World had received a glowing review from the communist magazine. Although the Czech-language version, Prezydent krokadýlů, caused a minor scandal when it was first published in 1963, the controversy only served to increase the work’s popularity with Czech readers. Like the 1964 edition of The Cowards, the Czech translation of The Cool World was released into a very different kind of socialist world than the one that had shaped Škvorecký’s debut novel in the decade between 1948 and 1958. By the mid-1960s, both Hemingway and Dixieland jazz were old news. Following the lead of new youth cultures in sixties-era Czechoslovakia, the authorities were moving on to target rock-and-roll and other forms of Western-influenced counterculture. Literary tastes were also changing. Here, Škvorecký’s epigraph from Mezzrow was prophetic. While American modernists like Hemingway and Faulkner would remain influential throughout the sixties, it was Mezzrow who heralded the arrival of a new, alternative lifestyle that would have an even broader appeal for an emerging youth counterculture in Czechoslovakia. Not only was Mezzrow a real-life antecedent for Norman Mailer’s infamous “White Negro,” but writers of the Beat Generation also passed around dog-eared copies of Really the Blues.99 As Gayle Wald writes, “It was the thoroughness of Mezzrow’s commitment to a hipster ethic he helped innovate that made him a readily available model for those post-war white male intellectuals whose romanticized appropriations of black culture were similarly instrumental to their development of a critique of the national social and 139

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cultural ‘mainstream.’”100 Even if young Czechs weren’t always aware of the original sources in African American culture, a similar countercultural ethos would be instrumental to the critique of mainstream socialist culture that would begin to emerge in the midsixties. Škvorecký turned forty the year that The Cowards was rereleased. Although he was no longer the young upstart writer, he would play a small but central role in catalyzing a new era in the history of literary dissent between the United States and Czechoslovakia in the midsixties. One evening in late February 1965, the phone rang in Škvorecký’s Prague apartment. It was the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg on the line. Even though the two writers had once corresponded about a Czech translation of Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” Škvorecký wondered why one of the most famous poets in the world would be calling him long-distance from New York. But as Ginsberg explained over the phone, he had actually just been deported from Cuba, and now his outbound plane had landed in Prague.

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Chapter Four

T HE KIN GDO M O F M AY

ALL E N G I N SBE RG T H RO U G H SP R I N GT I ME  P R AG U E

“Then along Národní street towards the river, Viola the club of poetry on the way,” Allen Ginsberg wrote in his travel journal soon after arriving in the capital of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR) in the winter of 1965. “I dropped in, atmosphere like a night-club, many handsome boys, some with beards, fat girls in black.” To reach the Viola—a subterranean wine bar and performance space—Ginsberg had to step through a passage in the facade of a Jugendstil building located on one of Prague’s busiest avenues.1 When he entered the basement club, the American poet was shocked to discover a large photograph of himself and his longtime companion Peter Orlovsky hanging on the wall. “One girl asked me if I wasn’t Ginsberg,” he noted in his journal, “I say that’s my name and she was holding my hand the whole evening.” Ginsberg ended up staying at the Viola late into the night, before finally departing “with two guys, one with a beard, in a fur-coat and with a walking stick, we had grilled sausage and rye bread.”2 As Ginsberg discovered the moment he walked into the Viola, American Beat writers were already well-known to Prague’s youth counterculture by the time he arrived in the midsixties. 141

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The Czechoslovak secret police, the Státní bezpečnost (StB), also took note of Ginsberg’s popularity. “During his stay in the ČSSR,” the StB’s file on Ginsberg reads, “he was predominantly in contact with the young artists concentrated at the VIOLA wine bar.”3 Ginsberg would remain behind the Iron Curtain for more than two months, spending much of his time in Prague, where he quickly became a fixture among Prague’s youth counterculture. Then, in early May, his visit was abruptly cut short. In the aftermath of a massive student celebration called Majáles, in which Ginsberg was elected as the ceremonial “King of May,” agents of the StB confiscated Ginsberg’s travel journal—which contained his political observations, sexual fantasies, and scraps of poetry, along with his description of the Viola, quoted above—and used it as evidence against Ginsberg. As one classified Ministry of the Interior report put it, “Because the presence of A. GINSBERG had a bad influence on a section of our youth, the Czechoslovak authorities proceeded to his expulsion from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.”4 On May 7, Ginsberg was put on a plane bound for London, and his brief reign as the King of May came to an unceremonious end. On the outbound flight, he wrote a poem called “Kral Majales” (the Czech phrase for “King of May”), which contained some of his most powerful spontaneous verses in years. Ginsberg feared that his confiscated travel journal, which also contained drafts of other Prague poems, was lost forever.5 Then, in May 1990, Ginsberg received a bulky package from Eva Zábranová, the daughter of Ginsberg’s primary Czech translator, Jan Zábrana, an underground poet who had passed away in 1984. Although the original copy of Ginsberg’s travel journal was still missing, Zábranová had discovered a Czechlanguage transcription in the StB archives. After translating the document back into English, she sent a copy to Ginsberg in the United States. “I hope that the translation is more or less fine,” she wrote, “I was trying to do it as accurate as I could and to keep the style of writing as well as the word order because I think that the person who made the Czech version was very accurate too.” The StB’s anonymous translator was less confident in his work. “It’s difficult to read notes of a drunken man,” they noted in the margin, “his handwriting is illegible, his thoughts unintelligible and on top of that to translate them and perhaps in an intelligent way?” Whatever its accuracy, this double translation of Ginsberg’s lost journal—an unlikely collaboration between a secret police agent and the daughter of 142

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an underground poet—is a near-perfect example of how the narrative of Ginsberg’s visit to Prague in 1965 was coauthored by competing cultural forces in Czechoslovakia in the decades after his expulsion. In the process, the American poet’s election as King of May was transformed into a potent myth of cultural dissent. Even before Ginsberg’s arrival in the midsixties, Beat literature itself had become a complex site of mediation in Czechoslovakia during the period sometimes referred to as “the Thaw.” Indeed, from the late 1950s until the end of the Cold War, no American literary movement would be more important to the trajectory of literary dissent across the Iron Curtain than the Beat Generation.6 Because the Beats were so critical of domestic Cold War culture in the United States, their work could be officially translated and published in many parts of the communist world by the mid-1960s. For Eastern bloc readers, the Beat critique of domestic American culture found new purchase during a period of rising consumerism. Across a divided European continent, nonconformist writers, artists, and intellectuals also attempted to appropriate the concept of “Beat” to challenge local cultural and political hierarchies.7 At the same time that Beat literature and styles were being translated, domesticated, and appropriated abroad, many American Beat writers like Ginsberg became avid travelers—this was one way for them to slip the bounds of American containment culture. But when they did, they often tested the limits of alternative Cold War cultures abroad.8 When Ginsberg arrived in Czechoslovakia, he had just been deported from Cuba. His visit to Havana was just the latest example of the Beat Generation’s ongoing fascination with postrevolutionary Cuba.9 Ginsberg had been invited to Cuba by Casa de las Américas, a cultural organization established by the Cuban government, to serve as a judge in an international poetry competition alongside the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra. In Havana, Ginsberg quickly befriended a group of young, queer poets associated with the literary magazine El Puente (The bridge) and then spoke out about the Cuban government’s persecution of gay people. (He also joked on an official radio program about having a sexual fantasy about Che Guevara.)10 One morning, three men in green khaki uniforms woke Ginsberg and informed him that he was being kicked out of the country.11 Ginsberg would later write to his father, “In Cuba I committed about every ‘infraction of totalitarian laws’ I could think of, verbally, and they finally flipped out & 143

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gave me the bum’s rush. It was half Kafkian & half funny.”12 The incident was much less whimsical for Ginsberg’s hosts. After his expulsion, several editors at Casa de las Américas were replaced, and at least two of the radical poets associated with El Puente were arrested.13 Ginsberg, meanwhile, was already on to his next adventure. The US embargo on Cuba meant that he couldn’t fly directly from Havana back to New York, so he had to take a rather indirect route home.14 “Outside waiting to go toward huge silver jetplane with CZHECKOSLOVAHIA [sic] painted along it like the backbone of a fish,” he wrote in his journal from the airport in Havana, “great gang of check [sic] visitors being greeted farewell.”15 Even though Ginsberg was determined to keep a lower profile in Prague, the consequences of his visit to Prague would be even more dramatic. After Ginsberg’s election as King of May and his subsequent expulsion, his poetry was banned and his name was used by the Ministry of the Interior in an aggressive campaign against the disaffected Czech youths who had adopted styles associated with American beatniks and hippies. Of course, this would only reinforce Ginsberg’s subversive appeal in Czechoslovakia, especially after a Soviet-led invasion ended the Prague Spring in August 1968. In the seventies and eighties, samizdat copies of Ginsberg’s poems continued to circulate among Czechoslovakia’s reconstituted cultural underground.16 Many of these “dissident” writers, artists, and musicians embraced Beat aesthetics and lifestyles as part of their transnational avant-garde lineage. For cultural nonconformists and Communist Party hard-liners alike, Ginsberg became a symbol of antiestablishment revolt right up to the Velvet Revolution in 1989.17 But it would be a mistake to read these developments as straightforward evidence of an American poet’s “bad influence” on the generation of Czechs and Slovaks who came of age during the sixties. By the time Ginsberg arrived in the winter of 1965, Czechoslovakia was already undergoing a major social and cultural transformation, following a second wave of deStalinization. Indeed, the full impact of Ginsberg’s visit to Prague can only be understood in the context of two broader developments since the end of the Stalinist era: the Czech-language reception of Beat literature and culture, beginning in the late fifties, and the emergence of a new youth counterculture in Czechoslovakia in the early sixties. In addition to appropriating literary sources and cultural styles translated from abroad, 144

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the Beat-inflected subculture that Ginsberg encountered in Prague also drew on indigenous traditions of cultural dissent. As Czechoslovakia’s youth population was growing more and more restless, the Communist Party was unsure how to respond. Should they try to repress or co-opt these new cultural energies? Two months after Ginsberg’s arrival, all these long-building pressures would finally erupt in the carnivalesque spectacle of Majáles, a traditional Bohemian student festival marking the arrival of spring. American Bohemia

Beat writing arrived early in Czechoslovakia, thanks to the pioneering work of the literary journal Světová literatura (World literature). In 1959, the critic Igor Hájek published a lengthy “review with excerpts”—a standard form for the journal—on the writers of the Beat Generation in an issue devoted largely to contemporary American writing. Hájek’s review was titled “Americká bohéma,” or “American Bohemia,” a direct reference to the countercultural environments, from Greenwich Village to North Beach, that shaped Beat sensibilities.18 But with its winking allusion to the historical Czech region known in the West as Bohemia, Hájek’s title can also remind us that Beat culture in Czechoslovakia was always a hybrid affair. In the six years between the appearance of “American Bohemia” in Světová literatura and Ginsberg’s arrival in Prague, a liberalizing intelligentsia, the Communist Party establishment, and a growing youth movement in Czechoslovakia would all find ways to creatively appropriate the symbols of American counterculture, including the Beats.19 For all these groups, the problem of censorship was central. For the Communist establishment, the Beats were a useful reminder that state censorship was also a force in Cold War America. In “American Bohemia,” Hájek sets the scene with a description of the 1957 trial in which Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems was brought up on obscenity charges. Hájek describes the Beat Generation’s emergence in the bohemian North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, where Ginsberg first performed “Howl” at the Six Gallery, published his debut collection (with Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights), and then defended his work (in absentia) in court two years later. But Hájek deflates this sacred Beat origin story by importing a dismissive quotation about the North Beach neighborhood from an American 145

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communist magazine: “Its international flavor and interclass composition attract bohemians, who find stimulation from the variety of cultures and comfort in the illusion of democracy attained without struggle.”20 That “Howl” was ultimately cleared of obscenity charges, transforming it into a popular sensation, only served to reinforce this illusion. The American magazine that Hájek quoted in “American Bohemia” was called Mainstream, the latest incarnation of Masses & Mainstream, a communist publication cited frequently in Světová literatura in the late fifties. Earlier in 1959, Mainstream had published a left-wing critique of the Beat Generation by John G. Roberts called “The Frisco Beat.” According to Roberts, the new bohemians were entirely “divorced from social ethics,” just like Franz Kafka, modern literature’s most famous “disinherited son.”21 Here, Roberts echoes a standard complaint expressed by critics across the political spectrum, including Norman Podhoretz in Partisan Review and Paul O’Neil in Life magazine: that the Beats were nihilistic anarchists lacking any positive political or aesthetic program to go along with their general attitude of cultural disaffection.22 But in Mainstream Roberts also turns this critique back on publications like Life that were capitalizing on the Beat phenomenon: “The slick magazines, after decades of attacking Greenwich Village as a threat to home, church and flag, discovered in our era of conformity, bohemia sells.”23 Even though Hájek quotes this last line, it would be a mistake to assume he was simply parroting the Marxist critique of the Beats. Just as the writer Josef Škvorecký had invoked Masses & Mainstream after 1956 as part of his effort to reintegrate American modernist writers like Ernest Hemingway into Czech literary culture, Hájek’s quotations from Mainstream enabled him to accomplish his larger critical mission. “American Bohemia” is best understood as a groundbreaking work of cultural translation. This project began with the word “Beat” itself. “Unfortunately,” Hájek notes, “it is not possible to translate the linguistic pun on beat (zbitý ) and beatific (blahoslavený ) into Czech.” He settles for the phrase zbité generace rather than the term used by a Slovak critic in Bratislava a year later: úderná generace, which translates back into English as the “Percussive Generation,” with slightly militant overtones.24 But Hájek’s translation went much further. His essay introduced Czech readers to an entire countercultural vocabulary, explaining new sociological categories in the United States like “squares,” “suburbia,” “the 146

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commuter,” “conformity,” and the “organization man,” as well as their counter-phenomena: “hipsters,” “hotrodders,” “blue jeans,” and the racial “primitivism” of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro.” Hájek also includes an early discussion of autostopem—or hitchhiking—which would become a popular youth trend in sixties-era Czechoslovakia, still associated with Beat forms of mobility, freedom, and dissent.25 Hájek further contextualizes his survey of Beat writers (which, in addition to Ginsberg, includes Jack Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, Kenneth Rexroth, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti) through references to an impressive range of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” (concepts he also needs to explain to his socialist audience) authors in the United States, including John Cheever, Herman Wouk, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Jean Stafford, Carson McCullers, Saul Bellow, and especially J. D. Salinger, whose work was just beginning to appear in popular Czech-language editions. “American Bohemia” also includes the first Czech translations of several major Beat texts, including Ginsberg’s poems “Howl,” “America,” and “At Apollinaire’s Grave.” The selection and approval of the first two poems makes obvious sense, as they represent Ginsberg’s most powerful critiques of domestic Cold War culture in the United States while also reflecting Ginsberg’s sentimental attachment to the Jewish socialism of his youth.26 But for Hájek, one thing that separated the Beats from earlier generations of progressive writers in the United States was their intense interest in European avant-garde movements, like Dada and surrealism. Guillaume Apollinaire was a figure of great interest in Czechoslovakia, in part because of the references to Prague in his 1913 poem “Zone.”27 In addition to Ginsberg’s poems, “American Bohemia” also includes the first Czech-language excerpts from two recently published Beat novels: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and John Clellon Holmes’s The Horn (1958). This may have been the most important payoff of all Hájek’s critical maneuvers in “American Bohemia”: they enabled him to get examples of Beat writing into the hands of Czech readers, so they could judge for themselves. From the start, Beat translation was a collaborative project. Hájek had assistance from Lubomír Dorůžka, Zdeněk Kirschner, and Jan Zábrana, Ginsberg’s most important Czech translator during this era. After the publication of “American Bohemia,” new works by Beat writers— including Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso—continued to appear in Czech translation, often put out by the state publishing house 147

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SNKLU (Státní nakladatelství krásné literatury a umění ), which was renamed Odeon in 1965. In the sixties, SNKLU/Odeon became a bastion for liberal-minded editors who wanted to fill in the gaps in Czech literature resulting from years of strict socialist-realist cultural policy.28 During this era, Zábrana continued to work on his translations of Ginsberg’s poems, with help from his close friend and collaborator Josef Škvorecký. To get “Howl” past the censors, they excised a few lines, including Ginsberg’s reference to “Supercommunist pamphlets,” but political considerations were hardly the only challenge in translating Ginsberg into Czech. Škvorecký later described the difficulty of “unravelling the many allusions in Ginsberg’s verses, incomprehensible to a non-American, and the numerous words that came into use long after my obsolete dictionaries had been published.”29 Škvorecký and Zábrana exchanged letters with Ginsberg back in the United States, seeking assistance in translating his hipster vernacular into Czech.30 This prior contact between Ginsberg and his Czech translators would have surprising consequences when the American poet arrived unannounced in Prague a few years later. In the early 1960s, several other factors helped Beat writing and lifestyles to take hold in Czechoslovakia. For instance, new governmental policies provided increased opportunities for cultural exchange. After 1962, a relaxation in the country’s travel policies allowed Czechoslovak citizens to visit the West in much greater numbers. Several Czech writers and intellectuals traveled to the United States during this period, including the poet Miroslav Holub, who, as Justin Quinn has shown, was deeply influenced by Ginsberg and the Beats.31 By the mid-1960s, however, Czechs didn’t have to travel nearly so far to experience Beat culture firsthand. Prague had developed its own small but thriving Beat poetry scene, centered on a strip of bars, theaters, and concert halls lining Národní Street. “The role of Národní Street, a kilometer-long boulevard running from the Vltava River to Wenceslas Square, played in the intellectual renaissance of the sixties can hardly be overestimated,” Michael Žantovský has written. Located on the border between Prague’s Old and New Towns, Národní Street was home to the National Theater, the offices of the Writers’ Union, the Prague Academy Film School, the famous Café Slavia, the Reduta jazz club, the publishing house Odeon, the Laterna Magika theater, and a “Bermuda triangle” of seedier bars. But one subterranean establishment on Národní played a particularly important role in popularizing Beat poetry: the Viola Wine Bar. 148

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The Viola, which opened its doors in 1963, was Hájek’s “American Bohemia” come to life. Jiří Ostermann, one of the Viola’s founders, was a big fan of the Beats and of Ginsberg in particular. Like Ginsberg, Ostermann was both Jewish and queer, making him a double outsider in communist-era Prague. Trained as a stage actor, he pioneered a new format at the Viola: literary readings accompanied by live jazz performances.32 On a typical night, local avant-garde poets would read works by Beat figures like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Corso, while a local band played the songs of jazz musicians like Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.33 One popular program dedicated entirely to Ginsberg’s poetry was repeated more than sixty times. Unlike the other experimental theaters that were popping up in Prague in the sixties—like the Semafor or the Theater on the Balustrade, where Václav Havel got his start—when the official program ended at the Viola, jam sessions stretched into the early hours of the morning. The drug of choice was phenmatrazine, a Germanmanufactured amphetamine substitute that was rumored to improve sexual performance. In addition to being the preferred hangout of local Beat writers like Václav Hrabě, Vladimíra Čerepková, and Inka Machuková, the Viola also attracted many of Prague’s up-and-coming writers, intellectuals, and filmmakers in the midsixties.34 As Veronika Müllerová writes in her oral history of the Viola during the Ostermann era, “the Viola created a free space for creation and meeting, a kind of island of freedom in the bound world of communist dictatorship.”35 And, as the blown-up photos of Ginsberg on the walls would attest, the American Beat poet was the Viola’s patron saint. Contemporary media sources from the United States and Czechoslovakia offered two very different ideological interpretations of the Viola’s Beat scene. “Near the headquarters of the Czechoslovak Writers Association in Prague, there is a club called the Viola, one of the most popular night spots in the city,” opens one article in the New York Times from the fall of 1963, titled “Poets of Prague Challenge Party.” The Times article presents the existence of the Viola as evidence of “a belated move towards de-Stalinization,” pushed by the country’s young writers and artists. As further evidence of this shift, the article cites a defiant telegram from a Slovak writers’ congress in support of Josef Škvorecký, who was still being rehabilitated after the banning of his debut novel The Cowards four years earlier. Although the author of the article is more focused on the vanguard 149

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role played by Czechoslovakia’s liberal writers, the author interprets the Beat program at the Viola as a sign of the changing times: “A year ago it could not have been imagined here,” the article suggests, “for it is a Greenwich Village type of club where youngsters declaim poetry to the accompaniment of jazz.”36 A year later, the state-published magazine Czechoslovak Life published a cover article about the Beat scene at the Viola, with an alternative interpretation of its relationship to Thaw-era youth culture.37 Intended as a Communist bloc rejoinder to the popular Life magazine, Czechoslovak Life was published by Orbis, an official publishing house of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Information, and distributed in English, French, Swedish, and Italian editions. The cover of its April 1964 issue features a striking image of two performers on the Viola’s stage—a bassist in military uniform and a vocalist dressed in all black—with an enlarged photograph of a shirtless Allen Ginsberg looming in the background. “Is the Viola a Beat haunt, then?” the article asks. The answer, at first, is emphatic: No, the Beats dissociate themselves from a society they write off as not worth changing. Our youth criticizes certain aspects of society, but the wish for improvement is coupled with a sense of responsibility and commitment. The youth movement recently adopted as one of its aims the uncovering of waste and misusage of materials in industry and agriculture. Youth constructions never lack applicants. This month, the first volunteers will be starting work on the wide-gauge railway line from the Soviet border to the East Slovak Iron Works. If a reference to “the East Slovak Iron Works” seems incongruous in an article about Beat poetry, that’s because the Communist Party was wrestling with a dilemma. Faced with the rise of a new youth counterculture, the party continued to push the socialist ideal of “education through work,” sometimes with comic desperation: Youth constructions never lack applicants! In reality, youth enthusiasm for working brigades had all but disappeared after the end of Stalinism.38 Now, party leaders worried that, without some constructive outlet, the country’s disillusioned youth would escape into political apathy, or worse yet, open dissent. 150

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FIGURE 4.1.  Cover of state-published magazine Czechoslovak Life from April 1964, featuring

performers on the stage at the Viola. That is an enlarged picture of a shirtless Allen Ginsberg in the background.

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It is therefore tempting to dismiss Czechoslovak Life’s report on the Viola scene as a desperate piece of state propaganda. But, as with Hájek’s “American Bohemia,” the author, Rosemary Kavanová, may have just been engaging in a bit of critical misdirection. Kavanová was the English-language editor of Czechoslovak Life from 1963 up until 1968. Born in London, she moved to Prague in 1950 after marrying a Czech soldier and diplomat named Pavel Kavan. Even though Kavan was a committed communist, he was arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years during the Stalinist show trials of the early fifties. Released from prison in 1956, Kavan wasn’t fully rehabilitated until several years after his untimely death in 1960. His widow Kavanová was therefore no mouthpiece of the regime. Instead, she viewed her work at Czechoslovak Life as an extension of the Thaw era’s “cultural brinkmanship,” a collective attempt by Czech writers, artists, and journalists to “stretch the bounds to the limit” of what was possible.39 For an official publication like Czechoslovak Life, this required a balancing act. The article immediately preceding the Viola piece heralds the construction of a new nuclear reactor in Western Slovakia, while the same issue also contains articles about the avant-garde painter Adolf Hoffmeister and the New Wave filmmaker Věra Chytilová. As for Kavanová’s article, immediately after mentioning enthusiasm for “youth constructions,” she adds, We can, however, find some common features with the Beat generation. Our young people are Beat in the sense of searching for the truth. After the shock of the Stalin cult revelations, they are no longer content to swallow a faith pre-fabricated by adults. They are beginning to search for their own answers, to strive towards convictions in their own way. They are Beat, too, in their worship of spontaneity—a reaction to the studied art of the past—hence the popularity of jazz, the twist, the new exuberant young theaters—and the Viola.40 Ever since the official rejection of Stalinism in 1956, disillusioned young people in Czechoslovakia had been searching for new modes of truth telling in literature, including Beat forms of authenticity. Kavanová goes on to discuss contemporary Czech poetry with further references to the “cult period” of the early fifties, suggesting that the embrace of Beat 152

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poetry was also motivated by a newly enlivened cultural curiosity. She quotes a young geologist as saying, “There are compelling pictures of a life we do not know and allusions to things and places beyond our experience.” A student of philosophy adds, “Depressing, violent, arresting, and for us who have so little contact with America, illuminating.”41 Published five years apart, “American Bohemia” and “Poetic Venture” each offer a sympathetic interpretation of the Beat phenomenon, hidden under a veneer of Marxist critique. They also show how, between 1959 and 1964, Beat writing and lifestyles were translated and adapted to the local cultural and political context of Thaw-era Czechoslovakia, seeding a new countercultural scene in Prague. Whatever the ideological motives of their respective authors, both essays, which appeared in official publications, also reflect the Communist Party’s ambivalence toward the new youth subcultures.42 The government would experiment with a combination of approaches—mixing repression with co-optation—right up until the winter of 1965, when the limits of Czechoslovakia’s cultural liberalization would be tested. Prague Howl

“Then, one night in early winter,” according to Josef Škvorecký, “the phone rang.”43 It was February 18, 1965, and Ginsberg had just arrived at Prague’s Ruzyně Airport freshly deported from Cuba. At the Havana airport, Ginsberg had searched his papers and found a letter from Lawrence Ferlinghetti listing the contact information for his Czech translators.44 Škvorecký and Jan Zábrana collected Ginsberg at the airport and brought him to Zábrana’s apartment. Ginsberg was apparently the first native English speaker Zábrana had met. (Ginsberg would later remark that Zábrana talked like a dictionary.) Ginsberg was fascinated to finally meet Škvorecký in person: “He was a real writer and he was also a jazz clarinetist and he edited a jazz magazine and knew all about Charlie Parker and Bebop and he completely understood Kerouac’s prose from the point of view so he was totally right on as far as understanding what was going on with American prosody and was himself considered sort of like the new, almost Kerouac of Czechoslovakia.”45 (Never mind that Škvorecký played the saxophone.) An excerpt of On the Road had appeared in “American Bohemia” in 1959, but the full 153

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novel would not arrive in translation for another two decades. For now, the Czechs had Škvorecký. It is unclear how long Ginsberg had planned to stay in the Eastern bloc, but with help from Škvorecký and Zábrana, the Writers’ Union sponsored Ginsberg’s initial stay in Czechoslovakia, providing a small stipend and two weeks’ accommodation at the Hotel Ambassador on Wenceslas Square.46 Early in his stay, Ginsberg learned that he was owed significant royalties for the Czech translations of his poems, including in Světová literatura, and for the popular weekly performances of his poetry at the Viola. He calculated that his royalties (which could only be spent in-country) would be enough to support him until his visa expired in mid-May. He decided to spend one month in Prague and then travel to the Soviet Union and Poland before returning to Prague to catch his outbound flight in May. Why did Ginsberg decide to remain in the Eastern bloc for so long? Much of the answer lies in his family history. His mother, Naomi, a Russian Jewish immigrant to the United States who had died in 1956, was an outspoken communist, and Ginsberg had long been curious about the lived experience of Soviet-style communism. He also longed to seek out his mother’s living relatives in Moscow. But Ginsberg was drawn to Prague in particular because of the city’s association with Franz Kafka, who combined in one figure many of the political, religious, and literary qualities that intrigued Ginsberg about the Eastern bloc. From Prague, Ginsberg wrote to his father, Louis, “Following tracks of Kafka here—The Trial a perfect parable of life here in the ’50s everybody says. His books are just published after years of silence.”47 Throughout his first month in Prague, Ginsberg carried a copy of The Trial like it was a travel guide. “You can measure the winds of political change” in Czechoslovakia according to the shifting status of Kafka, he observed.48 Ginsberg visited the house where Kafka wrote The Trial and also visited Kafka’s grave at the New Jewish Cemetery, located right near Zábrana’s apartment. It’s clear that Ginsberg also associated Kafka with the lost world of Prague’s prewar Jewish population. He wrote to his father, “Also met Jewish community—77,000 pre war and 3,000 now,” and, “went to services last Friday in oldest synagogue in Europe—met them again this morning—all sorts of Tales of Golem to hear & Rabbi Seou’s [sic] grave & full of Kabbalistic [manuscripts].”49 The city’s preserved Jewish sites filled Ginsberg with nostalgia for a vanished world, but he was also excited to discover a thriving Beat scene. 154

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Almost immediately after he arrived, Škvorecký and Zábrana brought Ginsberg to the Viola, where he was stunned to find his image adorning the wall. According to Škvorecký, the Czech Beat poet Čerepková saw Ginsberg walk in and exclaimed, “Nowadays every bum looks like Ginsberg!”50 For her part, Čerepková only remembers being excited about seeing the poet with her own eyes. Ginsberg was one of her great influences, along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder. Not only did Ginsberg meet Czech Beats like Čerepková at the Viola, but he also encountered up-and-coming young writers like Václav Havel at the café. During his first weeks in Prague, Ginsberg spent many of his nights at the Viola and at the after-parties that spilled into student apartments and dormitories across Prague. At one such gathering at Škvorecký’s apartment, the assembled group got drunk and began to sing a medley of songs, including the “Internationale” and “John Brown’s Body”—an uncanny echo of F. O. Matthiessen’s own Prague revelry almost two decades earlier.51 “Everybody here adores the Beatniks,” Ginsberg wrote to his father, “& there’s a whole generation of Prague teenagers who listen to jazz & wear long hair & say shit on communism & read Howl.” Ginsberg was still surprised to be recognized on the street. Soon after his arrival, Pavel Baňka, a young Czech photographer, was on a date when he spotted a distinctive figure with long hair, beard, glasses, and canvas sneakers standing in front of the Museum of Vladimir Lenin. (Ginsberg’s distinctive white sneakers, purchased in Havana, would soon become fashionable among his young Czech admirers. Čerepková remembers, “They all imitated him and went out into the snow in brand new sneakers.”52) Baňka recognized Ginsberg from images he’d seen in Světová literatura, which he called “his bible.” He turned to his date and said, “Hey, that’s Ginsberg!” Unimpressed, she replied, “You can see him everywhere.” Undeterred, Baňka approached the bearded figure and exclaimed, “You are Ginsberg!” They continued the conversation at a nearby pub, where Ginsberg told Baňka all about his misadventures in Cuba. He ran into Ginsberg several more times in Prague, including at the Viola, at drug-fueled student parties, and then, finally, during the Majáles celebration.53 Ginsberg’s primary guide through Prague’s student counterculture was Andrew Lass, a seventeen-year-old American who had moved to Prague after his parents, both communists, applied for political asylum in Czechoslovakia in the fifties.54 “The famous Beat poet-provocateur, 155

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sitting under the romantic lighting of the smoke-filled and noisy jazz club, seemed more like an apparition,” Lass noted. Because Lass spoke fluent English and socialized with other student radicals, he could help Ginsberg navigate the private spaces of Prague’s youth counterculture. One of these Czech students later remembered how Ginsberg crawled under the dinner table at his apartment, and recited religious hymns he’d learned in India while playing his finger cymbals. “Ginsberg had a tiny notebook,” he recalled, “and wrote down everything possible and wanted to know how to say dirty words.”55 Sex was clearly on Ginsberg’s mind in Prague, as evidenced by the detailed descriptions of sexual encounters—both real and imagined—in his travel journal. He even prepared a one-page cheat sheet with Czech slang terms for various sex acts.56 As Ginsberg later bragged to his father in a letter, “I run around with teenage gangs & have orgies & then rush up to Writer’s Union & give lectures on the glories of US pornography Henry Miller etc.” His father wrote back, “Is sex your only subject you regale them with?”57 In fact, Ginsberg was also doing a lot of listening in Prague. His journal contains a detailed record of conversations about Czechoslovak politics, including several with Zábrana, who, Ginsberg noted, would constantly look over his shoulder to see if anyone was listening. At the time, Zábrana was working on a translation of the poem “Kaddish,” and he joked that the censors had asked him what Ginsberg meant by a line referring to “Czechoslovakia attacked by robots.” Zábrana answered, “Hitler, of course.”58 The secret police, it turns out, were not convinced by Zábrana’s excuse. In Ginsberg’s file, they note (quite incorrectly) that the original version of “Kaddish” contains the line “I see with my eyes Czechoslovakia invaded by communist robots in 1948.”59 In fact, Ginsberg had written, “with your eyes of Czechoslovakia attacked by robots,” a double reference to his mother’s paranoid schizophrenia and to the Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (1920), which introduced the word “robot” to the world. Ginsberg also found his way to Hanzlberk, a semi-abandoned house at the base of Vyšehrad where a group of avant-garde poets, dancers, and artists were all living together in ecstatic squalor. It was at Hanzlberk that Ginsberg met the novelist Bohumil Hrabal, who later recalled, “He bowed to me, I bowed to him, he bowed to everybody, people drank, there was music, somebody playing the guitar.”60 Ginsberg reportedly left behind 156

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a pubic hair in the Hanzlberk guest book. Both Josef Rauvolf and Tomáš Mazal have suggested that Hrabal’s own writing bears a strong relationship to the prose of Jack Kerouac—the novel Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England ) was inspired, at least in part, by The Dharma Bums—but Hrabal was also attracted to the wider Beat sensibility. “I’m fascinated by Kerouac and Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti,” Hrabal later wrote, “by these dharma bums who felt very strongly that the writer should be as far as possible poor, simple, and down to look up.” He continued, “I was with them in their group at a distance.”61 Ginsberg’s first month in Prague culminated in an electrifying reading of “Howl” at Charles University. Zdenek Stříbrný, who had met Ginsberg two years earlier in Greenwich Village, invited Ginsberg to read and discuss his poetry at his English seminar at the university. The event was so popular that Stříbrný had to move his class to the university’s largest auditorium. As he later recalled, “It was soon crammed full, with some students sitting on the floor at Allen’s feet, peering at the holes in his tennis shoes and looking up to him as their guru.”62 In Ginsberg’s memory of his “thrilling” reading at Charles University, “there were people hanging from the rafters.”63 As Ginsberg bellowed the famous lines of “Howl,” Stříbrný struggled to provide a contemporaneous translation.64 The reading was a sensation—not least of all for the secret police. According to an StB informant’s report, preserved in Ginsberg’s file, the discussion after the reading veered into a number of taboo areas: what Ginsberg called in his journal “all sorts of sex and brainwash questions.”65 When one student asked whether Ginsberg would like to live in Czechoslovakia permanently, the American poet responded, only “if they canceled the HSTD and the Red Police.” (The HSTD was the state agency responsible for censorship of all published material.) The report also notes, “Prof. STŘÍBRNÝ, however, did not translate word-for-word, always leaving out Ginsberg’s reactionary and tendentious attacks.”66 But the students appeared to get the message.67 The official press covered Ginsberg’s visit, too. In late March, Literární noviny, the official publication of the Writers’ Union, published an interview between Ginsberg and Igor Hájek, the author of “American Bohemia.”68 By 1965, Hájek had become the foreign literature editor at Literární noviny, which would become an important and controversial liberalizing force in the years to come. Compared with “American Bohemia” six years earlier, Hájek takes on Ginsberg’s political views much more 157

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directly in the interview. “Ginsberg isn’t yet a communist,” he writes in a brief introduction, “even though he grew up among them.” Ginsberg’s poetry is instead a polemic against the Marxist conception of literature that reigned among the American Left in the 1930s, Hájek argues, an outdated set of ideas that also don’t reflect the latest currents of Marxist thought in the socialist world. The first part of Hájek’s interview had actually been conducted the previous year, when Hájek visited Ginsberg in New York after the relaxation of travel restrictions. Hájek describes his impression of a dive bar on New York’s Second Avenue, where he observed Ginsberg socializing and watching a news report on the Gulf of Tonkin incident. (The Viola looks like a millionaire’s club, he suggests, compared to this shabby East Village pub.) The next day Ginsberg took part in a demonstration against the Vietnam War in Union Square, where the only other people protesting were a few scattered students. Ginsberg had started attending protests a year earlier, and he became one of the earliest and most highprofile opponents of the escalating Vietnam War. During their follow-up conversation in Prague, Ginsberg offered his reflections on the “ancient and natural” phenomenon of youthful rebellion. At one point in the interview, Ginsberg describes how the modern state cuts people off from one another, deforming human communication into empty slogans and propaganda. “That’s why I turn to my body,” Ginsberg explains, “as a compass in my relationships with people, because sexuality is one of the roots of these relations.”69 Ginsberg certainly put this idea to the test in Prague. “They let me loose, I talked freely, the walls of the State didn’t fall, everybody was happy, sex relations with anyone male or female is legal over age of 18 (in Poland all over age 15 is legal) and I left for Moscow,” he later reported in a letter to the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra.70 On March 18, two days before Hájek’s bold interview was set to appear, Ginsberg boarded a train to the Soviet Union. In Moscow, Ginsberg kept up his busy schedule, tracking down family connections and meeting with major Russian poets, including Anna Akhmatova, Andrei Voznesensky, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who had recently recited his own poetry at the Viola while visiting Prague.71 Ginsberg got in touch with Mayakovsky’s former lover Lilya Brik as well as the poet-mathematician and dissident Alexander Volpin. On his way back to Prague, Ginsberg stopped in both Krakow and Warsaw and made a side trip to Auschwitz. He arrived back in Prague exhausted on April 29 and checked into the shabby Hotel Merkur near the city’s central 158

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bus station. He finally felt ready to leave the Eastern bloc behind, but the earliest flight he could get out of Czechoslovakia wasn’t until May 8. Ginsberg had no idea that in just two days—on May 1, 1965—Prague’s entire student population was set to celebrate a festival called Majáles, which had been banned for much of the communist era and which marked the transition from winter to spring. Return to Majáles

If Ginsberg had returned to Prague just two days later, his stay in Czechoslovakia would demand little more than a few paragraphs in his biographies alongside his other travels in the communist world in the midsixties. Instead, the American poet’s participation in the traditional Bohemian festival of Majáles would transform Ginsberg’s self-conception as a poet within the context of an increasingly global Cold War. For his hosts in Czechoslovakia, the Majáles celebration on May 1, 1965, would become the most dramatic manifestation of shifting student attitudes before the arrival of the Prague Spring in 1968. It’s therefore tempting to view Ginsberg’s role in the events of May 1 as one of the most breathtakingly contingent events in the history of what’s now referred to as the “global sixties.” Was this really all just an accident of timing? A big part of the answer lies in the history of Majáles itself. The traditional Bohemian student festival of Majáles dates back at least as far as the fifteenth century, a period of university expansion in the Czech lands. Incorporating aspects of other European fertility festivals that celebrate the arrival of spring, Majáles also entailed a reversal of normal power hierarchies between students and faculty. For one day, students were allowed to lampoon traditional sources of scholastic authority by dressing up in costume, marching in a parade, and proclaiming satirical slogans. These traditional rites culminated with the ceremonial election of a Král majáles, or “King of May,” usually followed by a beauty contest to select a May Queen. By the mid-1960s, Majáles also had a long history of being banned. Like many other “national” traditions in Bohemia, Majáles underwent a revival in the mid-nineteenth century. One of the most famous literary references to the celebration comes from Alois Jirásek’s historical novel Filosofská historie (Philosophical history), published in 1877 but set in 1847. The novel depicts the student unrest that resulted from the 159

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banning of Majáles during a period of forced Germanization under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A century later, Majáles was again banned, first during the Nazi occupation, from 1939 to 1945, and yet again after the Communist seizure of power in 1948. The Czechoslovak Communist Party instead wanted to encourage youth participation in official May Day celebrations. (Ever since the Second International of 1889, the First of May had been designated as International Workers’ Day to commemorate the Haymarket massacre.) Under the Communist Party, Majáles would not be officially sanctioned again until the first year of the Thaw era. In 1956, the Communist Party allowed official Majáles celebrations to take place in both Prague and Bratislava for the first time since seizing power in 1948.72 They hoped the event would serve as a kind of pressure release valve for growing student agitation in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in February and the rebellion of prominent literary intellectuals at the Second Congress of Czechoslovak Writers later that April. The result was a raucous student demonstration with about five thousand participants. As Peter Hruby writes, “Students in Prague changed their traditional May (‘Majáles’) celebration of spring, love, and poetry into demonstrations against the government, and demanded abolition of censorship, political freedoms, travel abroad, and access to foreign books and journals.”73 The authorities were particularly outraged that the parade included signs that echoed the demands made by writers the previous month. One student holding a sign that read “We want World Literature” was trailed by a group of students dressed as books, all marked with the phrase “on the index.” This was an oblique reference to the literary journal Světová literatura, which had just been established. The parade led to a park, where there was a violent confrontation between the police, a workers’ militia, and a group of students reveling to a jazz band. Afterward, the country’s youth organizations were placed under stricter party control, and Majáles was banned indefinitely.74 Prague’s students responded to the post-1956 ban by reviving an alternative Majáles tradition. Beginning in 1962, every May 1 over a thousand students would converge on Petřín Hill overlooking Prague and gather at the statue of the poet Karel Hynek Mácha, whose epic love poem Máj (May) had been rediscovered during the Czech national revival. These unruly parties, at which students allegedly chanted even more direct antiregime slogans, resulted in additional clashes with the police. In 1965, the 160

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Communist Party and the Czechoslovak Union of Youth reluctantly approved an official Majáles celebration to occur in the afternoon following the official May Day parade, in order to bring this situation under control and, more generally, to counter student discontent, which had been building since the early sixties.75 A lot was riding on May Day in 1965. As the StB would later put it in their “Preliminary Report” on the events of the day, “special attention was paid to the security measures for this year’s May 1 festivities, particularly because it was a jubilee celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Army.”76 The cultural memory of the end of the Second World War had become a major site of contestation in the decade since 1956, and the StB had been keeping a close eye on student discontent in the lead-up to Majáles, questioning and detaining dozens of targets. They also maintained a network of student informants among the Majáles organizing committee. For the day of the celebrations, members of the People’s Militia in civilian clothes were dispatched to Petřín Hill, along with 150 loyal members of the Czechoslovak Union of Youth, “to politically influence the situation.” Their primary concern continued to be the annual clashes between security forces and students near the Mácha statue on Petřín Hill, “which has always had an unpleasant political response both at home and abroad.” Several hundred members of the security forces, both in uniform and in disguise, were stationed along the official Majáles parade route and in the Julius Fučík Park of Culture and Rest, where the election was to take place in the late afternoon.77 All these preparations underscore the point that the security forces were much more concerned about student unrest than they were about the participation of Ginsberg, who had been off their radar ever since his departure for the Soviet Union in mid-March. When Ginsberg returned to Prague at the end of April, he was stepping into an already-volatile situation. And little did he know, a group of rebellious students were preparing to make a provocative political statement with their nominee for the Majáles throne. According to the rules of the nomination process, each of the big schools and universities in Prague could propose a candidate for the election. As the StB was already aware, the Czech Technical University was home to a radical faction who, according to Petr Blažek, had circled Majáles on the calendar.78 The group was led by Jiří Müller, who would become one of the most important 161

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Czech student leaders of the sixties. The day before Majáles, a group of students from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Czech Technical University approached Josef Škvorecký and asked him to be their official nominee. Škvorecký would have been a particularly controversial choice for King of May, as his debut novel, The Cowards, had been banned, in part, because of its irreverent depiction of the final days of the Second World War in Bohemia, including the Soviet liberation that was being commemorated that May Day. But as it turned out, Škvorecký came down with the flu (or perhaps just cold feet). As a substitute, Škvorecký offered an even more provocative suggestion: they should nominate Ginsberg. When Škvorecký called Ginsberg to ask if he would participate, the American poet hesitated and only agreed after Škvorecký assured him that his candidacy would not be interpreted as a political act. He had made it this far in the Eastern bloc without running into trouble, and he didn’t want another incident like the one in Cuba. Škvorecký told Ginsberg not to worry; it was simply an old “MiddleEuropean fertility festival.”79 Ginsberg was intrigued that there would also be an election of a ceremonial queen, whom it would be his “prerogative” to sleep with at the end of the night. Škvorecký told Ginsberg that it would be the first Majáles celebration in twenty years, conveniently making no mention of the trouble in 1956.80 Škvorecký then got back in touch with Müller at the Czech Technical University and suggested that he go visit Ginsberg himself the next morning.81 On the morning of May 1, the official May Day parade went smoothly. After observing the parade with his young American guide Andrew Lass and the philosopher Ivan Sviták, one of Europe’s most prominent Marxisthumanist philosophers, Ginsberg ate a lunch of hot dogs and lemonade and went home for a nap. Then, according to his journal entry from that day, he was suddenly awoken by a knock on the door: “In come huge band of students in parasols & top hats, 1890’s dress, wescoats [sic], canes, with jesters, trumpets.” One student, whom he recognized from the Viola, announced, “Mr. Ginsberg we have the honor to beg your presence in procession to the Crowning of King of May and to accept our support for your candidacy of Kral Majales & we humbly offer you crown & throne.”82 Ginsberg was given a paper crown and led downstairs to a truck waiting outside. Ginsberg and his entourage then met up with the assembled students of the Technical School in the Dejvice neighborhood of Prague. The students, 162

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who already numbered in the thousands, hoisted Ginsberg onto the back of an even bigger truck, loaded with beer kegs, a loudspeaker, and a live Dixieland jazz band. Ginsberg reportedly announced to the crowd, “I’ll be the first kind king and bow down before my subjects. I’ll be the first naked king.”83 The students were already in costume and carrying signs with satirical slogans. In front of the float, they carried a large banner that read: “GINSBERG AS KING OF MAY, AN EXPRESSION OF PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM.”84 The crowd proceeded toward the center of Prague, where all of the schools would converge along with their candidates at Old Town Square. The StB’s “Preliminary Report” notes that the security forces observed a number of hostile slogans and allegorical themes along the procession route, with several foreigners filming the spectacle. According to the StB, some of the students started chanting, “Long live Gizburg [sic], Gizburg [sic], our guru!” Another group of about fifty young people marched in reverse, repeating, “Forward to the left, forward to the left, left perversion, right perversion, golden middle way.” According to the StB, “Most viewers did not understand the slogans” and were instead critical of the students for “not expressing the successes we had achieved.”85 Ginsberg was confused and asked what was happening, but now there was no turning back. We now finally have access to Ginsberg’s immediate thoughts about the experience, but only as refracted through Eva Zábranová’s reverse translation of the StB transcript of Ginsberg’s journal.86 Here is Ginsberg’s stream-of-consciousness entry on the day of Majáles: Yesterday I arrived in Prague. Škvorecký rang me up. Afternoon with a golden paper crown on shoulders of seven steel fair-haried [sic] students, through crowded streets singing, beer bottles coming from 10,000 hands, asked for cigarettes. Complete paranoia. My symbols are mixed up, my head is swimming, I was waving at children like Novotný, in a bright sunshine, wonderful afternoon under Prague’s astronomical clock, poet greeting the house where Kafka has written his Process, finally alone, a crowned king, lonely, strange, mad shouts Ginsberg! Ginsberg! with an echo of stone alleys of houses and above the old time bridges. 163

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FIGURE 4.2.  A disoriented Allen Ginsberg on his Majáles float outside the down-market

Hotel Merkur, where Ginsberg was staying after his return from the Soviet Union. © Allen Ginsberg. Corbis via Getty Images.

Ginsberg then describes how, when he stopped the float in front of the building where Franz Kafka had composed The Trial (“his Process”), he dedicated his future reign to Kafka, reciting his own trademark mantras as he played finger cymbals and the students chanted Ginsberg’s name. As Ginsberg later told Lass, “I’d been to India for several years and so I was somewhat into Buddhist notions, especially the idea that ‘when the mode of music changes the walls of the city shake.’”87 Kafka, whose work had only been rehabilitated two years earlier, had never received such a strange tribute in his home city. 164

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FIGURE 4.3.  The Majáles parade makes its way through Old Town Square in Prague. Courtesy of Miroslav Khol.

By this point, all of the different student groups had formed a single parade, converging as they crossed the Vltava River, then passing beneath the pedestal where an enormous statue of Stalin had been detonated in 1962, before finally arriving at the Julius Fučík Park of Culture and Rest, formerly a deer park reserved for Bohemian royalty.88 Ginsberg’s description continues: Face to face a cathedral, face to face a hill where Stalin’s statue has stood for ten years, I was carried over the heads of a jazz band to a huge park where I was glaring among the most beautiful long haired boys handing out the autographs all night. 165

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The king of Prague’s Majales with my beard and long hair and crown on it, my smokers’ cough, singing Hari Om Namo Shiva over and over again, up, the brass, and then I sit here in front of a huge crowd waiting for my queen who I neither love nor I love even myself nor I know nor I can see because of the spotlights.89 As Ginsberg’s disorientation suggests, the Majáles celebrations exceeded everyone’s expectations, including those of its organizers. Majáles fell on a Saturday that year, and because of the official May Day festivities that morning, which had attracted some 400,000 participants, the streets of Prague were already packed with onlookers. Ginsberg later recalled, “What I had expected was this little May Day ceremony with a few hundred or a thousand scraggly, scruffy students in the park, but instead it’s this sea of faces.”90 The authorities too had expected only a few thousand participants in the afternoon’s Majáles celebration, as in 1956, but their official estimate of the crowd climbed to 140,000–150,000.91 The official Majáles festival had become a carnivalesque spectacle, like something taken straight from the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work was enjoying a contemporary renaissance in the Soviet Union.92 It was as if all existing hierarchies and systems of authority had been overturned for a day. And just as Bakhtin describes in Rabelais and His World, there would even be a crowning ceremony—followed, of course, by the ritual “uncrowning.” In hindsight, Ginsberg’s election as King of May seems inevitable, but his coronation was hardly a foregone conclusion. To begin with, the election ceremony was not entirely “democratic.” In a conversation between Ginsberg and Lass conducted twenty years after his visit, the two tried to reconstruct the election procedures. The ceremony took place on an elevated stage in an outdoor concert venue erected in a corner of the park, near the old Prague Exhibition Grounds. Each candidate for the throne was required to give a speech. Ginsberg recalls to Lass, “So the student from the medical school came up to the microphone wrapped in bandages with ketchup all over and gave a long speech in Latin, remember that?” When it was Ginsberg’s turn, Ginsberg began to chant “Ohmshrimatraia, Ohmshrimatraia,” the mantra of the future Buddha, promising a forthcoming enlightenment. According to Ginsberg, that “was the 166

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FIGURE 4.4.  Allen Ginsberg onstage chanting mantras during the election for King of May in

the Julius Fučík Park of Culture and Rest. Courtesy of Miroslav Khol.

obvious situation there.” In their conversation, Lass also described the final phase of the election, which Ginsberg had barely understood as it was happening: The procedure was to measure the loudness of the applause and so there was this microphone hooked up to this enormous meter, and while you were singing I went behind this enormous thermometer-bulb meter and there were these two guys looking at a little version of the meter connected to the microphone you were singing into and that was also pointing into the crowds—and these two guys would move the arrow of the meter as you were singing.93 Ginsberg thought he had “won it fair and square.” But Lass explains to Ginsberg, “What this tells you is the extent to which this was a political 167

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demonstration and how important it was for the people who were arranging the parade and masterminding it to actually use you as a symbol and a vehicle.”94 Ginsberg then asks, cheekily, whether this was a CIA operation, but Lass replies, “No, no, they were students who actually then became leaders in the student movement in ’68.” Ginsberg thought it was “more spontaneous than that.”95 We may never know exactly what happened behind the Majáles stage. But students from Prague’s famous film school FAMU (Filmová a televizní fakulta Akademie múzických umění v Praze), which would produce many of the filmmakers associated with the celebrated Czechoslovak New Wave, did document Ginsberg’s election on film.96 (We can actually see these students filming Ginsberg in one of Czech photographer Miroslav Khol’s astounding images from Majáles.) Their recording corroborates some of the most absurd details that Ginsberg and Lass reference in their conversation, including both the applause meter and the medical student wrapped in bandages and covered in ketchup. We see Ginsberg chanting his trademark mantras and then repeating the phrase “long live Majáles,” astoundingly, in the original Czech. Even if the applause meter was hardly scientific, the enthusiasm for Ginsberg’s candidacy is clearly overwhelming. Following Ginsberg’s chants, the camera spins around to reveal a pulsating crowd. As the results of the election are announced, the crowd roars, and rock music fills the spring air. The film doesn’t end there. After Ginsberg’s election, an unidentified man on the stage raises his arms and yells, “At’ žije Král, Král je mrtev!” (Long live the King, the King is dead!) Next a group of students dressed like American military police depose Ginsberg from his throne as the rock music continues to throb in the background. These were actually military costumes borrowed from the nearby Barrandov film studio, which was making a movie about the US antiwar movement. As the dizzying cinematography of this film suggests, Ginsberg still had no idea what was going on. As he recalls to Lass, “Suddenly about six big guys like the ushers came over and told me, ‘You are no longer King of May,’ lifted me, lifted the entire chair and took it off the stage to the side.”97 The prank was actually part of the ceremony, and now the ritual inversion was complete. But the students had no idea that their ritual uncrowning of Ginsberg would turn out to be prophetic.

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FIGURE 4.5.  Allen Ginsberg being filmed by students from FAMU during Majáles. They

weren’t the only ones watching closely. Courtesy of Miroslav Khol.

Operation May Bug

Within hours of Ginsberg’s election as King of May, the Ministry of the Interior began targeting Ginsberg for expulsion from Czechoslovakia, with help from the StB. Several high-ranking Communist Party members were present at the Majáles election, including the minister of education and culture, and they were outraged that Ginsberg had been selected as King of May. Even though Ginsberg was scheduled to fly out of the country just a week after Majáles, on May 8, the authorities decided to take matters into their own hands. Using documents from the archives of the security services, the historian Petr Blažek has painstakingly reconstructed the steps taken by the StB in the days after Majáles.98 First, they bugged

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the telephone in Ginsberg’s room at the Hotel Merkur and began compiling a list of all the poet’s contacts in Prague. (According to Josef Rauvolf, this surveillance operation was code-named “May Bug.”)99 Not everything went according to plan, however. For starters, the StB could not locate Ginsberg for a full forty-eight hours after Majáles. Instead of retiring to his hotel room after Majáles, Ginsberg had accompanied a group of Czech students back to their dormitory, where they engaged in frank political discussions until the early hours of the morning. Little did Ginsberg know that they had been accompanied to the dormitory by an undercover StB agent named Karel Vodrážka, an alumnus of the Technical School that had selected Ginsberg as their candidate.100 According to the StB’s “Final Report”: GINSBERG badmouthed the Soviet Union and disparaged the leadership of our state. He did not hide his anti-Communism and antipathy towards Marxist philosophy in front of the students. He praised the students’ Majáles as the connecting of political resolve to protest the order with maximum eroticism of the environment.101 Ginsberg reportedly advised the students that they should invite the Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky, whom Ginsberg had met in Moscow, to Majáles the next year, as that would “‘ironically’ demonstrate that they are not onesided in their focus on the West and, furthermore they will extend a good deed to a person who is ‘oppressed by the Soviet regime.’”102 But Vodrážka could not submit his report on Ginsberg’s comments at the dormitory for another two days, after Ginsberg finally returned to his hotel. On the night of May 3, another set of undercover agents caught up with Ginsberg at the Viola. Earlier in the evening, Ginsberg had attended a concert featuring the Slovak rock group the Beatmen at the Špejbl and Hurvínek puppet theater.103 The StB agents managed to steal Ginsberg’s travel journal while he was distracted. The journal contained drafts of several promising poems, including one he had written while on the Majáles stage, as well as Ginsberg’s impressions of Czechoslovakia and a running account of his sexual activities (sometimes indistinguishable from his fantasies). According to a report later prepared by the Ministry of the Interior, the notebook also included the following statement: “Czech Communism 170

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with its bureaucrats above and its secret trials. Terror like in Cuba, only better masked. All the capitalist myths about Communism are true.”104 The context for this quote was a late-night discussion about Czechoslovak politics with his translator Zábrana during one of Ginsberg’s first nights in Prague. The StB now had access to many such details about Ginsberg’s activities in the two-plus months before Majáles. From Ginsberg’s notebook, the police also culled several dozen names for further investigation. Two days later, while walking back to his hotel from the Viola with a young Czech couple, Ginsberg was assaulted by a “Kafkian stranger” who called Ginsberg a buzerant—a derogative term for a gay person in Czech—and then punched him in the face.105 The attacker later claimed that Ginsberg had been engaging in sexual contact with the couple on the street. The entire group was brought to the police station for questioning. Until recently, Ginsberg’s assailant remained anonymous, but Rauvolf has confirmed that this man too was working for the secret police.106 Ginsberg and his companions were finally released at 5:00 a.m. after Ginsberg demanded to speak with the US Embassy. But the next evening Ginsberg was brought back to the police station once again, this time in connection with his missing travel journal. As Ginsberg recalled the event, “I was eating and suddenly two big, the Kafkian fat men, big bulky guys, came up to the table and said: ‘Mister Ginsberg,’ and I said ‘Yes.’ ‘Did you lose a notebook?’”107 Ginsberg confirmed that he had lost his journal and accompanied the men to the station in the hope that he might recover his notes and fragments of poetry. Once Ginsberg acknowledged in writing that the journal was his, he was informed that he was under official investigation and that the notebook would now be turned over to a state prosecutor. When he asked what he had done wrong, the officer said that he had produced “writings against the state.”108 On May 7, just one day before Ginsberg’s departing flight was set to leave Czechoslovakia, he was called to the Department of Visas and Passports, where he was told, according to the StB’s “Final Report,” that “his stay is not welcome and is terminated and that he must leave Czechoslovakia immediately.”109 The official charge against Ginsberg was that he had corrupted the Czechoslovak youth. The Ministry of the Interior cited expert testimony, which claimed that Ginsberg had caused several Czech teenagers serious sexual and psychological harm.110 Technically, Ginsberg hadn’t broken any laws regarding homosexuality, but the issue of age of 171

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consent was more ambiguous. Although the age of consent for heterosexual contact was fifteen in Czechoslovakia at the time, as Ginsberg had confirmed when he arrived, the age of consent for homosexual relations was actually eighteen.111 Ignorant of these legal distinctions, Ginsberg was informed that he was being expelled from the country. He requested to the immigration officials that he be allowed to leave as planned on May 8 to avoid a diplomatic scandal, but the authorities were insistent. Ginsberg departed on a plane headed for London later the same day. Ginsberg made a nearly perfect ritual exit. But for his contacts in Prague, the American poet’s expulsion was only the beginning. The next day, Czechoslovak president Antonín Novotný referenced Ginsberg in a major speech, stating that “the next time we will think more carefully about such a guest.”112 A week later, the Communist youth daily Mladá fronta (Young front) published an article called “Allen Ginsberg and Morality,” which elaborated on the official charges against Ginsberg, quoting letters from psychologists and concerned parents about Ginsberg’s dangerous influence on Czechoslovakia’s young people.113 “From these letters it resulted without a shadow of doubt that Ginsberg exerted a strong demoralizing influence upon his Czech friends,” the article concludes, “that he inspired and actively participated in drunken parties and sexual orgies, that he was bisexual, homosexual, a dope addict, poseur, and a social extremist.”114 We now know these letters, still preserved in Ginsberg’s file, were actually compiled by the StB, who then provided them to the editors of the newspaper.115 One of these letters, submitted by a particularly “disturbed” parent, has the unmistakable ring of a false confession. For instance, the parent claims to have “welcomed” a surprise visit to their apartment by government agents. The agents were understandably concerned “with the behavior of our youth, especially that segment of it that is under the influence of behavior and conduct, that is foreign to us and our way of life, of some literary figures of Western countries, particularly the United States of America.” The parent then accuses Ginsberg of “bisexuality, homosexuality, narcomania, drunkenness, exhibitionism and social extremism bordering with orgies,” claiming that their son had been imitating Ginsberg by abusing phenmetrazine, the stimulant that was popular among Prague’s youth counterculture long before Ginsberg’s arrival. There was an explanation for this too: “This segment of our youth was familiar with his non172

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literary activities even before his arrival, something that is without doubt the unfortunate fault of some of our cultural journals which, uncritically, without serious analysis, interpreted his way of life.”116 This was likely a reference to Hájek’s 1959 essay “American Bohemia” in Světová literatura. The Mladá fronta article mentions Hájek by name, criticizing him for his frank interview with Ginsberg in Literární noviny. The StB’s “Final Report” on Ginsberg’s activities in Czechoslovakia also singles out Hájek, for “contributing to [Ginsberg’s] popularity” with his articles, and notes Josef Škvorecký’s prominent role in the Majáles affair.117 Many of the less prominent names that appeared in Ginsberg’s confiscated journal were brought in for interrogation. As in Cuba, there would be consequences for many of the people Ginsberg came into contact with in Czechoslovakia. Ginsberg’s exit also coincided with the end of the Beat scene at the Viola. Not long after Ginsberg’s expulsion, Jiří Ostermann was removed from his position at the Viola, and the wine bar’s golden age was over. In the decades since his expulsion from Prague, some (including Ginsberg’s biographers) have criticized the American poet for acting so provocatively (or perhaps naively) while in Czechoslovakia, ignoring local law and moral custom.118 Indeed, Ginsberg invited this line of criticism with some of his flippant remarks in the aftermath of his visit, as when he reported to his father that he’d been expelled from Czechoslovakia for “anti-state orgies.”119 Just as his contacts were being interrogated in Prague, Ginsberg was in London cavorting with the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Once he was back in New York later that summer, Ginsberg claimed, “I never made a secret of the fact that I smoke pot and fuck any youth that’ll stand still for it, orgies, etc.”120 He further joked that mimeographed copies of his confiscated travel journal were probably already being passed around by his secret admirers at the Communist Party headquarters. But the near-exclusive focus on Ginsberg’s own behavior in Prague has long obscured the other essential factor in the Majáles affair: the agency of his Czech counterparts. Ginsberg actually had little idea of what was happening during Majáles, and even less control over the outcome of the election. Ginsberg’s election as King of May was a perfect example of what the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has called “the structure of the conjuncture.”121 In other words, Ginsberg’s status as a “stranger-king” only mattered so much because it represented the collision between a highly contingent event (Ginsberg’s presence at Majáles) and a much longer 173

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structural process (“the Thaw”) that had been playing out in Czechoslovakia for nearly a decade. When Ginsberg arrived in Prague in the winter of 1965, he was stepping into the middle of a cultural contest between an emerging youth movement and a hard-liner faction in the Communist Party. After his expulsion, both sides in this generational conflict would use Ginsberg and Majáles as symbols in the ongoing battle over the future of Czechoslovak socialism. And, however briefly, Ginsberg’s poetic vision of Majáles would be given political substance by the Prague Spring. Mid-Heaven

On the outbound plane from Prague, Ginsberg wrote a spontaneous poem called “Kral Majales,” which he would later include—with minimal revisions—in his 1968 collection Planet News.122 Taken together, the poems of Planet News chronicle a global itinerary that took Ginsberg from Tangier and Calcutta to Havana and Prague over the course of the sixties. By the time the collection was published, Ginsberg had completed his transformation from Beat spokesperson to international countercultural icon, just as a series of youth protests erupted across the world, from Chicago and Tokyo to Paris and Prague.123 It’s therefore tempting to read “Kral Majales” as a form of prophecy. As with many of Ginsberg’s best-known poems, “Kral Majales” transmutes the poet’s real-life experiences into an oracular form characterized by long Whitmanesque lines and strophic repetitions. As he later told Lass, this formal strategy was directly related to his frequent chanting of mantras throughout the Majáles festival. He was experimenting with an idea: That a change in the literary attitude and verse measure, the measure of the verse line, probably indicated some change of body-English, attitude and perspective on the phenomenal world outside. Actually I was using that as a way of undercutting the rigidly hyper-rationalistic Marxist dogmatism that I was hearing both from Cuba and not so much from the Czechs who were sophisticated but from their official voices.124 “Kral Majales” therefore marks a further shift in Ginsberg’s relationship to both Marxist aesthetics and the communist world in general. In a Paris 174

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Review interview conducted in London immediately after his expulsion, Ginsberg tells his interviewer, “There’s one thing I feel certain of, and that’s that there’s no human answer in communism or capitalism.”125 Morris Dickstein usefully characterizes Ginsberg’s political standpoint in Planet News as a hard-won “romantic socialism.”126 While some of his earlier poems like “Howl” and “America” were cries of dissent against the stultifying domestic culture of early Cold War America, “Kral Majales” was a poetic counterstatement to—and rejection of—the entire binary framework of Cold War geopolitics, ideology, and culture. “Kral Majales” opens, in media res, with an alternating pattern: And the Communists have nothing to offer but fat cheeks and eyeglasses and lying policemen and the Capitalists proffer Napalm and money in green suitcases to the Naked, and the Communists create heavy industry but the heart is also heavy127 This poetic form perfectly captures Ginsberg’s sense of being caught between two terminally corrupted political-cultural systems. The poem then chronicles all of his specific abuses at the hands of the Czechoslovak government: being followed “thru Springtime Prague” by secret agents, the multiple arrests and interrogations, the assault “by a mustached agent who screamed out BOUZERANT [sic],” the stolen notebook, and finally his deportation. These very real events are reformulated as poetic myth— one part Kafkaesque parable, one part messianic allegory. (He directly invokes The Trial in the poem through his reference to the “two strange dolls that entered Joseph K’s room at morn.”)128 But his “big paranoid hymn” doesn’t stop there: “and I am the King of May, naturally, for I am of Slavic parentage and a Buddhist Jew.”129 For Ginsberg, the crown of Majáles is forged out of both foreign and indigenous identities, a cosmic synthesis far more enduring than if it were only political. “Kral Majales” is the fulfillment of Ginsberg’s decade-long search for an embodied poetics that could transcend Cold War geopolitics. Beginning with the middle section of the poem, Ginsberg repeats the line “and I am the King of May,” positioning himself as the symbolic and 175

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physical embodiment of the liberating “power of sexual youth.” The poem positions this “Kingdom of May” as a socialist-libertarian alternative to the systems of state control that he felt characterized both capitalism and communism.130 In other words, “Kral Majales” is an attempt to escape the negative dialectic of Cold War geopolitics by articulating a third, utopian possibility.131 By the midsixties, there was nothing politically groundbreaking in Ginsberg’s desire for a third option beyond the Cold War binary, but his poem arrives at its special power by evoking the real, if temporary, world of Majáles: the embodiment of his romantic socialist ideal and the realization of his desire to dissolve the boundary between poetry and life—and between East and West. As Ginsberg makes clear in the final line of the poem, “Kral Majales” was a poem literally composed in the space between Cold War blocs, “on a jet seat in mid Heaven.” Thru Springtime Prague

Back on the ground, in Prague, the student population became even more openly confrontational with political authorities in the aftermath of Ginsberg’s expulsion, especially after the party-controlled Czechoslovak Union of Youth (ČSM ) and the Communist Party turned again to the tools of repression. Historians now agree that a new generation of student leaders was pivotal in the transition from the youth apathy of the early sixties to the activism of the late sixties.132 Among the most prominent of these leaders was Jiří Müller, the same student who had recruited Ginsberg to be the Czech Technical University’s candidate for the Majáles throne. (The StB’s “Final Report” notes that Ginsberg “felt the strongest sexual attraction” toward Müller, “who was sexually naïve and generally overall rather naïve” but “was surprised by these opinions and refused GINSBERG.”) In late 1965, Müller proposed an ambitious reform program at a Czechoslovak student conference, and within a year he was expelled from the university and conscripted into the military. Müller became a cause célèbre among Czech students and intellectuals, rallying many to the cause of reform.133 The same year, the regime initiated a public campaign against the so-called vlasatci, or “longhairs,” a Czech term for hippies and beatniks.134 According to Josef Rauvolf, “Thousands of young men were affected (often beaten, always cropped), refused service 176

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in restaurants, and expelled from public transportation, movie theaters, and schools.”135 The regime directly tied their campaign against the longhairs to Ginsberg’s perverse influence on Czechoslovak youth. But in the years since the Czech youth counterculture had first begun imitating Beat styles, the student movement had grown more ideologically self-reflective, and more assertive.136 After the summer of 1967, the growing student opposition joined with writers and other members of the intelligentsia in demanding fundamental democratic reforms to the Communist Party’s one-party dictatorship. In June, at the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union, a vocal minority that included some of Czechoslovakia’s most well-known writers and intellectuals—including Ludvík Vaculík, Pavel Kohout, Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Antonín Liehm, Ivan Klíma, and Eduard Goldstücker— spoke out against unpopular Communist Party policies. By September, Vaculík, Liehm, and Klíma had been kicked out of the party. The liberalleaning magazine Literární noviny, where Igor Hájek was an editor, was disbanded. Student activists were prominent among those who protested the reprisals against the writers. Then, in October 1967, an estimated 1,500 students took to the streets after yet another power outage at the Strahov dormitory, which housed students of the Czech Technical University. The student protestors marched from Petřín Hill; past the Prague Castle, where the Central Committee was in session; and toward the center of Prague, holding candles and chanting, “We Want Light!” They were finally beaten back by security forces with batons and tear gas. As public support for a broader democratization movement continued to grow, the students’ simple slogan took on considerable symbolic weight.137 In January 1968, Novotný resigned and was replaced by the reformminded Slovak politician Alexander Dubček. The reform-socialist movement drew on political and cultural discourses that had been developing in Czechoslovakia for over two decades, from the postwar dream of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism” to the Marxist-humanist reappraisal of Franz Kafka after 1963. Once in power, Dubček and the reformist wing of the Czechoslovakia Communist Party developed a new Action Program that addressed many of the demands put forward by the youth movement.138 By the end of March, the Prague Spring had begun in earnest. If it is possible to hear echoes of Ginsberg’s verses from “Kral Majales” in the Prague Spring slogan of “socialism with a human face,” as a 177

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possible “third way” between American-style capitalist democracy and Soviet-style communist dictatorship, that is because Ginsberg’s own political sensibilities had been transformed by his participation in Majáles. A year after his deportation, in 1966, Majáles had been allowed to take place again but only under the control of the ČSM. Although overall participation had declined dramatically, the event still resulted in a rowdy student demonstration, and dozens of students were arrested, including several children of high-profile Communist officials.139 During the Prague Spring, on May 16, 1968, students again celebrated Majáles, this time with new slogans demanding that the Dubček government go even further with their top-down reforms.140 The symbolic import of the Majáles celebration in 1968 underscores the point that the Prague Spring was a culmination of a much longer process that, for many young Czechs, first broke into the open on the day three years earlier when Allen Ginsberg was elected King of May.141 Unfortunately, as Ginsberg reflected in his poem, “the Kingdom of May is too beautiful to last for more than a month.” As spring turned into summer, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev and the leaders of the other Warsaw Pact countries grew increasingly worried that Czechoslovakstyle reform socialism would destabilize the entire Eastern bloc. On the night of August 20–21, an occupying force of Warsaw Pact soldiers invaded Czechoslovakia in a gesture of “fraternal assistance to the Czechoslovak people.” There followed a brief but inspiring period of civil resistance led, notably, by students in alliance with trade unionists.142 In a famous and controversial essay published in December 1968, Milan Kundera called the week after the Soviet-led invasion that summer “the most beautiful week that we have ever lived through.”143 The subsequent neo-Stalinist period, which saw the resumption of strict state controls on cultural life, would come to be referred to as normalizace, or “normalization.” Although there was nothing “normal” about the new regime installed by the Soviet Union after the Prague Spring, it would also be a mistake to view Majáles in 1965 as an entirely anomalous and contingent event that occurred only because of the unexpected presence—or “bad influence”—of a foreign poet-provocateur. It’s true that if Ginsberg had never been put on a plane from Havana to Prague, or if he’d returned from the Soviet Union just a few days later and missed Majáles, the status of the Beats in Czechoslovakia would have been very different in the seventies and eighties. As it 178

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turned out, Ginsberg’s election as King of May did have spectacular consequences, but the episode was also just the most visible manifestation of larger social and political shifts in Czechoslovakia that drew on years of countercultural exchange with the West. And if many young Czechs had been looking to American writers like Ginsberg for an alternative vision of Bohemia during the Thaw, in the decades after 1968 the world would turn to Prague for a new model of literary dissent.

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Chapter Five

TH E TO URIST

P H I L I P ROT H A N D THE W RITE RS F ROM T H E OT H E R E U RO P E

In May 1973, the Czechoslovak secret police, the Státní bezpečnost (StB), began keeping a classified file on the novelist Philip Roth. The American writer was flagged after an informant told the StB that Roth had met with “suspicious persons” during a visit to Prague earlier that spring. The secret report also identified Roth as a “supporter of international Zionism,” antiSemitic code language established during the Stalinist era that was making a comeback in the seventies. The StB charged that Roth had traveled to Prague under the cover of a tourist visa to make contact with several “persons of interest in Czechoslovakia, who in 1968 participated actively in the creeping, opportunistic, right-wing developments in the ČSSR,” the reform movement better known outside the Communist Party as the Prague Spring. The persons in question were all well-known Czech writers and intellectuals: Ivan Klíma, Antonín Liehm, Stanislav Budín, Miroslav Holub, Ludvík Vaculík, and Milan Kundera. Major Hoffman, the agent assigned to the case, recommended the preparation of “operational measures for Roth’s next arrival in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.” For the purposes of this secret operation, Roth was assigned the code name TURISTA, or “the Tourist.”1 180

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What exactly was the nature of Roth’s “tourism” in Czechoslovakia during the seventies? According to Roth, “It was Franz Kafka who was responsible for getting me to Prague to begin with.”2 In 1972, Roth and his companion Barbara Sproul drove from Vienna to Prague, across the militarized Austro-Czech border, to see the city where Kafka had spent his life. After checking into the Hotel Jalta on Wenceslas Square, where the rooms were routinely bugged, Roth set out on a tour of Old Town sites associated with his beloved Kafka. He immediately “understood that a connection of sorts existed between me and this place,” with its old neighborhoods “emptied of Jews,” not so unlike the East-Central European towns where Roth’s own ancestors had once lived in Galicia. “Looking for Kafka’s landmarks,” he writes, “I had, to my surprise, come upon some landmarks that felt like my own.” During their brief stay in Prague, the American couple also discovered a contemporary Czech literary culture still undergoing a period referred to as normalizace, or “normalization.” Following the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, Czech literary culture was being transformed yet again, thanks to the reimposition of a strict state censorship regime and an official backlash against reform-minded intellectuals and cultural nonconformists. After Roth befriended a small group of banned Czech writers and intellectuals, most of whom were high-profile targets of the regime, he returned to Prague annually during the seventies. Beginning with his second visit, Roth began to take greater risks. First, he gathered information about the treatment of his “dissident” friends in Czechoslovakia for the writers’ organization PEN, including details about how the Communist government was punishing a small group of writers by seizing the foreign royalties owed to them for books that had been translated and published abroad. To help make up for their lost income, Roth organized a clandestine financial scheme that funneled money from prominent American writers to suppressed intellectuals in Czechoslovakia. After five years, Czechoslovak authorities finally revoked Roth’s entry visa in 1977 because of his escalating involvement with his struggling counterparts in Prague. Roth’s literary engagement with both Czechoslovakia and its banned writers would continue through the end of the Cold War—and have even wider consequences. If American literature had enjoyed a golden age in Czechoslovakia between 1956 and 1968, Czech-language literature was about to experience its own international renaissance under conditions of political 181

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normalization. And Roth played a central role in this paradoxical development. In 1975, he initiated the landmark Penguin paperback series Writers from the Other Europe and served as its general editor until the series’ end in 1989. The Other Europe series was originally conceived as a way to help Roth’s friends in Prague get their banned books into wider circulation. But the Other Europe series should also be understood as Roth’s great midcareer project: the creation of an alternative literary canon that stood in opposition to dominant aesthetic categories on both sides of the Cold War divide, including both American and socialist modes of literary realism. This counter-realist project also extended to Roth’s own fiction, which moved away from the self-directed provocations of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) toward penetrating investigations of the individual’s relationship to history, identity, and politics. It is impossible to understand the arc of Roth’s long career without accounting for his encounter with Czech writers from the Other Europe, which not only transformed him as a novelist but also helped him introduce an entire counter-realist tradition within East-Central European literature to a Western readership. By reconstructing Roth’s encounter with his Czech counterparts, we can also see how their East-West contact brought new forms of literary dissent into circulation at a transitional moment in Cold War geopolitics. The Other Europe series debuted near the end of a period of foreign policy “realism” and superpower détente, a brief interregnum before another series of escalations in the US-Soviet rivalry during the 1980s. In the wake of the global disruptions of 1968, societies on both sides of the Cold War divide were searching for a new political narrative, both at home and abroad. The utopian projects of the New Left in the United States and reform communists in Czechoslovakia had largely collapsed. As historian Tony Judt writes, “In the East the message of the Sixties was that you could no longer work within ‘the system’; in the West there appeared no better choice. On both sides of the Iron Curtain illusions were swept aside.”3 If the seventies were experienced as a period of cultural disillusion and political demobilization in both the United States and Czechoslovakia, this was also an era in which new discourses about literary “dissidence” were emerging: the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s postinvasion account of the Prague Spring, for one; but also a new image of the persecuted Czech literary intellectual, whose global appeal was couched 182

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in an emerging language of human rights. For both these cultural narratives, Kafka was a crucial starting point. Kafka Obstructed

“IT BEGAN ODDLY,” according to the opening line of Roth’s antirealist novella The Breast, a reenactment of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) in which the protagonist David Kepesh is transformed into an enormous human mammary gland.4 Published in 1972 on the eve of his adventures in Prague, the novella is evidence of both Roth’s desperate attachment to Kafka and his pursuit of alternative aesthetic models during these years. Many of the biographical details that Roth has made available about this first trip appear in his more conventional Kepesh novel The Professor of Desire (1977), in which the protagonist—no longer a breast—visits Prague with his girlfriend, Clare, during a European tour. Kafka provides the lens through which Kepesh views normalized Prague. Kepesh and Clare are guided around the city’s Kafka-related sites by a former professor, a “smallish, bespectacled, neatly attired” Czech referred to simply as Soska.5 One of the real-life models for this character was Zdeněk Stříbrný, a Shakespeare scholar who introduced Roth to Kafka’s surviving niece Věra Saudková.6 Twenty-five years earlier, Stříbrný had been one of F. O. Matthiessen’s star pupils during his semester at Charles University. In Professor of Desire, the fictionalized Soska has been forced into retirement and spends his days translating Moby-Dick, one of Matthiessen’s favorite novels, into Czech.7 At one point, Soska remarks to Kepesh, “To each obstructed citizen his own Kafka,” to which Roth’s protagonist replies, “And to each angry man his own Melville.” Soska stands in for an entire class of deposed intellectuals. A series of purges initiated in 1969 had decimated the intelligentsia and the official cultural industries of Czechoslovakia, including the universities.8 Normalization had also come for Kafka. As Soska explains to Kepesh, “Kafka is an outlawed writer, the outlawed writer.”9 Rather absurdly, Kafka was assigned a central role in the official Soviet-approved account of the intelligentsia’s participation in the Prague Spring. The status of Kafka’s writings was always tenuous in post-1948 Czechoslovakia: after being banned as a “decadent antirealist” during the 1950s, Kafka was briefly “rehabilitated” in 1963 at an international conference organized by the scholar Eduard 183

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Goldstücker, an event widely seen as an early harbinger of liberalization. Now Goldstücker himself was a prominent enemy of the regime, and Kafka’s books were again taken off the shelves.10 According to Paulina Bren, “Normalization’s new set of cultural critics thus insisted that the alienation described by Kafka was felt merely by marginalized, nonrepresentative Czech and Slovak intellectuals who were so anxious to mimic their West European counterparts that they had even adopted their neuroses.”11 Although this was just one aspect of the normalization regime’s revision of the Prague Spring narrative, the focus on a Jewish writer like Kafka usefully allowed critics to inject a dose of anti-Semitism into their attack on reform-minded intellectuals. The attack on Kafka reached a crescendo in 1972, the same year of Roth’s first visit, which was also the ninetieth anniversary of Kafka’s birth. Accordingly, Roth’s StB file includes conspiratorial references to foreign “Zionist centers,” a common line of attack on literary intellectuals who had dared express their admiration for Kafka.12 During his initial visit to Czechoslovakia, Roth was put in touch with his Czech translators, the couple Luba and Rudolf Pellar, by the foreign publishing house Odeon. Dating back to their involvement with the landmark literary journal Světová literatura, the Pellars had translated a number of American novels into Czech during the sixties, including J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye in 1960 and Roth’s own Letting Go in 1968. After the onset of normalization, they too were placed under secret police surveillance. During his visit, Roth also learned from the Pellars that the couple had recently completed a translation of Portnoy’s Complaint but couldn’t get the book approved for publication. Censorship practices during this period were increasingly dispersed among publishers and editors, who all behaved conservatively under the new conditions of normalization.13 On the same trip, Roth was alarmed to discover that the United States Information Agency (USIA) had also deemed Portnoy’s Complaint too scandalous for inclusion in the USIA library attached to the American Embassy in Prague. After contacting the agency directly, Roth learned that Portnoy’s Complaint had been added to a long list of novels that were systematically excluded from US libraries abroad.14 The experience only deepened Roth’s interest in the comparative politics of censorship during the Cold War. The Pellars had also provided a new Czech translation of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? in 1964, a year after Albee had visited Czechoslovakia as part of an official exchange. Following 184

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the example of Bedřich Becher and Jiří Kolář, who had translated an earlier stage adaptation, the Pellars published Albee’s play under a new title: Who Would Be Afraid of Kafka?15 Roth was fascinated by the countless ways that Kafka was put to use in his native land. As Roth soon discovered, not only the regime but also many of the banned writers he encountered in Prague were proliferating their own political interpretations of Kafka.16 Following their lead—or perhaps ironizing this tendency—Roth provides his own politicized reading of Kafka in The Professor of Desire. For David Kepesh, the erotic and spiritual obstructions encoded in Kafka’s fiction serve as an allegory for life under Czechoslovakia’s repressive government. At one point, Kepesh says to Soska, “I can only compare the body’s utter single-mindedness, its cold indifference and absolute contempt for the well-being of the spirit, to some unyielding, authoritarian regime.”17 There is evidence that Roth shared Kepesh’s preoccupation with Kafka’s erotic blockages. Ivan Klíma, one of the first Czech writers Roth met in Prague, writes in his memoir that Roth immediately “surprised me by asking if I thought Kafka had been impotent.”18 Klíma objected to this interpretation: at the time, he was working on an adaptation of Kafka’s first incomplete novel, Amerika (1927), with the playwright Pavel Kohout. Unlike Max Brod’s heavily edited version, the play they envisioned would be stripped down to include only language taken directly from the source text, as a kind of protest against the many politicized readings of Kafka that surrounded them in normalized Prague. Although they disagreed on the point of Kafka’s impotence, Klíma became Roth’s “principal reality instructor” in Prague.19 (Roth may have borrowed the phrase “reality instructor” from Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel Herzog, which was itself influenced by Bellow’s travels behind the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1950s.) Klíma was a Kafka enthusiast from a Jewish background who had also been a vocal participant in the Prague Spring movement—three strikes against him in the eyes of the normalization regime. Even though he had been teaching at the University of Michigan during the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968, he decided to return home to Prague, where he refused to renounce his former beliefs and was banned from publishing. Roth explains, “He drove me around to the street-corner kiosks where writers sold cigarettes, to the public buildings where they mopped the floors, to the construction sites where they were laying bricks, and out of the city to the municipal waterworks where they 185

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slogged about in overalls and boots, a wrench in one pocket and a book in the other.”20 Klíma himself would briefly take a job as a street sweeper too, but only as voluntary research for his most well-known novel, Love and Garbage (first published in samizdat as Laská a smetí in 1986). Many of the other politically compromised intellectual-laborers to whom Klíma introduced Roth in Prague didn’t have the same choice or Klíma’s small income from foreign royalties. Along with his wife, Helena Klímová—a former editor at Literární noviny (a publication that played a prominent role in encouraging the Prague Spring movement) who was now retraining as a psychotherapist—Klíma hosted a number of other American writers during this period. Because they spoke good English, their apartment was often a first stop for prominent literary tourists. In his memoir, Klíma describes visits by both Arthur Miller and Roth’s close friend William Styron, but Klíma distinguishes Roth from these visitors because of Roth’s intense desire to understand Klíma’s circumscribed world. Klíma writes, Given [Roth’s] interest in the fate of Jews, of course, he could not ignore one of the most fundamental Jewish experiences: persecution. However much he had managed to evade it in a free country he harbored a feeling of solidarity with those being persecuted in a country that had been deprived of its freedom. I don’t think any other [American] author has written with such understanding and earnestness about the oppressive fate of Czech writers and Czech culture.21 Clearly, this narrative of Czech intellectual persecution was very different from the official story being promoted at home and abroad by the normalization regime. Even if the unofficial version was much closer to Klíma’s lived reality, this new narrative was still being fashioned in the mid-1970s, sometimes out of older materials. Interestingly, Kafka played a role in both official and unofficial discourse about cultural life under normalization. For Prague’s banned writers, Kafka provided a common literary language that could be addressed to an international audience. But this was just a starting point. Roth soon met a number of other “reality instructors” besides Klíma in Prague and discovered a Central European literary tradition that extended far beyond Kafka. 186

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FIGURE 5.1.  Philip Roth with his primary “reality instructor” in Prague, Ivan Klíma. Courtesy of Barbara Sproul.

Reality Instructors

Roth’s first trip to Czechoslovakia was brief—only a few days—but he continued his Czech education soon after returning home, finding an able tutor in an unlikely location: Staten Island, New York. In a letter to Roth written during the summer of 1972, Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books, put Roth in contact with Antonín J. Liehm, a Czech journalist and critic who had emigrated to the United States after the Soviet invasion and taken a job teaching at the City University of New York (CUNY) Staten Island. Liehm had been an influential editor at the shuttered Literární noviny. Silvers mentioned that Liehm was about to publish “a big book on the Czechoslovak uprising, with an introduction by Sartre.”22 Originally written in Czech under the title Generace (Generations), Liehm’s “big book” was published later that year by Grove Press as The Politics of Culture. Roth arranged to meet Liehm at the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan. Now in direct communication, Liehm recommended that Roth read his new book, which dealt “with all the Czech problems and people you are interested in.”23 The Politics of Culture is less about the so-called uprising than it is about the flowering of Czechoslovakia’s socialist literary culture during 187

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the 1960s, a topic Liehm explores through a series of interviews with leading Czech writers and intellectuals, from Josef Škvorecký to Václav Havel. But in a lengthy forward to these interviews, Liehm also takes on the Prague Spring and its aftermath, drawing on hundreds of years of Bohemian history to create an exceptionalist narrative about the historical role of the Czech intellectual. Liehm argues that in Bohemia, “the connection between culture and politics had an organic basis from the very first.”24 In the absence of a strong aristocracy, writers, linguists, and scholars had been established as the “spiritual elite of a subjugated nation.” This “usable past” proved very important to oppositional intellectuals from the sixties on. Both Politics of Culture and Liehm’s course on Czech film at CUNY Staten Island, which Roth attended regularly, framed the author’s thinking about culture in Czechoslovakia. In preparation for his next trip to Prague in 1973, Roth also read what little Czech literature he could find in English translation. With Liehm’s help, he then assembled a list of writers to meet with in Prague, many of whom were interviewees in Politics of Culture. On this second trip, Roth met with Milan Kundera, Stříbrný (the Shakespeare scholar who was a partial basis for Soska in The Professor of Desire), Miroslav Holub, Karol Sidon, Stanislav Budín, and Budín’s daughter Rita Budínová. Roth became close with several of these writers, most famously Kundera, over the next decade, but he initially hid these friendships from public view to protect his contacts from possible Czechoslovak government retaliation. In a 1976 essay for the New York Times, Roth assigned each Czech writer he’d met an alphabetical code name. Roth wrote, “Let me just say here that with ‘X,’ who wanted to show me the confluence of two beautiful rivers, I have taken a trip by car to a countryside castle for lunch, with ‘Y’ I have spent an evening listening to his wife sing for us some favorite Moravian folk songs, and one night I lost a post-dinner contest to ‘Z,’ who shamed me by knowing the names of more American Indian tribes than I did.”25 From Roth’s correspondence from the period, it’s possible to confirm that Z was the writer Ludvík Vaculík. It’s also likely that X and Y are the novelists Klíma and Kundera. Kundera and Klíma are often contrasted because of the very different choices they made in the face of political difficulties. While Kundera, whose code name with the StB was “the Elitist” (ELITÁŘ), eventually chose exile in Paris, Klíma repeatedly turned down opportunities to teach abroad, including an appointment at Bucknell University arranged 188

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by Roth. However, Roth himself was just as interested in the different aesthetic choices the two writers made in response to their overlapping political reality. He came to view Kundera’s abstract and ironic style as a kind of antithesis to Klíma’s rough autobiographical realism. This contrast was even more remarkable to Roth because of “the correspondence of preoccupations” in their work. According to Roth, both writers used fiction to ward off political despair and displayed an affinity for exploring erotic vulnerability and various kinds of “social excreta, whether garbage or kitsch.” Both writers sought to translate their political situation into a literary vocabulary but opted for a very different aesthetic grammar. Roth writes, “I sometimes had the feeling while reading Love and Garbage that I was reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being turned inside out.”26 In the end it was Kundera, not Klíma, who Roth would place at the center of the Other Europe series, in part because Klíma was more widely translated outside of Czechoslovakia when the series was created. Roth and Kundera became close friends, but at first the two writers could barely communicate and relied heavily on Kundera’s wife, Vera, as a translator for their hours-long conversations. Vera, who spoke much better English than Milan, later edited many of his letters to Roth. Vera Kundera’s role as mediator underscores how Roth’s public friendships with Czech writers like Kundera and Klíma have obscured the essential roles played by their female friends and partners.27 Roth also formed a close friendship with Ivan Klíma’s wife, Helena, whom Roth describes in Shop Talk as “a psychotherapist who received her training in the underground university that the dissidents conducted in various living rooms during the Russian occupation.”28 The view of Czech literary culture that Roth would later present in his book series was a decidedly masculinist one, but this was related in part to the gender politics of underground literature in Czechoslovakia. As Jessie Labov and Friederike Kind-Kovacs write, “Women were essential in running the machinery of samizdat publications in the East, smuggling texts, supporting tamizdat publications in the West, while being almost completely eclipsed by their better-known male colleagues and husbands.”29 This invisible labor enabled the rise of many writers, including Kundera, in the West. Ironically, Kundera’s fiction then helped establish a hypersexualized image of dissident masculinity in the Western cultural imagination—an erotic cliché that Roth would satirize in both The Prague Orgy (1985) and The Human Stain (2000). 189

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FIGURE 5.2.  Philip Roth with Milan Kundera in Prague. Courtesy of Barbara Sproul.

Although less well-known to English-speaking audiences today, Roth’s third reality instructor, Vaculík (“Z”), had been at the center of the Czech literary opposition ever since his speech at the 1967 Writers’ Congress. In 1975, the New York Review of Books published an open letter by Vaculík addressed to Kurt Waldheim, secretary general of the United Nations, and Robert Silvers asked Roth to write an anonymous headnote “explaining who Vaculík is, what his position and recent difficulties have been.”30 In the resulting note, Roth describes how Vaculík’s authorship of the “Two Thousand Word Manifesto” during the Prague Spring was viewed as one of the precipitating events of the Warsaw Pact invasion later that August. Vaculík had pushed for even greater democratization of the Prague Spring movement, well beyond the Communist Party’s top-down reforms. After being expelled from the party in disgrace, Vaculík had, according to Roth, “retreated into silence.”31 In fact, at the time Vaculík was busy founding the first Czech samizdat publishing house under the name Edice Petlice (Padlock Editions), through which he continued to circulate his own writing as well as that of dozens of other banned writers.32 Vaculík’s open letter enumerates the depredations he faced as a result of all his vigorous literary activities: the seizure of his passport, 190

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daily surveillance of all his contacts (“postal, telephone, friendly, foreignlanguage, sexual”), arrests, and interrogations. Stylistically, the letter is an unusual political text: in a false confessional tone, it moves from a pastiche of a legalistic appeal to a surrealist critique of détente. Vaculík writes, “The world is enthusiastic over the Americans and the Russians screwing together two spaceships, and I, far beneath them, am miserably worried about my papers.” Vaculík is referring to the Apollo-Soyuz docking mission, the first joint US-Soviet space operation, launched in 1975, which was treated as a symbol of détente. The letter also references his subjection (in absentia) to a political trial that was like something taken straight from Kafka: “There I was condemned for an unknown crime to an unknown sentence, my sons and I.”33 The familiar trope of a Kafkaesque trial provided a rare moment of traction for Western readers of Vaculík’s oblique letter. In the Czech context, the genre of the open letter is most often associated with the playwright Václav Havel, whom Roth also met in Prague. By the 1970s, Havel was already familiar to New York theater circles, where several of his absurdist plays were performed—and often reductively interpreted as allegories of communist bureaucracy. Roth was able to meet Havel in 1974 when the latter was visiting Klíma to show him a draft of one of his first open letters, addressed to the leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Gustav Husák. Havel’s letter went on to become one of the foundational documents of Czech dissidence, laying the groundwork for a new coalition between the noncommunist intelligentsia and the cultural underground. As part of his defense of a culture under attack by an authoritarian state, Havel included a damning assessment of the narrow literary realism that the regime enforced on its writers, which he referred to as “the aesthetics of banality.”34 Rather than revealing social truth, Havel writes, this literature “will never stray one inch beyond the taboos of a banal, conventional and, hence, basically fraudulent social consciousness . . . a concatenation of smooth, hackneyed, superficial trivia of experience; . . . pallid reflections of such aspects of experience as the social consciousness has long since adopted and domesticated.”35 Havel’s own plays had long exposed the aesthetics of banality, but in “Dear Dr. Husák” he restates these artistic commitments in an emerging language of political dissidence. With Vaculík and Havel available as models, Roth considered writing his own open letter on the situation of writers in Czechoslovakia, but 191

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Liehm counseled him against going through with the idea. “Why not wait until [the Czechoslovak government] really turn down your request for a visa,” Liehm asked. “As long as you—and Barbara [Sproul], because this would inevitably effect [sic] her too as far as visas are concerned—can go there is nothing more valuable.”36 Kundera agreed with Liehm’s advice. He wrote to Roth, “Your occasional personal visits in Czechoslovakia are much more than the article. The possibility of meeting and speaking with you in Prague meant for me and for my mates more than our coyness allowed to tell.”37 Roth discarded the idea of an open letter. Instead, he provided PEN with an unsigned “country report” on Czechoslovakia, the first in a planned “series of reports to be published from time to time by American PEN on the situation of writers in a given country.”38 Despite its anonymity, the report provides a detailed summary of the political situation that Roth discovered during his visits to Czechoslovakia during the early 1970s. The first section of the report, subtitled “A Visitor’s Notes on Kafka’s City,” begins by listing the ways that normalization had affected many of Czechoslovakia’s most promising writers and intellectuals: Josef Škvorecký, Antonín Liehm, and Eduard Goldstücker had all emigrated and were teaching abroad; Helena and Ivan Klíma were no longer allowed to publish; Milan Kundera had been removed from his position as a teacher at the famous Prague film school (FAMU); and the regime was dedicated to turning Ludvík Vaculík “into a Czechoslovak Solzhenitsyn.”39 By invoking Solzhenitsyn, Roth was participating in a new transnational discourse that further politicized cultural nonconformists across the Soviet bloc. It was precisely through such turns of phrase that a small group of Czech “writing people,” to borrow Havel’s phrase, were transformed into “dissidents” in the Western imagination. Roth goes on to describe how these Czech “dissident writers” were being punished for their participation in the Prague Spring movement. His account of 1968 and its aftermath conspicuously echoes the grand narrative of Czech cultural politics presented by Liehm in his book. Roth writes, “That the Prague Spring happened at all is largely due to the role of the intellectual community, from whose ranks have emerged leaders of political movements throughout the modern history of the nation: the 19thcentury revival of Czech and Slovak political identity; the First Republic (1918–1938); the struggle against Nazism.” As a result, many Czech writers were singled out for retribution by the regime after the Soviet invasion of 192

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1968. In particular, Roth provides detailed information on the methods used by the Czechoslovak government to confiscate the foreign royalties owed to this small group of politically undesirable Czech writers. Roth lists the ten writers whom the government had designated as “authors of subversive and anti-socialistic works as well as authors whose work is not distributed in Czechoslovakia.” In addition to Klíma, Kundera, and Vaculík, the group included Václav Havel, Alexandr Kliment, Pavel Kohout, Jiří Šotola, Karel Kosík, Robert Kalivoda, and Jan Procházka. According to the report, “It is estimated that a dissident author will now receive, after deductions and taxes, between 2% and 4% of his total foreign royalties.” To provide material assistance to his contacts in Prague, Roth established the short-lived “Czech Ad Hoc Fund for Czechoslovak Writers and Intellectuals,” which secretly funneled money from US authors to suppressed writers and intellectuals in Czechoslovakia. A letter that Roth sent to the poet Allen Ginsberg in August 1974 provides a window into how this scheme operated and which writers participated. Roth was contacting Ginsberg, who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia less than a decade earlier, to recruit him to contribute to the fund. Roth writes, “Late in June I returned from a trip to Prague, where I spent a week talking and visiting with some of the dissident writers and intellectuals who are being persecuted and harassed in a variety of effective ways by the Czech regime.”40 Even though the government was confiscating foreign royalties, Roth explained that there was a way to get money to the specific writers using Tuzex coupons, a government-created pseudo-currency used to control the circulation of foreign cash in Czechoslovakia. Roth hoped that Ginsberg would be willing to contribute fifty dollars a month, “which would assist fifteen Czechs who are having serious financial problems because of ideas they have espoused and/or books they have written.” Roth enclosed his PEN country report, along with a list of participants in his scheme. Both Vaculík and Klíma are listed, along with thirteen other recipients in Czechoslovakia.41 The US writers that Roth lists include Edward Albee, Saul Bellow, John Hersey, Alison Lurie, Joyce Carol Oates, William Styron, Barbara Tuchman, Gore Vidal, and Kurt Vonnegut.42 The Czech Ad Hoc Fund came to an end soon after PEN, and the organization’s president, Jerzy Kosiński, got involved. In 1975, Kosiński sent Roth a one-line letter asking, “Don’t you think it’s better to do it our way?”43 Roth had been using sketchy Czech travel agencies in the Yorktown neigh193

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borhood of New York City that specialized in sending remittances back to Czechoslovakia in the form of Tuzex coupons.44 But Kosiński wanted PEN to take over the financial transfers and make them tax deductible. Roth went along with this idea at first. But the PEN oversight committee soon decided that if they were going to provide material assistance to suppressed writers in the Eastern bloc, then they would also need to support writers suffering under pro-American dictatorships elsewhere in the world, particularly in Latin America. Roth decided not to work with PEN on the project any longer, and the Czech Ad Hoc Fund was soon abolished. By this point all of Roth’s political activities in Czechoslovakia were catching up with him. During his 1976 visit to Prague, he was approached by two uniformed police officers who had joined the plainclothes agents that usually followed Roth around Prague on his visits with his proscribed writer friends. Roth would later describe the encounter in detail in Deception (1990), an early autofictional novel featuring a protagonist named Philip Roth. As his alter ego narrates, “I showed them my passport, my visa, my hotel identification card, but they said that wasn’t enough, I had to come with them to the police station. I began to shout, alternately in English and in my high school French, that I wanted to see the ambassador at the American Embassy.”45 In reality, too, the confused police officers walked away to consult with the plainclothes agents who were waiting down the block. While they were distracted, a panicked Roth jumped onto a passing tram, narrowly avoiding apprehension.46 The American writer canceled the remainder of his trip and immediately returned home. A few years later, Roth learned that the secret police had interrogated Klíma, and perhaps several others, the evening of Roth’s narrow escape. Klíma and Kundera both tried to reassure Roth that this was hardly an unusual occurrence, but Roth remained shaken by the news. In a letter, Kundera wrote to Roth to confirm that, “without any doubts there is your dossier, a long time ago in hands of Czech police and probably many your friends were interrogated about you and you knew nothing.”47 But Kundera also emphasized that “those interrogations are not to be dramatize, very often it is only a matter of routine work. Whenever someone is questioned by Czech police he is questioned about everything that he can be asked. They are interested in everything.”48 Despite Roth’s considerable efforts, most of his plans to help his friends had collapsed, and, after his close call with the secret police, his Prague education was complete. The 194

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next year, Roth’s tourist visa application was denied, and the author would not return to Czechoslovakia until after the Velvet Revolution. The Other Europe

Two years earlier, in 1974, Roth had pitched the idea of a new paperback series to Penguin Books. In his country report for PEN, Roth had noted that although Czech film and theater had undergone an international revival during the liberalizing sixties, “literature reached the world’s notice more slowly.” At the end of the sixties, Roth suggests, talented Czech writers like Vaculík, Klíma, Kundera, Škvorecký, Bohumil Hrabal, and Miroslav Holub were on the verge of breaking out with foreign audiences. Unfortunately, “by August 1968, when their work had begun to appear more and more frequently in foreign translations,” Roth writes, “Czech and Slovak writers were already the prime quarry of repression.”49 In the mid-1960s, the influential poet and editor Al Alvarez began taking an interest in Holub and other Eastern European poets and published several important translations with Penguin. Alvarez’s attraction to writers like Holub and the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz had great consequences for the development of Anglophone poetry during the final decades of the Cold War.50 Roth envisioned a parallel series that would collect translated fiction by some of the writers he had met in Prague, as well as other important writers from across the Eastern bloc (and nonaligned Yugoslavia) who were having trouble being published at home. A year after he made his pitch, the first two volumes of the Penguin collection were published under the series title Writers from the Other Europe, and Roth, as general editor, was responsible for selecting titles. (The “Other Europe” in the series title may have been a reference to Miłosz’s 1964 book Une autre Europe.) The first two books in the series, both published in 1975, were by Czech friends: Laughable Loves by Kundera and The Guinea Pigs by Vaculík.51 On one of his first trips to Prague, Roth had also made a side trip to Budapest and realized that the Czechoslovak situation was not entirely unique. The Other Europe would eventually expand beyond Czechoslovakia to encompass Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia and introduce literary intellectuals like György Konrád and Danilo Kiš to Western readers. By the time the series came to an end in 1989, it had published seventeen works by eleven different authors, most of whom Roth 195

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had never met in person. Although the Other Europe series sprang from a very specific political context in normalized Czechoslovakia and a small set of personal relationships, the series would ultimately allow Roth and the writers in the series to articulate an entire alternative cultural geography that would be embraced by a growing transnational reading public. The formation of this alternative cultural geography has a vital material history. The eventful publishing history of Vaculík’s The Guinea Pigs demonstrates how much effort was required to get many of these texts into wider circulation. After the onset of normalization, the novel’s original publishing contract had been torn up.52 When no other official publishing houses would take on the manuscript, Vaculík decided to publish the book himself in samizdat form, as one of the first volumes put out by Edice Petlice. At first, The Guinea Pigs circulated only in this hand-typed, stapled form among a small circle of readers in Prague. The samizdat text was then smuggled out of the country, and an excerpt was printed in one of the first issues of Index on Censorship in 1972. Over the next decade, Index would become a major venue for what is known as tamizdat—samizdat material published abroad.53 A year later, the Third Press in New York published a full English translation, but only in a very small edition. The Other Europe series specialized in taking small editions like this and reprinting them for a much wider audience. From samizdat to tamizdat to one of the world’s largest commercial presses, the path taken by The Guinea Pigs involved the work of countless people besides Roth: editors, translators, publishers, copyists, and even smugglers. This last role entailed some risk, as the StB already suspected Roth of exporting “tendentious anti-socialist materials” to foreign countries and made sure that his bags were searched at the airport.54 Roth’s hotel room was also searched for suspicious documents on at least one occasion, but no documents were discovered. Although Roth certainly had assistance in the trafficking of literary manuscripts, he played the key role as general editor in framing how the series would be received by critics and common readers alike. In private, Roth was forthcoming about the political impetus behind the series’ creation, and he sent letters to editors at influential venues to publicize each release. As he writes in a typical letter, The first two books, published in 1975, are by two of the most highly regarded Czech novelists, Milan Kundera and [Ludvík 196

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Vaculík]. Because of their activities in helping bring about the Prague Spring, and their support for the short-lived Dubcek reform government, neither Kundera nor Vaculík has been allowed to publish his work in Czechoslovakia since the Russian invasion of August 1968. All their foreign royalties are taxed at about 90%, a punitive measure by which the government has attempted to impoverish and demoralize about a dozen of the most gifted writers in Czechoslovakia.55 Roth stopped short of mentioning his own experiences in Prague, but he is quick to reference the political circumstances faced by these authors. In contrast, he decided to omit this political context in the editor’s note that opens every volume of the Other Europe series. According to this note, the purpose of the series was simply “to bring together outstanding and influential works of fiction by Eastern European writers,” most of whom were “virtually unknown in America.”56 In public, Roth advertised his series on the literary merits alone and left their political interest implicit. Roth’s other major responsibility as general editor was commissioning introductions for each volume. As with the Czech-language reception of American literature during the Thaw era, such paratexts were essential to the success of the Other Europe project. In particular, critical introductions from well-known literary figures proved crucial in mediating the reception of these challenging texts, which often proved difficult to classify according to prevailing aesthetic categories. In Irving Howe’s introduction to Konrád’s The Case Worker (1987), for instance, Howe relates how difficult it was for him to “place” Konrád’s work, “to find terms of description drawn from other works of literature that might evoke its special qualities.”57 The impressive list of writers recruited to write introductions—John Updike, Heinrich Böll, Carlos Fuentes, Joseph Brodsky, Angela Carter—helped draw attention to the series and also associated the relatively unknown writers in the series with established figures in contemporary world literature. Roth himself wrote an essay introducing the first book of the series, Kundera’s Laughable Loves, providing critics with an interpretive paradigm for how to address the political circumstances that lay behind many of the books in the series. A version of the essay also appeared in Esquire, 197

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FIGURE 5.3.  Promotional material for the Penguin series Writers from the Other Europe,

with an editor’s note from Philip Roth. Philip Roth Papers, Library of Congress.

along with two stories from Laughable Loves, establishing Kundera’s enduring reputation as an erotic novelist with an American readership.58 Immediately after acknowledging how recent political events had impinged on Kundera’s promising career as a writer in Czechoslovakia, Roth quotes Vaculík, who asserted that it was “unfortunate . . . when foreign critics 198

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judge the quality of Czech literary work exclusively by the degree to which it ‘settles accounts with illusions about socialism’ or by the acerbity with which it stands up to the regime here.”59 Rather than promoting “antisocialist” polemics, as the StB’s Major Hoffman would have it, Roth actually hoped to shield Kundera’s text from an overly politicized reading. Roth might have been responding in part to pressure from Kundera, who understood the potential influence of these introductions and the immense impact the series would have on his own reputation. In total, four major works by Kundera were included in the series (more than any other writer), and yet he feared that any framing that focused on the regional political context would prevent him from reaching a wider, cosmopolitan audience. Kundera was therefore thrilled with Elizabeth Pochoda’s introduction to the Other Europe edition of The Farewell Party (1977) because she wrote about how it was “as difficult as ever to place him within a definite literary tradition.” She also deftly sidestepped the impact of politics on the text, suggesting that, “one might also say [Kundera’s novel] was forged in a laboratory that ran rather different experiments on the human animal than have been available to writers of Western Europe.”60 Kundera liked this depoliticized framing enough to include it in a later French edition and even wrote to Roth, “All the critics repeat what they gather elsewhere and that’s why I should like them to repeat what Mrs. Pochoda says.”61 Kundera was much less pleased with the introductory note that Roth included at the start of each volume, which used the geographic labels “Other Europe” and “Eastern Europe” interchangeably. For Kundera, “Eastern Europe” was a political fiction that Roth’s series seemed to ratify, and in a series of impassioned letters, he complained to Roth that this artificial context would make his own work appear “merely political, anti-Staliniste.” (The misspellings in Kundera’s letters to Roth were more frequent when he was agitated.) The occasion for this strong disagreement appears to be Kundera’s completion of the novel Life Is Elsewhere and the question of whether it would be included in the series. Kundera explained to Roth, “My situation isn’t siple: I love you, I don’t love your colection. You love my books, you don’t love Life is Elsewher. Hence a solution: we can liberate Life is elsewhere from this colection. One reason more over: exactly for this book the regional contexte can be dangerous.”62 Furthermore, by accepting the Cold War division of Europe, the label enforced a cruel uniformity on a diverse set of authors. Despite admiring many of 199

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these writers, Kundera felt that grouping them together under the heading of the Other Europe was a terrible mistake. He argued to Roth that the “regional contexte is very bad . . . more over wrong, irreal,” calling the Other Europe “a batard born from Yalta, by the father Stalin and the mother Roosevelt.” Kundera told Roth that there were still a few ideas he took very seriously, and the nonexistence of this Other Europe was one of them. Kundera preferred what he called the great Central European idea, which was at the heart of his evolving cultural critique of the Cold War division of Europe into East and West. Kundera articulated this idea in a series of public statements between 1979 and 1985, gathered together for the first time in English translation in The Art of the Novel (1985). Rather than referring to any geographic Europe, Kundera’s Central Europe is closer to a form of cultural identity—an identity he explores through an invented tradition of the Central European novel. For Kundera, this history of the novel constitutes a “parallel history of the Modern Era.”63 The literary tradition that Kundera has in mind passes through a “pleiad of Central European novelists,” including Bruno Schulz, Herman Broch, Robert Musil, Witold Gombrowicz, Jaroslav Hašek, and Kafka.64 Kundera argues that their alternative tradition of the novel—ambiguous and antilyrical, radically skeptical about modern history—is ultimately “incompatible with the totalitarian universe.”65 Given the dark history of the twentieth century, the Central European novel represented not a reality but a “possibility for Europe.”66 In other words, Kundera’s project sought out a counter-history of the novel that could stand opposed to the degraded political reality of a divided Europe and point toward an alternative future in which the borders of Europe would be redrawn. Counter-Realism

Kundera’s reconstructed history of the novel was also intended as a course correction for Cold War literary aesthetics. The imposition of socialist realism in the Eastern bloc had muted an entire tradition within the history of the European novel, and Kundera sought its rejuvenation, especially in his own work. Whereas Škvorecký had once turned to contemporary American literature, Kundera was now attempting to revive an alternative literary tradition much closer to home. This countertradition clearly also appealed to Roth, who has suggested that the writers from the Other 200

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Europe revealed to him a side of literature that he felt was particularly underdeveloped in the United States during the early Cold War years. As he told Pierpont, “American realism is a powerful source, and I love it—it’s given us Bellow and Updike—but it’s only one literary given.”67 This was a common view during the sixties and seventies: the unruly and antinomian impulses of the modernist avant-garde had been domesticated in the postwar American realist novel. In a 1960 essay entitled “Writing American Fiction,” Roth famously suggested that, by midcentury, social reality in the United States had already exceeded the novelist’s powers of imagination.68 Critics point to this essay as a signpost on the road to American postmodernism, but for Roth, this aesthetic crisis led ultimately to the Other Europe. While many of the works in the Other Europe series have since been declared archetypes of Eastern European postmodernism, those same works bear little resemblance to American postmodern texts by Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, or William Gaddis. Instead, I would propose that we call this new literary mode counter-realism. The writers included in Roth’s series enact a range of fictional strategies in their work. Yet, taken together, the series represented a provocative departure from both American and socialist modes of postwar realism. Rather than abandon realist strategies wholesale, the Other Europe books challenge Western readers with oblique symbolic representations of life in East-Central Europe. By sidestepping the representational politics of both realist and allegorical genres, they also inoculate themselves against being read as either stable depictions of communist social reality or straightforward parables of life in the Eastern bloc. Roth’s eventual decision to include works by writers such as Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz, and Géza Csáth that predate the Cold War further removed the Other Europe from its immediate political and temporal contexts. They also provided Roth’s growing canon with a counter-realist genealogy. The Other Europe series represents the articulation of an entirely new Cold War genre that drew on multiple national literary traditions, raising fascinating questions about the mechanics of transnational influence, appropriation, and canon formation. In his groundbreaking work on Roth, Ross Posnock uses Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke (1986) as the basis for constructing what he calls a “genealogy of immaturity” connecting Roth to writers like Gombrowicz, Schulz, Kundera, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.69 For Posnock, the trope of immaturity ties Roth to the antinomian literary 201

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politics that “began to appear in the American renaissance of the midnineteenth century as part of Romanticism’s critique of Enlightenment scientism and rationalism, a critique that also informs modernist European and Eastern European novelists and thinkers.”70 This recurring antirational critique has often expressed itself in a parallel resistance to realist modes of narration. Although Posnock is invested in a “democratic” model of transnational influence that celebrates creative appropriation while eschewing biographical and historical context, Posnock’s insights have even greater force when reconsidered in light of Roth’s real-world encounters with writers from Central and Eastern Europe. Even if biographical lines of influence are notoriously difficult to trace, they always have a basis in the material circulation of literary texts. Take, for example, the most frequently translated American writer in Czechoslovakia: Edgar Allan Poe. Two books by Czech writers that were included in the Other Europe series testify to Poe’s considerable influence across the twentieth-century literary world, and in Czechoslovakia in particular.71 The first is Bohumil Hrabal’s novel Closely Watched Trains, which was the basis for the Oscar-winning Czech New Wave film of the same title in 1966. Hrabal’s status under the normalization regime was different from all the other Czech writers in the Other Europe series. Hrabal worked in the so-called “Gray Zone” (Šedá zóna) between official and underground culture, publishing occasionally with state-run presses while also circulating versions of his work in samizdat form. Very few Western readers were familiar with Hrabal before he appeared in the Other Europe series, so Roth enlisted Josef Škvorecký to write the introduction for a new edition of Closely Watched Trains. In a letter inviting Škvorecký’s participation, Roth wrote, “Virtually no one knows him here, and even those who remember the movie, don’t know he wrote the book it was based on, or that there even is a book.”72 Škvorecký accepted the invitation and also wrote a follow-up essay, “American Motifs in the Work of Bohumil Hrabal,” for the University of Michigan–based journal Cross Currents a year later in 1982. The essay includes a discussion of Poe’s influence on Hrabal and his generation of Czech writers. Škvorecký claims that Closely Watched Trains likely originated with an early “Poesque” story by Hrabal called “The Legend of Cain.”73 But even more illuminating than his analysis of the Hrabal-Poe connection is Škvorecký’s larger discussion of how difficult it is to account for such lines 202

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of transnational influence. According to Škvorecký, “a discussion of borrowed motifs and influences can be treacherous” since very often we are really only exposing “coincidental affinities” or, at best, “complex inter­ correspondences.” But he also suggests, Instead of looking for evidence of imitation we may seek an explanation in the mass media network of this century, which, of course, includes the proliferation of cheap and accessible books. It is a network extending over the European mental landscapes, and against it some of the recurrent motifs of American literature and arts are silhouetted, removed from the two dimensions of the printed word and the electronically projected image, and elevated into the three dimensions of reality.74 To illustrate his point, he turns back to the example of Poe. He begins by discussing the great proliferation of Poe translations in Czechoslovakia, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. But material availability is only one part of the equation. Škvorecký then asks whether the decisive factor was “the fact that the two-dimensional horrors, allegedly borrowed by Poe from Germany and claimed by him to have originated in his soul, have been made three-dimensional in the regions of Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Majdanek?” In other words, a translated writer takes on even greater significance if their work can provide new terms of description for what are otherwise unspeakable historical experiences. Vaculík’s The Guinea Pigs is another book in the Other Europe series directly influenced by Poe. In fact, The Guinea Pigs essentially rewrites Poe’s story “The Black Cat,” with the eponymous cat switched out for a pair of guinea pigs. The novel presents a strange and elliptical narrative about a bank clerk who tortures the pet guinea pigs, which he has brought home as gifts to his son. Vaculík signals Poe’s influence many times throughout the novel: at one point the narrator quotes directly from Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (although the narrator mistakenly claims to have come across the text in “an astounding study written by an American economist of the early nineteenth century by the name of E. A. Poe”).75 Throughout, Vaculík dares the reader to identify the story’s tortured animals with the helpless subjects of the communist state.76 But the novel resists that same 203

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reading at every turn by denying the guinea pigs any stable referent outside of the story. Instead, Vaculík seizes on Poe’s famous motif of the perverse confession to frame the entire narrative.77 In “The Black Cat,” as in Poe’s story “The Imp of the Perverse,” the truly perverse act is the narrator’s voluntary confession of a murder rather than the act itself. Early in The Guinea Pigs, the narrator describes a snake he has decided to watch die rather than kill off with a decisive blow: “My most perverted impulse, if you will, was—having saved its life already—my present urge to dissect the act for you here, and you being so interested in it.”78 Rather than incriminating some external governmental authority, Vaculík instead implicates his novel’s narrator—as well as his readers—in even the smallest scale of political violence. The perverse confessional mode is a major feature of many of the counter-realist works that Roth included in the Other Europe series. Roth has praised the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski’s stories in particular for showing him that “the only way to write about the Holocaust was as the guilty, as the complicit and implicated.”79 (Borowski, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, later accommodated himself to Poland’s postwar communist regime, however uncomfortably.) Beyond Borowski, Schulz in particular would prove central to later generations of Jewish American writers who were looking for new ways to write about the toxic memory of the Holocaust.80 For Roth, the perverse confessional mode marked many other works from the series’ authors, including “Tadeusz Konwicki, Danilo Kiš, and Kundera, say, to name only three K’s, who have crawled out from under Kafka’s cockroach to tell us that there are no uncontaminated angels, that the evil is inside as well as outside.”81 The extreme perversity at the heart of many of the books Roth decided to include in the Other Europe series only seemed to increase their influence, as well as their moral and political authority. In 1985, Roth asked Kundera to write the introduction for Gombrowicz’s antimodernist masterpiece Ferdydurke, but Kundera declined. Instead, Kundera reiterated his concern that the Other Europe would be misunderstood as a euphemism for Eastern Europe. Kundera emphasized that, for better or worse, language had an immense power to frame the political imagination. In a rush of broken English, Kundera again argued that the entire notion of Eastern Europe was a monstrous mystification, even if it had already become so common as to appear banal.82 By this time, he 204

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had articulated the aesthetic arguments of The Art of the Novel in a more forceful political language. “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” Kundera’s most influential essay, argues that turbulent political events in places like Prague and Warsaw are not just Eastern European problems but must be understood as “a drama of the West—a West that, kidnapped, displaced, and brainwashed, nevertheless insists on defending its identity.”83 Kundera also makes his own philo-Semitism much more explicit in the essay, pointing to the region’s Jewish cultural heritage as an essential component of Central European identity, even for non-Jews like himself.84 All these rhetorical moves underscore Kundera’s larger objective in writing the essay: to convince a Western audience to reinvest in the cultural fate of the small nations of Central Europe. By the mid-1980s, Kundera was beginning to see how Roth’s series was helping him achieve exactly this goal. In “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” Kundera writes, “Central Europe is not a state: it’s a culture or a fate. Its borders are imaginary and must be redrawn with each new historical situation.”85 If Kundera viewed the Central European novel as a last site of resistance, the Other Europe series helped make that alternative literary tradition available to thousands of new readers. Roth’s counter-realist series also encouraged its audience to reimage the cultural geography of Europe along new aesthetic and political lines. Even as Eastern bloc dissidents fiercely debated Kundera’s essay in the New York Review of Books, Western intellectuals increasingly seized on alternative cultural constructions such as the “Other Europe” or “Central Europe” as they moved away from the political vocabulary of “Eastern Europe” in their own writing.86 As Kundera finally acknowledged to Roth in the mideighties, “Your collection (even with this terminology) was necessary to remake the ‘other Europe’ again Europe. It was a stopover between oblivion and Europe.”87 The Little World around the Corner

In 1984, a decade after establishing the Other Europe series, Roth reflected in an interview with Hermione Lee, “When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters.”88 It did not take long for his statement to travel back to Czechoslovakia. In 1985, an excerpt from the 205

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interview was anonymously translated and published in a samizdat journal under the title “Romantika útlaku,” or “The Romance of Oppression,” provoking an impassioned response from Roth’s principal reality instructor, Ivan Klíma.89 In a letter that was published in Harper’s the next year, Klíma accused Roth of reinforcing the false, Manichaean logic of the Cold War, with its assumptions about the “dark prospects of literature in unfreedom.”90 According to Klíma, It is one of the failings of our time that it endeavors to minimize and simplify all the problems of our contemporary world to the common denominator of political conditions, transfer them to the sphere of ideological terminology, dividing the world up into good and evil, free and unfree, a world in which you can live with hope and a world in which (at least theoretically) it is not possible to live at all.91 Klíma’s complaint echoed Kundera’s earlier objections to the Other Europe label. Although Roth did not respond publicly to Klíma’s criticism in Harper’s, he did publish a novella later the same year in which he elaborated on his ironic analysis of his experiences in normalized Czechoslovakia. The Prague Orgy was first published in 1985 as an epilogue to the omnibus edition of Roth’s successful Zuckerman trilogy, but the novella can also be read as an epilogue to Roth’s entire encounter with the Other Europe. Early drafts of The Prague Orgy reveal that the novella was initially intended as the concluding section of Zuckerman Unbound (1981), the second book in the trilogy, and that the Prague section was to be titled “The World around the Corner.” According to this original design, the protagonist Nathan Zuckerman’s career as a notoriously famous American novelist would be brought into sharp relief by the counter-situation of the proscribed Eastern European writer, lending a political edge to Roth’s comic subject matter. Roth may have borrowed the title of his third Zuckerman novel, The Anatomy Lesson, from the book-length essay Čas anatomije (1978) by Danilo Kiš, in which the author responded to the official backlash against his novel A Tomb for Boris Davidovich after its original publication in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, as Jack Knowles has shown, the earliest drafts of American Pastoral, which date back to 1972, feature its 206

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protagonist traveling to Czechoslovakia. (The working title was “How the Other Half Lives.”)92 Indeed, in Roth’s so-called “American trilogy,” Zuckerman resumes the narrative pose that Roth first occupied in Czechoslovakia, as history’s not-quite-so-innocent bystander.93 The influence of the Other Europe series on Roth’s own writing was formal as well as thematic. During these years, Roth was also looking to the counter-realist tradition of East-Central European literature for narrative strategies that would enable him to move beyond both the Jamesian realism of his earliest fiction and the desperate fabulism of The Breast (1972). It’s no coincidence that Roth’s midcareer breakthrough came with the publication of The Ghost Writer (1979), the first Zuckerman book, which he fittingly dedicated to his friend Milan Kundera.94 Some critics have claimed that Kundera is also the model for the character Zdenek in The Prague Orgy, an exiled Czech writer who sends Zuckerman to Prague to retrieve a lost Yiddish manuscript. There is certainly archival evidence to support this interpretation. In an early outline of the novella, for instance, Roth notes that Zdenek and Zuckerman should communicate through Zdenek’s wife, “like M and I through Vera.” Roth clearly metabolized his real-life experiences in writing the novella: in a note attached to his manuscript, Roth playfully admits that his own recorded impressions have provided the raw material for these entries.95 The novella takes the form of Zuckerman’s diary entries during a 1976 visit to Prague, the last year Roth was allowed in Czechoslovakia. But in The Prague Orgy, Roth also deliberately undercuts many of these same biographical parallels. Take, for example, the fictional Yiddish writer Sisovsky, whose unpublished manuscripts Zuckerman comes to Prague to retrieve. Sisovsky deliberately resembles the Polish Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, whose work was enjoying a renaissance in the United States thanks to his inclusion in the Other Europe series. The circumstances of Sisovsky’s murder by a Gestapo officer in The Prague Orgy are taken straight from Schulz’s own tragic biography. Yet at one point, Zuckerman is told that the story of Sisovsky’s death is a lie: “It happened to another writer, who didn’t even write in Yiddish. . . . [Sisovsky] was killed in a bus accident.”96 Like Zuckerman in Prague, the reader should proceed skeptically. Elsewhere, a character named Bolotka, who some critics associate with Klíma, is given a line taken directly from one of Kundera’s real-life letters to Roth: that the secret 207

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police’s “interrogations are not to be dramatized.”97 Roth is clearly up to more than straightforward “dramatization” of his experiences in Czechoslovakia in The Prague Orgy, but what exactly? According to one line of interpretation, first advanced by Joseph Benatov, the novella’s central device of a failed tamizdat is evidence that Roth was trying to subvert the Cold War–era idea of a lost Eastern European manuscript finding redemption through Western publication.98 But Roth’s entire Other Europe series can be understood as a wildly successful tamizdat mission. Is Roth then undermining the accomplishment of his own series? Benatov also draws attention to one of the strangest aspects of a text with “orgy” in the title: the conspicuous absence of any real sex. While sexed-up language is everywhere in the novella, the characters themselves are all remarkably chaste. Unlike the eroticized world of Professor of Desire, sex is closer to a strategy of misdirection in The Prague Orgy. At one point, Zuckerman’s friends tell him that if they are questioned by the secret police about the American writer’s presence in Prague, they will lie and say that he “came for the fifteen-year-old girls,” a cringeworthy tactic that Klíma supposedly used in his own interrogation about Roth.99 Elsewhere in the novella, Zuckerman speculates that his Czech hosts are exaggerating their own sexual depravity in order to throw “a little cold water on free-world fantasies of virtuous political suffering.” Whatever their purpose, these sexual alibis and boasts are all voiced by the novella’s Czech characters, and never by Zuckerman. This is crucial. As Roth’s protagonist realizes midway through, with astonishment, he is “not fucking everyone, or indeed anyone. . . . I am a dignified, wellbehaved, reliable spectator, secure, urbane, calm, polite, the quiet respectable one who does not take his trousers off, and these are the menacing writers.” This is the larger function of sex, or its absence, in the novella: to signal how Prague has transformed Zuckerman as a writer and a narrator. Instead of the novelist’s relentless self-expression and obsessive desires driving the action, the voices of writers from the Other Europe are given (mostly) free play.100 Even if Roth isn’t ventriloquizing his real-life reality instructors in The Prague Orgy, his novella does provide a kind of response to Klíma’s critique. At several points in the novella, Roth turns again to the figure of Kafka to collapse the very category distinctions that Klíma found objectionable in Roth’s Paris Review interview. For example, Roth rewrites the 208

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opening line of The Metamorphosis in order to project his narrator into the situation of his Czech counterparts: “As Nathan Zuckerman awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a sweeper of floors in a railway café.”101 This reversal is extended later to include other personalities from Zuckerman’s native literary scene. In one memorable passage, Zuckerman imagines “Styron washing glasses in a Penn Station barroom, Susan Sontag wrapping buns at a Broadway bakery, Gore Vidal bicycling salamis to school lunchrooms in Queens—I look at the filthy floor and see myself sweeping it.”102 For Zuckerman, Prague’s banned writers hold up a distorted mirror to his native literary culture. Near the end of the novella, Roth quotes K. from The Trial: “What would entice me to this desolate country except the wish to stay here?”103 Zuckerman wishes to remain “here,” in Czechoslovakia, precisely because it is a place where he feels that stale oppositions fall apart, a place “where the division is not that easy to discern between the heroic and the perverse, where every sort of repression foments a parody of freedom.” But when Zuckerman is finally expelled from Czechoslovakia, he has no choice but to return to “the little world around the corner”: America.104 Right before Zuckerman boards his flight, a final government official “reads over the biographical details” in Zuckerman’s passport to determine whether the writer is indeed “fiction or fact.”105 After evaluating Zuckerman’s papers, the official says, “Ah yes . . . Zuckerman the Zionist agent.” Although Roth couldn’t have read his own surveillance file (he never learned more than a few phrases in Czech), the ending of The Prague Orgy ironizes the StB’s secret judgment: Philip Roth, a.k.a. “the Tourist,” is at the center of an international Zionist conspiracy. But as the character Bolotka has already reassured Zuckerman, StB agents are just “like literary critics—of what little they see, they get most wrong anyway.”106 The Breakthrough

The real-life StB did miss something important in their surveillance of the famous American novelist: they completely overlooked the activities of Roth’s companion on his first trip to Czechoslovakia, Barbara Sproul.107 There is almost no mention of Sproul in Roth’s StB file, aside from a few scattered references to the presence of his “housewife” in Prague. (Roth and Sproul, who spent much of her career as a professor of comparative 209

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religion, were never married). By the midseventies, Sproul had taken over as the Czechoslovak country coordinator for the human rights organization Amnesty International, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. During these years, Amnesty was a major player in an “information revolution” that linked Western human rights activists with Eastern bloc dissidents who were beginning to seize on the language of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act.108 Fact finders like Sproul, a member of Amnesty’s famed Riverside Group, were at the heart of this growing transnational network. As Sproul tells Claudia Roth Pierpont, she was able to do her Amnesty work in Prague with little interference because every day the “government agents would set off after Philip,” while she would spend their trips checking in on the families of Czech political prisoners.109 By the 1980s, Sproul was frequently publishing appeals in left-liberal publications like the New York Review of Books on behalf of Czechoslovakia’s “prisoners of conscience.”110 After their experiences in Prague, both Sproul and Roth were drawn into a thickening network of human rights advocacy that connected Western writers, publishers, and activists with dissident writers across the Soviet bloc.111 And yet, like Sproul’s hidden activities in Czechoslovakia, the broader relationship between the Writers from the Other Europe series and the human rights “breakthrough” of the late 1970s and 1980s has gone largely unnoticed.112 In many cases, it was the prior translation and circulation of literary works by so-called “dissident” writers, from Solzhenitsyn to Havel, that enabled these figures to become symbols of a new human rights movement in the seventies.113 By the early 1970s, Solzhenitsyn was already well-known in the United States because his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had been a Book of the Month Club selection a decade earlier, in 1963.114 The Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1973, a year before Roth pitched the Other Europe series and Solzhenitsyn was expelled as a dissident from the Soviet Union. When Roth referred to Ludvík Vaculík as “a Czechoslovak Solzhenitsyn” in his PEN report, he knew that Solzhenitsyn’s literary fame abroad had offered him a measure of protection in the Soviet Union—at least for a time. But Roth also distinguished Vaculík’s literary style from Solzhenitsyn.115 Unlike Solzhenitsyn, whose experimental realism was inspired by nineteenthcentury Russian literature, many of the Czech writers Roth met in Prague drew on a counter-realist tradition that combined neglected Central 210

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European writers, exemplified by Kafka and Schulz, with American literary alternatives, from Poe to the Beats. In turn, several of the “dissident” writers popularized through Roth’s series helped shape the literary language in which the human rights commitments of the late Cold War era were expressed. Alongside Vaculík and Kundera, figures like Danilo Kiš and György Konrád became prominent voices in international debates about the relationship between literature, censorship, and dissent. Kiš offered a necessary corrective to Kundera’s Central European literary ideal, written from the skeptical perspective of a Jewish writer living on the region’s southern periphery.116 Meanwhile, Konrád, along with Havel, helped articulate a new “antipolitical” conception of human rights that rejected the reigning paradigm of geopolitical realism, with significant consequences for the future direction of the human rights movement.117 While the rise of antipolitics has featured prominently in recent historical scholarship on the human rights breakthrough of the late 1970s, much less attention has been paid to the distinct literary sensibility that shaped how this discourse was articulated. Not only was this sensibility shaped by decades of cultural exchange across the Iron Curtain, but new discourses of human rights were also traveling on routes established through the circulation of literature between the blocs. By the early eighties, samizdat manuscripts and human rights reports were being smuggled across the Iron Curtain in the same diplomatic pouch, and they often reached the same Western audience. In 1981, for example, the New York Review of Books published a short essay by Konrád alongside one of Sproul’s reports for Amnesty International. Konrád’s essay opens, “It’s here in East Central Europe that Eastern and Western culture collide; it’s here that they intermingle.”118 Roth’s series was one of the most important results of this collision. Indeed, the greatest accomplishment of this phase of Roth’s literary career was making this small group of dissenting writers from the Other Europe better known in the little world around the corner.

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Chapter Six

AC ROSS TH E GRAY ZONE A ME R I C A N W R I T E RS AN D

T H E C ZEC H JA ZZ S ECTIO N

In the final years of the Cold War, an anonymous “Writer We Know” reflects: “An American visitor to a Communist country, if the visit partakes at all of publicity and official status, acquires symbolic values for which his native cultural conditioning has ill prepared him.” This quotation is taken from an unsigned column in the Talk of the Town section of the New Yorker, published on March 23, 1987.1 But its lesson could well be applied to any of the American literary figures discussed so far in this book: F. O. Matthiessen on the eve of the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, Allen Ginsberg in the era before the Prague Spring, or Philip Roth after the onset of normalization. Now, a decade after Roth’s tourist visa was canceled, yet another famous American writer had visited Prague: John Updike. The reasons for Updike’s visit to Czechoslovakia, and his anonymous New Yorker column, reveal a great deal about how much had changed in the history of literary dissent across the Iron Curtain by the mideighties. In January 1987, Updike wrote to William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, to request that the magazine publish an anonymous comment on 212

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a “serious topic” related to a group he’d met with in Prague. Updike acknowledged that this new piece might “trespass a bit onto the fictional territory of ‘Bech in Czech,’” a short story by Updike that was slated to appear in the magazine that April.2 But the situation had become urgent: the leaders of a renegade cultural organization in Czechoslovakia, known as the Jazz Section, had been arrested and were now awaiting their trial. What exactly was the Czech Jazz Section, and how did the arrest of its leaders become a matter of international concern? In 1969, a small group of jazz aficionados had tried to form an independent Union of Czech Jazz Musicians, but their application was rejected by the Ministry of the Interior. Instead, two years later, they established the Jazz Section as a chapter of the official Musicians’ Union of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Their full name in Czech—Jazzová sekce Svazu hudebníků ČSR—better reflects the group’s ambiguous legal status as a semiautonomous branch of a state cultural institution. Initially, the Jazz Section’s activities were not terribly controversial: for much of the 1970s, they organized music festivals, including the “Prague Jazz Days,” and other cultural events for a relatively self-contained community of jazz enthusiasts in Czechoslovakia. But the Jazz Section did much more than just promote jazz. As Updike puts it, the Jazz Section “evolved, after its founding in 1971, from a union of dues-paying musicians into a kind of fan club not only for jazz but for rock and other arts of the capitalist West.” Over the course of the late seventies and early eighties, the Jazz Section helped foster a much wider countercultural community in Czechoslovakia, thanks in large part to its semilegal literary activities, including a range of popular publications produced outside of the state censorship apparatus. By the time of their leaders’ arrest in 1986, Updike writes, “the Jazz Section had for fifteen years been in­ geniously functioning in a gray area of the government’s controls.”3 In other words, the Jazz Section existed in what was known in latesocialist Czechoslovakia as the “Gray Zone.”4 Although the most famous articulation of this concept comes from Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, in the Czech-language context, the phrase Šedá zóna (Gray Zone) emerged during the last decade of normalization to describe the ambiguous cultural space located somewhere between official state-sanctioned institutions and the “dissident” underground.5 The most influential Czech-language discussion of the concept comes from the sociologist, feminist, and Charter 77 activist Jiřina Šiklová, who published a samizdat essay titled 213

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“The ‘Gray Zone’ and the Future of Dissent in Czechoslovakia” just two months before the Velvet Revolution. Initially, Šiklová uses the phrase to refer to academic colleagues, especially in the field of historiography, “who remained ‘within the structure,’ that is, inside the scientific institutions and universities, while also staying in touch with their former colleagues expelled during the post-1968 purges, remaining willing to associate with them, to debate with them, and, when needed, even to help them.”6 According to Šiklová, the Gray Zone had expanded over the course of the eighties to include other groups in Czechoslovakia who might provide stillisolated dissident groups like Charter 77 with a popular base of support in the battles to come.7 By the time Šiklová’s samizdat essay appeared, the phrase had been in circulation for at least a decade. Peter Bugge, for instance, has discovered references to the Gray Zone in an essay published in a 1979 issue of the Paris-based, Czech émigré publication Svědectví, possibly written by Milan Kundera under a pseudonym. According to Bugge, a writer identified only by the initials “mk” uses the phrase to describe the “conscious search for a third, artistically free path between the politicized poles of regime and dissident art.”8 Despite their subtle differences in connotation— one emphasizing politics, the other aesthetics—both these articulations of the Gray Zone concept emerged out of East-West discourse about the evolving nature of cultural dissent in normalized Czechoslovakia. Thus, the Gray Zone concept can help us recognize new zones of contact not only between “official” and “dissident” culture inside Czechoslovakia but also between East and West. Updike likely first learned about the idea of the Gray Zone in the mid-1980s from the Czech writer Josef Škvorecký, who was now living as an émigré in Toronto. No one did more to publicize the cause of the Jazz Section in the English-speaking world than Škvorecký. To help make their situation legible to Western readers, he introduced the concept of the Gray Zone into English-language discourse in the mideighties. In an essay about the Jazz Section published in the New Republic in 1984, Škvorecký explains, “The Gray Zone is merely the conspiracy of normal people who stand between the fanaticism of the orthodox and the cynicism of the pragmatic on the one side, and the abnormal moral courage of the dissidents on the other.”9 The Western media soon picked up on Škvorecký’s novel framing. After the arrest of the Jazz Section’s leaders in 1986, the Interna214

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tional Herald Tribune quoted Škvorecký in an article published under the headline “Imprisoning Jazz in Czech ‘Gray Zone.’”10 When Updike later referred to the Jazz Section in the New Yorker as a “gray-area purveyor of alternative culture,” he was drawing directly on the conceptual frame established by Škvorecký.11 Through his advocacy on behalf of the Jazz Section, Škvorecký played a key role in drawing American writers like Updike into Czechoslovakia’s expanding Gray Zone. While the critical role that the Jazz Section played in fostering the Gray Zone inside Czechoslovakia is well documented in Czech scholarship and public memory, the story of the international literary campaign on their behalf has received far less attention.12 Updike was hardly the only American writer who spoke out on behalf of the imprisoned leaders of the Jazz Section after their arrest. In January 1987, the US-based human rights organization Helsinki Watch unveiled a petition signed by twentysix “American artists, writers, and musicians concerned with freedom of artistic expression” who were “greatly disturbed to learn of the September arrest of the Executive Committee of the Jazz Section in Czechoslovakia.”13 In addition to Updike, the petition’s signatories included famous US writers like Edward Albee, E. L. Doctorow, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, and Kurt Vonnegut. Many of these writers had visited Prague in the past two decades. Ever since 1968, Czech writers, artists, and academics of the Gray Zone, including the Jazz Section, had also carefully cultivated ties with colleagues and institutions abroad, fostering new forms of East-West communication and solidarity. By the time the leaders of the Jazz Section were arrested, the Gray Zone had become a transnational cultural space where multiple discourses and practices of literature, dissent, and human rights were colliding and becoming entangled. In the mideighties, the cause of persecuted cultural dissidents in the Eastern bloc, couched in the “antipolitical” language of human rights, drew the participation of American writers, diplomats, and activists from across the ideological spectrum. The international campaign on behalf of the Jazz Section can therefore help us make sense of all that had changed about the politics of literary dissent by the last decade of the Cold War. What began after the Second World War with isolated encounters between American writers and intellectuals and their Czech counterparts had, by the 1980s, helped consolidate a network of textual circulation, communication, and solidarity across the Iron Curtain. Newly 215

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ascendant discourses of free expression and human rights were now traveling on circuits that had been established through decades of literary exchange. When American writers like Updike visited Prague in the mid­ eighties, they were crossing an expanding, transnational Gray Zone that blurred the lines between official US cultural diplomacy, international human rights advocacy, and Czechoslovakia’s dissident underground. The campaign to save the Jazz Section was a nexus point for all these developments—and Škvorecký was once again at the heart of the action. Bringing Together West and East

Given Josef Škvorecký’s lifelong obsession with the fate of jazz in his native Bohemia, and his past experience serving as an intermediary between American and Czech literary cultures during the liberalizing 1950s and 1960s, it isn’t surprising that he became the most vocal advocate for the Jazz Section in the English-speaking world in the mid-1980s. But to understand why Škvorecký played such a central role in the international literary campaign to save the Jazz Section, we first need to rewind and see how the Czech Canadian émigré writer became an essential node in an expanding network of unofficial literary circulation between North America and Czechoslovakia in the two decades after the Prague Spring. When Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia in late August 1968, Škvorecký and his wife, the writer Zdena Salivarová, were on holiday in Paris. Although Salivarová convinced Škvorecký to return to Prague that autumn, the couple remained for only three months. After Jan Palach’s self-immolation in protest of the Soviet occupation in January 1969, the couple boarded a flight to London, bound ultimately for Canada. For the next two decades of his life as an exile, Škvorecký would teach courses on American literature, creative writing, and film at the University of Toronto. But his most important cultural activities were extracurricular. In 1971, Škvorecký and Salivarová established Sixty-Eight Publishers, with Salivarová in charge of the day-to-day editorial and business operations of the press. Within a few years, Sixty-Eight Publishers became the most important hub in a network of émigré presses that circulated unofficial Czech writing to readers both inside and outside of Czechoslovakia.14 216

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To knit this network together, Škvorecký drew on his connections across the American and Czech literary worlds to build a roster of titles, fundraise, and promote the work of Sixty-Eight Publishers. Škvorecký’s work at the press overlapped significantly with Philip Roth’s own counterrealist project in the seventies and eighties. A few years after the establishment of Sixty-Eight Publishers, Škvorecký contacted Roth to ask for help spreading word about the press to writers back in Czechoslovakia, where Škvorecký was no longer welcome. At the time, Roth was still an annual visitor to Prague and was working to establish the Writers from the Other Europe series. Škvorecký asked Roth to let their mutual friends in Prague know that Sixty-Eight Publishers “is always ready to publish any of their manuscripts under a pseudonym or under their own name, or pretenting [sic] that it was myself who wrote it, in short, in disguise.”15 It’s doubtful that anyone took him up on the latter offer, but Sixty-Eight Publishers did go on to print hundreds of Czech-language books, both by banned writers living inside Czechoslovakia and by exiled writers living abroad. Many of these books were then smuggled back into Czechoslovakia, where each copy was passed among a population of hungry readers. Škvorecký did more than anyone after 1968 to connect American and Czech literary cultures, but Roth also continued to contribute to this project. In the 1980s, both writers participated in a new literaryjournalistic milieu in the English-speaking world that was animated by the issue of dissident writers in the Eastern bloc. In the mideighties, Roth joined the board of Index on Censorship and assisted in fundraising efforts for Formations, a new publication established by his friend Jonathan Brent. Roth worked to bring other major American authors on board with Brent’s project, including John Updike, Mario Puzo, Toni Morrison, and Leon Uris.16 In a 1985 letter, Roth also tried to recruit Allen Ginsberg, who had been elected King of May and then expelled from Czechoslovakia twenty years earlier, to help fund the journal while they applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. According to Roth’s letter, Formations came to my attention because it is the first literary magazine to have been founded, in part, in response to the growing American interest in Eastern European literature. While more and more books by Eastern European writers have begun to be translated and published in the U.S. during the last 217

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decade, Formations is the only magazine whose policy is to give over a substantial number of pages in each issue to the shorter works—essays, stories, diaries, criticism—of writers like Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, Arnost Lustig, Witold Gombrowicz, Danilo Kis, and Gyorgy Konrad, all of whom have already appeared there or are scheduled for future issues.17 With the exception of Lustig, all these writers had also been part of Roth’s Other Europe series, which was continuing to take hold in the West. Although Škvorecký wasn’t included in the series, in 1981 he did write the introduction to the Other Europe edition of Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains. In his letter to Ginsberg, Roth quotes the Polish émigré critic Jan Kott, a Formations contributor who also wrote an introduction for the Other Europe series. According to Kott, what set this new magazine apart was its objective of “bringing together the literature of West and East.” This, of course, had long been the central impulse of Škvorecký’s own literary project. Roth’s 1985 novella The Prague Orgy was the rare example of a text by an American author translated and published by Sixty-Eight Publishers. Thanks to Škvorecký’s efforts, The Prague Orgy traveled back to Czechoslovakia in several clandestine forms in the mideighties. The first arrived over the radio. Beginning in 1973, Škvorecký hosted a regular broadcast for Voice of America (VOA) that was beamed back into his native country. Škvorecký recorded hundreds of episodes in the seventies and eighties, typically about literary subjects that would otherwise go unreported in Czechoslovakia. One of these reports was dedicated to The Prague Orgy, which, Škvorecký announced in his broadcast, “gives an American writer’s view of the literary situation in Czechoslovakia, extremely interesting for Czechoslovak listeners.”18 Around the same time, Škvorecký also commissioned a Czech translation of Roth’s novella for Sixty-Eight Publishers. Roth was more than happy to have his work published by Škvorecký’s press but requested that the translator be anyone other than their mutual friend Milan Kundera. “Much as I love him,” Roth joked, “I would have to ask that if he translates a book of mine from English to Czech, I get to translate a book of his from Czech to English. Otherwise no deal.”19 Roth was much more flexible about the financial arrangements: “Why don’t you give me a one dollar advance against royalties? It’s compensation enough for me to 218

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have this book strangely make its way into Czech.”20 The text of Pražské orgie was later smuggled into Czechoslovakia, where it also circulated in samizdat form.21 In the seventies and eighties, Sixty-Eight Publishers also became the primary distributor of Škvorecký’s own Czech-language writing, banned in his home country since his emigration in 1969. In 1977, Sixty-Eight Publishers published Škvorecký’s latest novel, The Engineer of Human Souls (Příběh inženýra lidských duší ). The first Czech-language edition also included a lengthy subtitle: An Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life, Women, Fate, Daydreams, the Working Class, Secret Agents, Love and Death. Released in two volumes, the novel was Škvorecký’s most ambitious work of fiction since the scandalous debut of The Cowards in 1958. The Engineer of Human Souls continues the adventures of Danny Smiřický, the semi-autobiographical protagonist of The Cowards. Much like his creator, Danny is now a middle-aged writer who has emigrated from Prague to Toronto, where he teaches classes on American literature on a campus modeled on the University of Toronto’s Erindale College, where Škvorecký was a faculty member. The novel’s loose, time-jumping narrative is interrupted by dozens of Danny’s old letters, received over four tumultuous decades since the Second World War, from friends and acquaintances across the Czech diaspora. In the novel’s frequent flashbacks, Danny returns again and again to the primal scene of his adolescence under the Nazi occupation of Bohemia. His memory of the lost world of The Cowards is now filtered through the political lens of exile. Škvorecký later explained that the idea for the experimental form of The Engineer of Human Souls came to him on the airplane flight between Czechoslovakia and London in 1969. “I thought that the structure of the novel should reflect the collagelike nature of our time,” he told the Paris Review in 1984. “I wrote the episodes separately, and then wove them together to create a sense either of contrast or continuity.”22 Much like his first novel, The Engineer of Human Souls explodes with intertexts. But whereas the 1964 edition of The Cowards opens with three epigraphs, The Engineer of Human Souls features twenty across its six parts. Each part is thematically organized around an English-language writer from Škvorecký’s personal canon: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, and (somewhat incongruously) H. P. Lovecraft. Škvorecký explains, “This framework was 219

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inspired by misinterpretations of my interpretations of American literature.”23 Each part is also framed by a classroom discussion between Danny and his students about one of these American writers, providing an opportunity for Škvorecký to contrast the soft-bellied political correctness of his Canadian undergraduates with his own hard-won anti-totalitarian irony. Even if his political views had hardened significantly since the Thaw era, The Engineer of Human Souls was the culmination of a career-spanning project of bringing together Czech and American literary traditions. The English-language translation of The Engineer of Human Souls— bravely undertaken by Paul Wilson—was published in 1984, during a boom of interest in Czechoslovakia’s banned writers.24 During these years, Wilson was also busy translating Havel’s most important essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” into English. In 1984, Milan Kundera built on the public profile created by the Other Europe series, publishing both his landmark essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” and his most famous novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The mideighties also saw the publication of several anthologies as well as now-forgotten works such as The Willys Dream Kit by the Czech American novelist Jan Novak, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. (Novak also translated some of Havel’s plays into English during these years.) The Prague fictions of celebrated American authors like Roth and Updike, as well as the 1984 revival of Arthur Miller’s play The Archbishop’s Ceiling, further stoked interest in Czechoslovakia’s unofficial literary culture. Alongside The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Škvorecký’s novel was one of the decade’s most celebrated works of Central European literature. After reading The Engineer of Human Souls, Kundera wrote to Škvorecký to tell him that his “magnum opus” was “a definitive death-knell to the sentimental theory . . . that it is impossible to write outside of one’s own country.”25 In 1984, The Engineer of Human Souls became the first translated novel to win the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in Canada. Part of the success of The Engineer of Human Souls, however, was a function of a favorable political environment in the mideighties. As Škvorecký’s title—a satirical reference to Stalin’s 1932 speech about the function of Soviet writers—signals, The Engineer of Human Souls is also Škvorecký’s most overtly anticommunist novel. But the novel’s parallel attempt to critique political correctness and progressive ideals of multiculturalism in the West has not aged quite as well. Danny’s patronizing 220

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(and sexualizing) attitude toward his female students, as well as his obvious discomfort with racial otherness, are a constant distraction from the novel’s formal inventiveness. Only a few critics seemed to notice these ugly qualities when the novel was first published in English. In Encounter, the writer James Lasdun described The Engineer of Human Souls as “an accumulation of questionable attitudes smuggled through in the diplomatic bag of dissident status.”26 During these years, Škvorecký ventured more assertively into political commentary, frequently aimed at an English-language audience. It was in a 1983 essay called “Prague Winter,” written for the conservative magazine American Spectator, that Škvorecký first attempted to explain the concept of the Gray Zone to an English-speaking audience. The occasion for Škvorecký’s gloomy essay about the aftermath of the Prague Spring was the publication of a new anthology of contemporary Czech literature in translation called The Writing on the Wall, which drew all its contents from samizdat publications put out by Padlock Editions (Edice Petlice).27 “The year 1968 does not ring many bells,” Škvorecký laments in his review, “and The Writing on the Wall will go unnoticed by many Americans.” Near the end of the essay, he draws a contrast between the brave “dissidents” included in The Writing on the Wall and the literary “conformists,” who instead fall in a “gray zone.” Members of the latter group, he suggests, complain about socialism in private while performing the rituals of normalization in public. In his brief but withering critique, Škvorecký suggests that the latter group has been deformed by its own “cowardice.”28 This was precisely the kind of language that Škvorecký had once satirized in The Cowards, along with the entire Stalinist cult of heroism. Just as Škvorecký was introducing the Gray Zone to American readers, his own politics had become much more black-and-white. In his Paris Review interview, Škvorecký claims that by the time he arrived in Canada, his views about communism were already set in stone: “At that age all of your associations have already been made: you’re a finished product.” In the decades after 1968, his antipathy toward “really existing socialism” (reálný socialismus), an official euphemism promoted during the Brezhnev era, shaded all of Škvorecký’s cultural attitudes, including his affinity for American literature. At an international conference held in Toronto in 1981 on the theme of “The Writer and Human Rights,” Škvorecký ended his remarks with a line from Evelyn Waugh, which he also quoted in The 221

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Engineer of Human Souls: “An artist must be a reactionary.”29 But not all Škvorecký’s attitudes about life under late socialism were set in stone. His bleak assessment of the Gray Zone would evolve considerably in the coming years, thanks largely to the Jazz Section. Hipness at Dusk

Between 1984 and 1988, Josef Škvorecký produced a series of essays about the Jazz Section for US-based publications, including the New Republic, Cross Currents, and the New York Review of Books. Škvorecký continued to receive regular updates about the Jazz Section from his longtime friend inside Czechoslovakia, now the country’s leading jazz expert, Lubomír Dorůžka. As Peter Bugge was first to notice, Škvorecký sometimes lifted entire passages from his correspondence with Dorůžka for his Englishlanguage articles on the Jazz Section.30 Škvorecký was also first exposed to the idea of the Gray Zone in Dorůžka’s reports about the Jazz Section. From Dorůžka, Škvorecký learned about the many compromises that were necessary to keep independent jazz culture alive in Czechoslovakia under normalization. As Dorůžka concludes one of these reports to Škvorecký, “Dusk has many shades.”31 In 1984, Škvorecký published his first English-language article about the Jazz Section in the New Republic. He titled the essay “Hipness at Noon,” a play on the name of Arthur Koestler’s classic anticommunist novel. In the eighties, the anti-totalitarian intellectuals of the early Cold War years—especially Koestler, George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt—were being rediscovered and repurposed amid a new wave of Soviet bloc dissidence. Of course, thinkers like Václav Havel understood there were important differences between the Stalinist repression of the early fifties and the “post-totalitarian” conditions of what many dissenting Czech intellectuals referred to ironically as “really existing socialism” (reálný socialismus) in the decades after 1968. In “Hipness at Noon,” Škvorecký sought to expose the New Republic’s liberal and left-leaning readers to “the darkness that calls itself really existing socialism,” through the example of the Jazz Section.32 But he also uses the concept of the Gray Zone to help him explain the ambiguous situation of the Jazz Section to a Western readership.33 Even if Škvorecký’s anticommunist political outlook had not changed much since he’d published “Prague Winter” a year earlier, his 222

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description of the Gray Zone was evolving. “The overt solidarity of these men and women is with Caesar,” he writes, “but their covert sympathies belong to God.” To illustrate his point, Škvorecký turns to Orwell: even if the citizens of the Gray Zone all hang portraits of Big Brother above their desks, “under his eyes” they read copies of 1984 while listening to Charlie Parker. Škvorecký was still ambivalent about the larger function of the Gray Zone in normalized Czechoslovakia, but the continued existence of the Jazz Section was an unquestioned good. “They are the Gray Zone which makes really existing socialism livable,” he concedes, “in fact, which makes it work.”34 To illustrate his point, Škvorecký provides a brief history of the Jazz Section. “It started in 1971, three years after the Soviet ambush,” he writes, describing the early activities of the Jazz Section, which attracted little attention outside of Prague’s small community of aging jazz aficionados.35 Then, in the mid-1970s, the Jazz Section began to embrace “hybrid forms” of jazz, rock, and punk music, creating a large following beyond their official membership in the process. The timing of this shift in musical genres was especially provocative. In “Hipness at Noon,” Škvorecký describes how the “jailing of the Plastic People of the Universe in 1976 led directly to the emergence of the Charter 77” and ultimately the arrest of the playwright-turned-dissident Václav Havel, “who got four and a half years and barely escaped death in prison.”36 While the causal relationship between these events is less direct than Škvorecký suggests, it’s certainly true that, by the early eighties, the new musical forms promoted by the Jazz Section—alternative rock, New Wave, and punk music—had taken on dangerous political associations. To complicate matters, unlike the Plastic People or other members of Prague’s musical underground, the Jazz Section was still technically part of a state institution. What seems to have really stoked the outrage of the regime, however, was the Jazz Section’s escalating publishing activities, which fell into a legal gray area. As Škvorecký puts it, “The Gray Zone conspiracy always finds loopholes in the armor of orthodoxy.”37 Throughout the seventies, the Jazz Section produced a regular bulletin called Jazz. Because Jazz was distributed only to members, it could be produced outside of Czechoslovakia’s sprawling yet dispersed state censorship apparatus. As a result, the Jazz Section’s publications are sometimes referred to as examples of polosamizdat, or “semi-samizdat.” The Jazz Section exploited this legal 223

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FIGURE 6.1.  Cover of Jazz no. 26, a polosamizdat (semi-samizdat) publication of the Jazz

Section, released in 1980. Courtesy of Joska Skalník.

technicality, producing some of the era’s most daring countercultural publications. Their extensive publications are also a helpful reminder that the Gray Zone was always a transnational space, shaped by new forms of cultural exchange and literary circulation across the Iron Curtain. Take, for example, the contents of one of the final issues of Jazz, published in 1980, which can provide a sense of the wide countercultural interests that occupied the Jazz Section community during a period when their activities were growing more politically controversial. Issue 26 of Jazz includes pieces on both established and avant-garde musicians from around the world, including Lou Reed, Annette Peacock, David Bowie, John Coltrane, Eddie Gomez, Bob Fripp, Machito, Johnny Winter, Blue Öyster 224

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Cult, and Pere Ubu. But there are also articles on experimental theater, sound art, and “rock poetry.” The issue even includes a full translation of Nat Hentoff’s long-form Rolling Stone essay from 1976, “The Pilgrims Have Landed on Kerouac’s Grave,” in which Hentoff follows Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan on a pilgrimage to Lowell, Massachusetts, alongside a translation of Ginsberg’s poem “Rolling Thunder Stones” (further evidence that Ginsberg’s poetry continued to circulate despite a ban put in place after his expulsion). By the early eighties, the publications of the Jazz Section had become one of the primary sites where countercultural forms from both inside and outside of Czechoslovakia were remixed into a potent brew of alternative culture.38 The Jazz Section also began to publish entire books. In the early eighties, they published a book about John Lennon, a history of rock and roll in Czechoslovakia, a popular three-volume rock dictionary, and a pamphlet called “Rock on the Left Wing” (Rock na levém křídle), which attempted to shore up rock’s leftist credentials but only further enraged the regime. During this era, the Jazz Section also introduced two new imprints—Situace and Jazzpetit—that ventured well outside the worlds of jazz and rock, circulating everything from theoretical texts on surrealism, Dada, and conceptual art to a volume focused on New York’s experimental Living Theater, whom they had already hosted in Prague for a series of underground performances in 1980. Most famously, in 1982, the Jazz Section published a new novel by the writer whom Škvorecký described as one of the pioneering “Gray Zonists” of the Stalinist era: Bohumil Hrabal. The Jazz Section published a “handsome” edition of Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England ), a novel containing echoes of both Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, in a huge edition of five thousand copies. Even if the Jazz Section’s membership was legally capped, the readership of their publications has been estimated in the tens of thousands.39 In 1986, the Jazz Section was also set to publish a major anthology of modern American poetry, translated by Jaroslav Kořán, who also edited the Jazz Section’s book on the Living Theater. Kořán was best known for his popular translations of American writers, including Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, Ken Kesey, Henry Miller, and Kurt Vonnegut, all put out by official publishing houses. Kořán’s collaborator on the project was Josef Jařab, the county’s leading scholar of American 225

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literature. A year earlier, in 1985, Jařab had edited a landmark anthology of African American literature called Masky a tváře černé Ameriky (Masks and faces of Black America), released by the state publishing house Odeon. Framed by Jařab’s opening essay on “American black literature and cultural pluralism,” the comprehensive volume covered African American writing from Frederick Douglass and Paul Laurence Dunbar up through Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison. The anthology was an immediate sensation. According to Marcel Arbeit and Michal Peprník, on the day of the book’s publication readers began to line up before dawn, and the book “was nationally sold out in approximately thirty minutes.”40 Why was Jařab’s anthology of African American literature published by a prestigious state press, while his next volume had to be produced by the Jazz Section? In the 1980s, Black writers from the United States still enjoyed a special status in much of the socialist world. Much had changed since Škvorecký promoted Langston Hughes in the late 1950s, but a new generation of translators and critics like Jařab were still able to exploit the ideological justifications of an earlier era. Jařab later argued, “The battle over which of the opposite sides, the official totalitarian authorities or the rather anonymous freedom-crazing people, would make better use of the identification or association with African American artists and their message, was soon decided by the very nature of that culture.”41 But the outcomes of this ongoing battle were often quite ambiguous. For instance, a Czech translation of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man had been approved for publication in 1981, to Jařab’s great surprise. Even though the “Battle Royale” section of Invisible Man had been published in Světová literatura in 1959, “our effort to have the Czech translation of the novel published was unsuccessful for years,” Jařab recalls. “It remains a mystery why, in 1981, the ban was finally removed; we suspected that someone in the publishing house must have succeeded in presenting the book as a protest piece against American racism and capitalist exploitation, as had proved to be the case with other publications by or about African Americans, such as James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain,” published by Odeon in 1979.42 To complicate matters, the official publishing world overlapped significantly with the Gray Zone during this era. Indeed, according to Hana Ulmanová, “Thanks to the connections and even friendships among the translators, editors, and scholars, all the necessary maneuvering was considered to be a great game, the goal of which was to get a book to the 226

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readership.”43 Sometimes, however, the game didn’t work, and the project would have to be either scrapped or published by the Jazz Section. This was the situation for Jařab and Kořán’s new anthology of modern American poetry, which was set to appear in the Jazzpetit series. The cover design for their anthology, which they called “Child on Top of a Greenhouse” (Dítě na skleníku) after the poem by Theodore Roethke, was already finalized when the leaders of the Jazz Section were arrested in September 1986. The galleys were confiscated before the book could go to press.44 As the Jazz Section’s activities in the Gray Zone expanded, state security forces had been closely watching. What began as small-scale acts of police harassment evolved into a more concerted effort to end the nonconformist activities of the Jazz Section in the early eighties. First, the Jazz Section was transferred to the Prague branch of the Musicians’ Union in 1983, and then the Prague branch was shut down. Individual leaders of the Jazz Section were targeted. Karel Srp was fired from his job at a publishing house, and his apartment was regularly searched, as were the headquarters of the Jazz Section. All copies of the publications of the Jazz Section were seized from libraries across the country. When all these tactics didn’t work, the authorities went as far as to abolish the entire Musicians’ Union in 1984, invoking old statutes established in the wake of the aborted Prague Spring. After revoking the Jazz Section’s precarious legal status, the police raided their headquarters, seizing their accounting books along with any of the publications they stored on premises. By now it was clear that the authorities were laying the groundwork for a trial. In September 1986, five members of the Jazz Section’s Executive Committee—Karel Srp, Joska Skalník, Vladimír Kouřil, Čestmír Huňát, and Tomáš Křivánek—and two others were arrested and charged with tax evasion and other “economic crimes.”45 In the eyes of the Czechoslovak government, the Jazz Section as an official state institution had ceased to exist. As the situation of the Jazz Section grew increasingly dire over the course of 1986, Škvorecký penned an update to “Hipness at Noon” and sent it to Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic and a committed Cold Warrior. “Apparently, the first article did help a lot to protect them against the wrath of authorities,” Škvorecký wrote to Wieseltier, “but it came out a year and a half ago.” The Jazz Section had been “bombarding” him with requests for a follow-up.46 Wieseltier declined, 227

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but Škvorecký would eventually publish another essay about the Jazz Section in a political-cultural journal called Cross Currents, which billed itself as “a Yearbook of Central European Culture.”47 Škvorecký was a regular contributor to Cross Currents in the mideighties, but he also complained in private that the journal reached only “exiles and people professionally interested in Central Europe.”48 Although this was exactly the kind of readership that Škvorecký and Salivarová had worked so hard to cultivate through their work at Sixty-Eight Publishers, he now realized that the imprisoned leaders of the Jazz Section required a bigger audience. Škvorecký’s new essay, “Hipness at Dusk,” was finally published in early 1987, as the Jazz Section’s leaders were still awaiting their trial. In the essay, Škvorecký refers to the Gray Zone as “the absolute, if silent, majority of citizens” who were not yet “bold enough to be dissidents” but nonetheless constituted “an ever-present, supportive base” for the opposition.49 Like Jiřina Šiklová, Škvorecký now understood Czechoslovakia’s expanding Gray Zone as a potential threat to the ruling regime. When he had first introduced the Jazz Section to English-language readers three years earlier, he had lamented the fact that their gradually escalating persecution was receiving almost no attention in the Western media.50 Thanks to Škvorecký’s journalistic efforts, the situation was beginning to change—but would it be enough? The leaders of the Jazz Section were set to stand trial in January 1987. By the early eighties, the Czechoslovak authorities seem to have finally realized that the Gray Zone activities of the Jazz Section were not just a pressure release valve but a real threat to their power. Why did it take them so long to shut them down? Part of the answer may have to do with the nature of the Gray Zone itself. According to Peter Bugge, the Jazz Section had always “operated in a curious twilight zone where the rule of law half existed without ever being trustworthy.”51 Sometimes this balancing act entailed active collaboration with the secret police: years later, it was revealed that Srp, the chairman of the Jazz Section, was registered as an StB informant (code name Hudebník, or “the Musician”) between 1976 and 1982.52 After the arrest of Srp and his colleagues, the Jazz Section’s lawyers appealed to the normalization regime’s own rhetoric of “law and order,” testing their professed commitment to principles of “socialist legality.” But alongside all this domestic maneuvering, there was another major component to the organization’s survival strategy. By the mideighties, the 228

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Jazz Section had also cultivated an international network of supporters, including an interconnected group of US-based diplomats, human rights activists, and writers. Peace Trees

John Updike wasn’t the first American writer to publish an appeal on behalf of the imprisoned leaders of the Jazz Section. In December 1986, Kurt Vonnegut published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Can’t Prague Leave Even Jazz Alone?” Vonnegut didn’t hold back: “It now appears that these cruel mutants, bred in the filth of the Second World War and all the feculent slime that has come afterwards, mean to punish with grim glee and severity the seven harmless and delightful members of the Executive Committee of the so-called Jazz Section whom they arrested last September and whom they have kept imprisoned ever since for Godknows-what.” Both he and Updike had met with the leaders of the Jazz Section during separate visits to Prague nearly two years earlier. In his Times op-ed, Vonnegut now dared the Czechoslovak authorities to use these meetings as evidence in their upcoming trial: “Let the court that is about to try and sentence them read the worst into what they had John and me do,” he writes. “Each of us had to plant a sapling and then to water it afterwards.”53 Updike would repeat this odd detail in his own anonymous New Yorker comment a few months later, referring to the “scrawny young saplings” that he and Vonnegut planted at the Jazz Section headquarters as “peace trees.”54 What exactly was the purpose of these peace trees, and what were they meant to symbolize? The short answer is cultural diplomacy. Updike and Vonnegut both visited Prague in the mideighties as official guests of William Luers, the US ambassador to Czechoslovakia, and his wife, Wendy Luers, a former human rights activist at Amnesty International. Updike in particular had a long history with the Luerses. In 1964, during a six-week cultural diplomacy tour of the Soviet bloc, Bill Luers had been Updike’s official State Department guide in Moscow. As part of the trip, Updike also visited Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Updike thought the trip “would constitute a small patriotic service, a wearing abroad, at last, of my country’s colors.” Many of his literary peers, including antiwar writers like Vonnegut and Norman Mailer, had served during the Second World War. Even Philip 229

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Roth had earned “the privilege of dissent,” Updike conceded, by enlisting in the army as a young man. While all these writers were outspoken in their opposition to the Vietnam War, Updike returned from his first tour of the Soviet bloc in the midsixties with “a hardened antipathy to Communism” that would last well into the Reagan era.55 Updike also returned home from the Eastern bloc with a new literary alter ego: the fictional Jewish American author Henry Bech. Three of the stories collected in Bech: A Book (1970) were inspired by Updike’s own experiences as an official “ambassador of the arts” for the State Department in the midsixties, conducting “that mostly imaginary activity termed ‘cultural exchange.’”56 Although Bech never makes it to Prague in any of these early stories, Updike’s recurring Jewish protagonist bears more than a passing resemblance to Roth.57 Updike would certainly measure his own Bech stories against Roth’s counter-realist Prague fictions by the mid­ eighties. In a 1985 letter to Roth, Updike expressed his admiration for The Prague Orgy: “For my money you are a better Czech writer than Kundera.” But Updike also aired some of his own insecurity. “Your experiences behind the Iron Curtain (I guess we don’t call it that any more) and mine have quite a different quality,” he observes to Roth. “Is the difference in our personalities, or the fact that I went in 1964, when the world was square if not flat?” In the two decades since Updike’s first trip to the Eastern bloc, Roth had successfully recruited Updike to several of his projects. First, Roth had enlisted Updike in the Czech Ad Hoc Fund, and then he had convinced Updike to write the introduction for Bruno Schulz’s Sanitorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, which appeared in the Writers from the Other Europe series in 1979. When Updike traveled to Czechoslovakia again in 1986, he carried a gift from Roth for the writer Ivan Klíma. Once in the country, he sent a postcard to Roth from the Bone Church in Kutná Hora, with the following quip: “The only orgy I got invited to was an orgy of sightseeing.”58 Initially, Updike had been resistant to the idea of returning to Prague at all. Soon after Bill Luers was appointed ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1983, he invited Updike to visit Prague as his official guest.59 “At the age of fifty-one,” Updike wondered aloud in a letter to Luers, “am I really up to making the Communist scene once more, posing as a good guy to the establishment, as a dissident to the dissidents, as an imperialist stooge to the brain-washed young students, etc.?” Updike told Luers that his fourday trip to Czechoslovakia in 1964 was still “sufficiently clear in my mind 230

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as to need no refreshing.”60 Nonetheless, Updike reluctantly agreed to visit Prague again in the spring of 1986. By the time Updike arrived, Bill and Wendy Luers had transformed the US Embassy in Prague into an unofficial annex of Czechoslovakia’s cultural Gray Zone. Between 1983 and 1987, the Luerses invited a series of famous US writers to Czechoslovakia under the auspices of a USIA speaker series, including Edward Albee, William Styron, and E. L. Doctorow, who all later participated in the campaign on behalf of the Jazz Section.61 The US Embassy also hosted readings and parties where visiting American writers mingled with members of the cultural establishment as well as prominent dissident writers. At first, Wendy Luers worried that she’d be getting the latter group into trouble by inviting them to meet with famous American literary figures. As she recalls, I said we are going to be bringing lots of writers, painters and everybody, do you want us to invite you or are we going to get you into much trouble, and they all said, of course invite us, we are already in so much trouble, it does not make any difference, and on top of that you have whiskey. So that started three years of just every week practically, and I am not exaggerating, every single week we would have somebody staying. And we had Edward Albee, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut over. I mean really everybody.62 It is easy to be cynical about the US Embassy’s own ideological motivations for supporting Prague’s banned writers. But Ivan Klíma has insisted, “The meetings with William Styron and his wife, Rose, and John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, E. L. Doctorow, Galway Kinnell and others, as well as with Mr. and Mrs. Luers, represented for us above all entry into the free world, a moment of exultation that imbued us with the strength to persevere, enhanced our hope.”63 These events were also an important (and rare) point of social contact between prominent figures associated with the dissident underground and the citizens of the Gray Zone, including members of the Jazz Section who were in regular attendance. According to William Kiehl, a public affairs officer at the embassy, “We brought people in and we held clandestine lectures with [the Jazz Section], where we would tell people to meet at a certain place and we’d bring a lecturer in to 231

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talk about popular culture, generally, of the Western variety.”64 After the official program was over, the festivities would often spill over into private apartments. It was also Wendy Luers who brought Vonnegut and Updike to visit the headquarters of the Jazz Section on the southern outskirts of Prague. Updike would later describe the Jazz Section’s headquarters as a warren of “small rooms holding jazzy posters, flushed faces, a jabber of feverish and ill-focused excitement, and the smell of white wine in paper cups.”65 Outside the headquarters, both writers were invited by the Jazz Section to plant a sapling—a “peace tree,” they were told—next to a recently installed stone monument. The monument’s Czech-language inscription read: “In commemoration of the 40th Anniversary of the End of the Second World War and of the Founding of the United Nations Organization by the Jazz Section.”66 In 1979, the Jazz Section had joined the International Jazz Federation, also becoming an affiliate organization of UNESCO—the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, which has its own Cold War history—without asking for official regime approval.67 Both the stone monument and the peace trees were part of the Jazz Section’s international strategy. After setting up the monument, the Jazz Section sent a report, complete with photographs, to the UN headquarters in New York and received a gracious response. The Czechoslovak government, meanwhile, fined them 500 crowns for erecting a public monument without permission. It was a small price to pay for the subsequent publicity. After Vonnegut published his op-ed in the New York Times, which mentioned the peace trees, a cultural attaché from the US Embassy in Prague reached out to Updike, asking him to write his own appeal. The official told Updike he was worried that Vonnegut’s description of the Czechoslovak Communist Party as “feculent” would send the regime’s “U.S. press monitors to the dictionary.” He then asked Updike, Are you planning to issue a statement? Speaking personally and not officially, I wish you would. Sometimes I think statements by prominent Americans have more influence than weeks of Vienna Helsinki discussions. You may wish to be less scatological than Vonnegut (perhaps only a hidden anagram or two describing the caca Commie regime), in order to make a return visit here easier. 232

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The cultural attaché even enclosed a chronology of the Jazz Section to assist Updike in writing his appeal. But to be safe, he warned, “Neither the Embassy nor I, however, should be attributed as authors.”68 Updike knew he was being used as a symbol, by both the Jazz Section and the State Department. Perhaps that’s why he opened his own New Yorker comment on the Jazz Section by acknowledging that an American writer’s visit to a communist country “acquires symbolic values for which his native cultural conditioning has ill prepared him.” Even though Updike understood that the peace trees would be taken as a “symbol of freedom and opposition,” he was self-aware enough to realize that the meaning of his own role in this ceremony was much more ambiguous. “As a western writer, I was one of the prank’s props, but not a terribly important one,” Updike writes in his anonymous comment, “the prank would go on, in its multitudinous improvised forms, whether I was there or not.”69 A month after his comment appeared in the New Yorker, Updike published a story in the magazine called “Bech in Czech.” Updike’s latest Bech story was a kind of coda to his fictional author’s cultural-diplomatic misadventures during an earlier phase of the so-called “cultural Cold War” between the United States and Soviet Union. “Bech in Czech” can therefore help us measure the cultural and political distance between Updike’s two trips to the Eastern bloc, two decades apart. The literary scholar Harilaos Stecopoulos has described “Bech in Czech” as an example of what he calls “Cold War Postmodernism.”70 Stecopoulos argues that Updike’s renewed participation in US cultural diplomacy in the 1980s should be understood as an extension of the US government’s deployment of modernist literature and art in its propaganda battles with the Soviet Union throughout the early Cold War era.71 By the end of the sixties, many of these efforts (some of which were secretly underwritten by the CIA) had been thoroughly discredited. What made writers’ participation in official US cultural diplomacy possible again in the 1980s, according to Stecopoulos, was “an increased willingness to champion the cause of the beleaguered writer trapped in the iron cage of the communist state.”72 To Stecopoulos’s insightful argument I would add just two points. By the 1980s, what was left of the cultural Cold War was increasingly occurring under the rubric of human rights. And, as we will see, a great deal of this renewed cultural exchange and human rights activism was now happening across the Gray Zone. 233

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Not everything had changed since the earlier era. “Here he is, your pal,” Updike’s fictional US ambassador announces to Bech as he stands in front of Franz Kafka’s gravestone in the New Jewish Cemetery in Žižkov.73 According to Updike’s biographer Adam Begley, two episodes from “Bech in Czech” are lifted directly from Updike’s real experiences in Prague: “a visit to Kafka’s grave and a book signing at the US Embassy.”74 Like both Ginsberg and Roth before him, Updike made the requisite pilgrimage to the New Jewish Cemetery soon after his arrival in Prague, placing a stone on Kafka’s grave. In the story, however, Updike turns Kafka’s gravestone into a more ambivalent symbol: he describes the monument as at once “blunt and enigmatic, banal and moving.”75 Updike may have been aware that, by the mideighties, his own story’s reference to communist Czechoslovakia’s “inscrutable Kafkaesque authorities” had become a well-worn cliché.76 The second episode adapted from Updike’s real visit to Prague is a book signing at the US Embassy. In the story, Updike describes the “endless line” of enthusiastic Czech readers that stretches down the block, waiting for a chance to see the famous American author Henry Bech in the flesh.77 Updike wasn’t exaggerating. According to William Kiehl, a public affairs officer for the USIA in Prague at the time, “we have pictures, in fact, I remember a great shot of people lined the whole length of the street, five abreast, to come into that library to get an autograph by John Updike.”78 Indeed, in a Czech-language magazine called Spektrum, we can glimpse a similar photograph of the queue at Updike’s book signing. As with the fictional Henry Bech, a great deal of Updike’s own fiction had already been translated into Czech. The first Updike stories appeared in the literary journal Světová literatura in 1963, many of them translated by Igor Hájek, the critic who first introduced the Beat Generation to Czech readers in his landmark 1959 essay “American Bohemia.” Ironically enough, when Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hájek was out of the country, traveling on a Ford Foundation grant awarded for his Czech translation of Updike’s novel The Centaur. (It is actually a copy of Kentaur that Updike is signing in the Spektrum photograph from 1985.) Hájek never returned to Czechoslovakia; in 1988, when “Bech in Czech” was itself translated into Czech and published in samizdat, the translator was Hájek.79 Updike never mentions the Jazz Section by name in “Bech in Czech,” but Bech does attend an after-party of “unofficial” writers and artists who 234

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FIGURE 6.2.  Image from an article about John Updike’s visit to Prague in 1986, published in

Spektrum. The article also includes an image of a long line of Czech readers waiting for an autograph from Updike outside the US Embassy. Courtesy of Hana Hamplová.

conspicuously listen to jazz and pass around lovingly produced samizdat texts.80 Updike was clearly charmed by these homemade books. As Bech turns over a samizdat book in his hands, he is “returned to some archetypical sense of what a book was: it was an elemental sheaf, bound together by love and daring, to be passed with excitement from hand to hand.” Updike understood that these literary texts were also social objects, connecting this Gray Zone inside Czechoslovakia to a much wider transnational public. “There was, beyond this little party flickering like a candle in the dark suburbs of Prague, a vast dim world of exile,” he writes, “Czechs in Paris or London or the New World who had left yet somehow now and then returned, to visit a grandmother or to make a motion picture, and émigré presses whose products circulated underground.”81 Here was an entire shadow world held together by the risky circulation of literary texts between East and West. 235

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The most beguiling—and perhaps most revealing—episode in “Bech in Czech” comes at the story’s conclusion. After giving an evening lecture on “American Optimism as Evinced in the Works of Melville, Bierce, and Nathanael West,” Bech retires to his room at the ambassador’s residence. Updike describes the moon rising from behind Prague Castle as “drenching in silver, like the back of a mirror.”82 (This is a callback to the first Bech story, “The Bulgarian Poetess,” which Updike had originally titled “Through the Looking Glass.”) Then, without warning, the text of the story is interrupted by long sections of italicized, untranslated Czech. The copyright page of Bech at Bay provides a clue: Updike is actually quoting the Czech-language translation of his own 1969 story, “Bech Panics,” published by the state publishing house Odeon in 1984. The Czech translator was not Hájek, now living in exile, but Antonín Přidal. Unlike Hájek, Přidal had remained in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet-led invasion. In the 1970s, he did much of his translation work under a pseudonym, but by the mideighties Přidal had become, according to one US Embassy official, a “skilled bureaucratic infighter.” In other words, Přidal was a member of the Gray Zone.83 “Bech in Czech” ends with an American writer confronting his own ambiguous translation into a literary symbol, panicked that when he departs the shadow world of Prague he will “cease to exist.”84 The real Updike, however, understood that long after he was gone, the prank would go on. The Gray Zone Besieged

Back in the United States, in January 1987, Updike and Vonnegut joined a group of twenty-six prominent American writers, artists, and musicians in signing a petition on behalf of the imprisoned leaders of the Jazz Section. In addition to Updike and Vonnegut, the signatories included Edward Albee, Joan Baez, Dave Brubeck, Hortense Calisher, E. L. Doctorow, Gil Evans, Tommy Flanagan, Max Gordon, Nat Hentoff, Mel Lewis, Wynton Marsalis, Arthur Miller, Dan Morgenstern, Toni Morrison, Gerry Mulligan, Robert Rauschenberg, Sonny Rollins, Gunther Schuller, Susan Sontag, Frederick Starr, Rose Styron, William Styron, Billy Taylor, and Cecil Taylor. “As artists,” the petition announced, “we see jazz not only as an American art form, but as an international language meaningful to 236

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many cultures.”85 The petition also invoked another “international language” that was becoming increasingly meaningful in the eighties: the human rights stipulations of the 1975 Helsinki Accords.86 As the campaign to save the Jazz Section shows, this new language of human rights activism was becoming increasingly entangled with the politics of literary dissent across the Gray Zone. Many of the writers who signed the Jazz Section petition had already been drawn into a network of human rights activism on behalf of banned Eastern bloc writers by Robert Bernstein, the president of Random House and founder of Helsinki Watch. Toni Morrison, who worked as an editor at Random House until 1983, later wrote of Bernstein: “From my vantage point, he functions almost like the Praetorian guard for those of us whose work is language,” protecting “those who husband it, produce it, accomplish it, distribute it.”87 Bernstein, who also led the International Freedom to Publish Committee of the Association of American Publishers, had established the Fund for Free Expression in 1975. The aim, according to Bernstein, was “to call attention to writers and dissidents in the Eastern bloc and press for their rights.”88 The cause of dissident writers in the Eastern bloc would help transform the human rights movement of the late Cold War into a big tent, attracting allies from across the American political spectrum. To advance his cause, Bernstein enlisted many of the high-profile writers he knew from his work as a publisher, including Doctorow, Miller, Morrison, Updike, and Vonnegut. One of their first projects was to become the American distributor of Index on Censorship. With the support of a Ford Foundation grant, Bernstein founded Helsinki Watch three years later, in 1978. Once again, Bernstein recruited well-known American writers to the new human rights organization’s masthead. Both Bernstein and Jeri Laber, the executive director of Helsinki Watch, traveled to Czechoslovakia in the early eighties, where they were put in contact with writers like Ludvík Vaculík, Ivan Klíma, and Václav Havel. While in Prague, Bernstein was invited to visit the Jazz Section’s headquarters. In the mideighties, the Jazz Section became central to Helsinki Watch’s human rights monitoring activities in Czechoslovakia, particularly after the Helsinki Cultural Forum held in Budapest in 1985. Ten years earlier, the Helsinki Final Act had been signed by thirty-five states, including the United States, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. In return for Western recognition of the territorial integrity of the Eastern 237

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bloc, the Soviet Union had agreed to a set of human rights provisions emphasizing freedom of emigration, family unification, freedom of the press, and increased opportunities for cultural exchange. The Cultural Forum in Budapest was the first official follow-up conference to focus exclusively on this so-called “third basket” of the Helsinki Accords; it was also the first to be held in a Warsaw Pact country. For the occasion, Helsinki Watch helped organize an unofficial “counter-forum,” which brought together writers and activists from both sides of the Iron Curtain, including Jeri Laber, Danilo Kiš, Timothy Garton Ash, Alain Finkielkraut, Jiří Gruša, Susan Sontag, Rose Styron, Amos Oz, and György Konrád.89 In a sense, Helsinki Watch’s approach to the counter-forum can be understood as the international corollary to the Gray Zone activities being pursued by groups like the Jazz Section within Eastern bloc societies. As Laber later put it, “The tactics we used at the Cultural Forum—testing and pushing the limits of official tolerance— became our strategy, and we went on to use it whenever and wherever possible.”90 It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Karel Srp and several other representatives of the Jazz Section were also present in Budapest, making unauthorized contact with several Western delegates to the official Cultural Forum.91 Srp later told Škvorecký that many of the people he met in Budapest already knew about the Jazz Section, thanks to his writing in English-language publications. Škvorecký’s first essay on the Jazz Section, “Hipness at Noon,” had been reprinted under the new title “The Unfinished End of the Jazz Section of the Czech Musicians’ Union” in a special volume called A Besieged Culture: Czechoslovakia Ten Years after Helsinki, which the International Helsinki Federation and Charter 77 Foundation had put together for the Budapest conference.92 A small-format book packed full of documentary evidence, cultural appeals, and literary references, A Besieged Culture is a nearly perfect artifact of its era, illustrating how discourses of human rights and literary dissent were deeply entangled in the mideighties. All of the different forms of human rights testimony included in A Besieged Culture are held together by frequent invocations of Prague’s most famous banned writer: Franz Kafka. The opening section features commentary on the Czechoslovak cultural situation from prominent literary intellectuals like Heinrich Böll, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tom Stoppard, and 238

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FIGURE 6.3.  Distorted image of the Old Town Bridge Tower at the foot of Charles Bridge in

Prague, part of Jiří Kolář’s series Kafka’s Prague, included in A Besieged Culture: Czechoslovakia Ten Years After Helsinki (1985). On the facing page, Kolář includes a quote from Franz Kafka’s “The Bridge”: “I had not yet turned quite around when I already began to fall, I fell and in a moment I was torn and transpierced by the sharp rocks which had always gazed up at me so peacefully from the rushing water.” DILIA theatre, literary, and media agency. 239

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Arthur Miller, closing with the exchange between Philip Roth and Ivan Klíma discussed earlier. Other sections take on a more evidentiary tone: the results of a questionnaire distributed to writers, artists, and intellectuals inside Czechoslovakia, a “Chronicle of Everyday Repression” compiled by Charter 77, and a series of documents including a list of “forbidden writers.” Škvorecký’s essay on the Jazz Section is included in a section of “Reflections” by well-known Czech writers, including Milan Kundera, Jaroslav Seifert, and Václav Havel. At the heart of the book, there is a glossy insert with a reproduction of Jiří Kolář’s cut-up series Kafka’s Prague, interspersed with quotations from the author’s literary fragments; an image from this series also provides the book’s cover.93 Taken together, all the components of A Besieged Culture helped make the repression of Czech literature and culture under normalization become a major topic at the counter-forum in Budapest. It also further raised the profile of the Jazz Section, both inside and outside of Czechoslovakia. When Srp and the other members of the Jazz Section returned from Budapest to Prague, they learned that their travel permissions were now revoked. Undeterred, they still planned to send representatives to the next year’s Helsinki Review Conference in Vienna. As the date of the conference approached, Helsinki Watch was optimistic about their participation, especially after both the Soviet and Polish governments had sent some promising signals about their treatment of dissidents.94 But in November 1986, just two months before the conference was set to begin, the leaders of the Jazz Section were arrested. Over the next several months, Helsinki Watch coordinated an extensive campaign to draw attention to the situation of the imprisoned leaders of the Jazz Section; as part of their efforts, they publicized an open letter from representatives of the Jazz Section to delegates at the 1986 review conference in Vienna. In fact, Helsinki Watch’s entire report on human rights violations in Czechoslovakia, prepared for the conference, is framed by an opening discussion of the harassment and arrest of the Jazz Section leaders: “Ironically, the recent crackdown seems related to the Czechoslovak government’s attitude toward the opening of the Helsinki Review Conference in Vienna in November 1986.” The detailed report also notes that “Karel Srp and Josef Skalnik were fined 500 crowns each for having set up—without permit—a commemorative plaque.”95 In retrospect, both the UN monument and the peace trees were clearly a part of the Jazz 240

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Section’s evolving human rights strategy, which built on their membership in UNESCO, the language of the Helsinki Accords, and recent bilateral cultural exchange agreements between the United States and Czechoslovakia. And even if the Czechoslovak government had removed the UN monument, the peace trees planted by Updike and Vonnegut were still in the ground. Helsinki Watch’s efforts on behalf of the arrested leaders of the Jazz Section culminated in January 1987 with an event in New York City called “Czechoslovakia: A Besieged Culture.” Cosponsored by the PEN American Center, the event celebrated the tenth anniversary of Charter 77, while also drawing more Western attention to the situation of the Jazz Section. Alongside a report called “A Decade of Dedication: Charter 77, 1977–1987,” the organizers unveiled the petition signed by American writers, artists, and musicians in support of the Jazz Section. The evening program featured remarks by Jeri Laber and Timothy Garton Ash, who had both been at the counter-forum in Budapest, as well as a program of well-known American authors and activists reading from the banned works of Czech writers. Many of these translated works had first appeared in journals like Index on Censorship and Cross Currents or had been excerpted in A Besieged Culture: E. L. Doctorow read from Ludvík Vaculík’s “My Philosophers”; the actress Diane Dowling from Kantůrková’s My Companions in the Bleak House; Maureen Howard from Vlasta Charmostová; Rose Styron from a sonnet cycle by Jaroslav Seifert; and Kurt Vonnegut from Dominik Tatarka’s “The Demon of Conformism,” as well as Havel’s “Six Asides about Culture” and “Anatomy of a Reticence.” Susan Sontag read an excerpt from the novella Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, Czechoslovakia’s greatest writer of the Gray Zone.96 The evening’s featured speaker on the Jazz Section was Škvorecký. Following a twenty-minute jazz performance by Tommy Flannagan and Michael Formanek (riffing on compositions by “free souls” like Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk), Škvorecký attempted to explain what the countercultural Jazz Section had in common with a dissident organization like Charter 77. He described how the Czechoslovak authorities had responded to Vonnegut’s op-ed in the Times by cynically promoting a series of regional jazz festivals (which Škvorecký called “an orgy of in-syncopation”). Meanwhile, both Karel Srp and Vladimír Kouřil remained in jail. The “pathology of official power” left the Jazz Section with no choice but to adopt 241

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the defensive human rights strategy of Charter 77. To complete the convergence between these two organizations, Charter 77 had recently made statements in the defense of the Jazz Section, drawing more international attention to their cause. Škvorecký even hazarded some optimism: the trial of the leaders of the Jazz Section, scheduled for that January, had yet to take place. Perhaps the authorities would quietly drop their case. But the Jazz Section trial had only been delayed. By March 1987, the outcome of the trial had become a matter of international concern. Postcards addressed to “His Execelency [sic] Gustav Husak,” the president of Czechoslovakia and the secretary general of the Communist Party, had been arriving from abroad. One side of the mass-produced postcard featured a slogan written in both Czech and English (“SVOBODU PRO FUNKCIONÁŘE JAZZOVÉ SEKCE / FREEDOM FOR JAZZ SECTION OFFICIALS!”) under an image of a muffled trumpet, its player’s arms bound by rope. The following text was printed on the back of the postcard: “I protest against the unjust arrests of the leading members of Jazz Section, a legal organization under Czechoslovak law.” The postcard’s message concludes by announcing that the fate of the leaders “will be closely followed.”97 Indeed, twelve foreign news organizations were present at the courthouse during final sentencing, including Time, the Associated Press, and VOA. In a highly unusual move, several international news agencies were even allowed inside the courtroom. The absurdity of the trial was captured in one “Kafkaesque” detail, which made it into several foreign news reports. Since 1984, Srp and the Executive Committee of the Jazz Section had written to the Ministry of the Interior more than a hundred times to inquire about the legal justification for their official dissolution. They never received a response. As Time put it, In one Kafkaesque exchange, Srp questioned an official of the Ministry of Culture who had been charged with “liquidating” the Jazz Section as to why he had not answered the group’s written requests for information. Replied the official: “We couldn’t answer letters from a committee that does not exist.”98 Kenneth Roth, a representative of Helsinki Watch who was also covering the trial, reported that Srp then replied to the government official by asking whether he would have been open to meeting with Srp in person.99 242

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The official replied with yet another paradox: “If you had consented to liquidation, of course we could have met.”100 The verdict in the Jazz Section trial was finally delivered on the afternoon of March 11, 1987. When Srp was led to the courtroom to receive his sentence, the assembled crowd waiting in the corridor broke into applause. According to state surveillance reports, over two hundred friends and supporters of the Jazz Section had been gathering since the early morning to await the verdict.101 Most conspicuous among the crowd of long-haired supporters were several prominent Charter 77 activists, including Václav Havel. In 1976, Havel’s presence at the trial of members of the experimental bands Plastic People of the Universe and DG 307 had helped bring together opposition-minded intellectuals and the cultural underground, shaping the coalitional human rights strategy of the Charter 77 movement. Now, a decade later, at the Jazz Section trial, the security services observed as Havel conducted an interview with a group of foreign journalists, alongside the lead attorney for the Jazz Section and several Western diplomats. When the defendants filed out of the courtroom, they were greeted by another round of thunderous cheers. The trial finally over, the long-haired crowd began to clap, stomp, and shout the lyrics to John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” As Srp reached the hallway, he broke away toward the assembled crowd with a beaming smile, before he was immediately restrained by his police escort and led away. The verdict, of course, had always been guilty. In the end, Srp and Kouřil were both sentenced to prison. But their sentences were more lenient than many had feared: sixteen months and ten months, respectively. The other members of the Jazz Section who were arrested had already been quietly released. “The Jazz Section has been punished,” as John Updike would put it, “but with an awkward ambivalence.”102 According to Kenneth Roth of Helsinki Watch, “The contradictions revealed by the trial reflect the deep ambivalence within official circles in Prague about how to respond to the movement for reform led by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.”103 Škvorecký had always suggested that even the Ministry of the Interior had its members of the Gray Zone. As for the fate of jazz in his native Bohemia, Škvorecký observed after the trial, “Paradoxically, if the original aims of the Section are considered, it has won a triumphant victory. Since 1948 (the year of the coup) jazz never had it so good in Czechoslovakia.”104 243

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Sundown in Pear Valley

“Associations are everything,” Škvorecký writes in The Engineer of Human Souls.105 This is not only the central theme of Škvorecký’s novel but also one of the main lessons of the history of literary dissent across the Iron Curtain. Even as nonconforming “writing people” like Václav Havel were transformed into “dissidents” in the seventies and eighties, they continued to work to overcome their cultural isolation, both at home and abroad. Ever since the start of the Cold War, cultural exchange between American and Czech writers, as well as the transmission of literature between the blocs, had helped keep alternative lines of communication open. Now, Škvorecký was at the heart of a network of literary circulation and political solidarity that connected writers, intellectuals, and activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain. These new forms of association challenged the division of the world into competing geopolitical blocs, often blurring the cultural boundaries between East and West in the process. But the political consequences of these new associations were often quite ambiguous: the history of literary dissent between Cold War blocs had always occurred across a Gray Zone. The cause of literary dissent also created strange bedfellows. While it lasted, the international campaign to save the imprisoned leaders of the Jazz Section created unexpected alliances across the American political and cultural spectrum.106 Both Allen Ginsberg and his longtime nemesis, the neoconservative intellectual Norman Podhoretz, were deeply invested in the fate of the Jazz Section in the mideighties. In 1986, Podhoretz wrote to Škvorecký to inform him that he was preparing to visit Prague, and he promised to relay any news he discovered about the situation of the Jazz Section back to Škvorecký. The trip, however, was not a success. After Podhoretz returned, a cultural affairs officer at the US Embassy in Prague wrote to John Updike to complain that his office now had “an axe to grind” with Podhoretz. “Poddhie,” he explained to Updike, “is on our shit list here at the embassy as well because he came to Prague, didn’t talk to us, and then recently claimed in print that we do not have any interest in the dissident community here.” The exasperated diplomat added, “If he only knew the hours we spend with them!”107 If this report ever made it back to Škvorecký, it didn’t show up in his correspondence with Podhoretz. By this point the two aging men were

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ideological companions. In their mutually flattering exchange, Škvorecký compliments Podhoretz on the publication of his new essay collection The Bloody Crossroads: Where Politics and Literature Meet (1986), which reprinted Podhoretz’s essay “An Open Letter to Milan Kundera,” a work of remarkable political condescension.108 Several years earlier, a review copy of the Other Europe edition of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting had landed on Podhoretz’s desk at Commentary magazine. Against his initial expectations, he fell in love with the novel. But Podhoretz also worried that Kundera hadn’t grasped the full political implications of his own writing. In a Paris Review interview, Škvorecký summarizes Podhoretz’s argument as follows: “Kundera was being claimed by the left, whereas he really belongs with the neo-conservatives.” According to Škvorecký, there was “a lot of truth in this.”109 Podhoretz found a much more willing ally than Kundera in Škvorecký. In a letter to Podhoretz, Škvorecký described his recent broadcast for VOA about The Bloody Crossroads, which “was eminently useful in getting my message across.” He also explained that, under previous administrations, the “in-house censors” at VOA had sometimes rejected his transcripts for being overtly political. But Škvorecký reassured Podhoretz, “It is much better now, with Reagan where he belongs, than it was with some of his precursors.”110 In his own letter, Podhoretz returned the compliment, telling Škvorecký, “I enormously enjoyed The Engineer of Human Souls.”111 Podhoretz’s archetypical “Know-Nothing Bohemian,” Allen Ginsberg, offered Škvorecký a very different assessment of his magnum opus. In particular, Ginsberg objected to how Škvorecký had represented him in a key scene of The Engineers of Human Souls. About halfway through the novel, Danny visits a poet conspicuously named “Allen” at his farm in “Pear Valley.” This was a lightly fictionalized account of Škvorecký’s reallife reunion with Ginsberg in the 1970s in Cherry Valley, New York.112 Before the English-language edition of Škvorecký’s novel was published in 1984, Škvorecký sent proofs of the translation to Ginsberg as a courtesy. On April Fool’s Day, Ginsberg responded in a letter: “I’m totally depressed by your vision of the farm.” Nonetheless, he gave his blessing to Škvorecký to go ahead and publish the translation, “just as long as I don’t have to sign an affidavit saying that the virtue of country organic farming is some sort of depraved or simple-minded bohemian evasion of social reality . . . and that I’m ‘proud of my country’ subsidizing the death squad military in 245

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Central America.” (Ginsberg was likely referring to recent revelations, publicized by Human Rights Watch, about crimes committed by the Contras in Nicaragua.)113 In his distinctive looping handwriting, Ginsberg added, “Or that I’m charmed by your vision of the farm.”114 But Škvorecký may have been more charmed by Ginsberg’s farm than the uncharitable details in his novel would suggest. Danny’s visit to Pear Valley actually comes at the heart of one of the most important (if cringe-inducing) sequences in the entire novel. After smoking marijuana on a boat on Lake Ontario with a group of undergraduate students, a stoned Danny tells his students he has become a “living stream of consciousness,” his mind cluttered by the accumulated “bric-a-brac” of a lifetime. This is also a nearly perfect formal description of Škvorecký’s novel. “It is just that in this flow of thoughts, in the flow of our inner time,” Danny reflects, “in this Zone, everything appears to arrange itself into these odd, strange contrasts so typical of the human situation.”115 Before Danny exits this “Zone,” his stream of associations carries him back into the past, to his memory of a cold February night in the midsixties when Ginsberg arrived in Prague. Danny picks up a ringing telephone in his Prague apartment: “Allen here,” the voice announces. Danny then relates many of the real-life details from Ginsberg’s momentous visit to Prague in 1965: the all-night conversations about taboo topics, the compromising details recorded in “a naïve American’s notebook,” Allen’s election as King of May, and his subsequent deportation from the country. There are also some key differences: Ginsberg’s primary Czech translator, Jan Zábrana, is erased entirely from the story.116 Danny takes sole credit for the subtle changes of terminology that had been required to publish Ginsberg’s poem during the Thaw. “Thus do Trotskyites become revolutionaries,” Škvorecký writes, “and a beatnik becomes a progressive poet.” (In his letter to Škvorecký, Ginsberg claims, “Yes of course I was aware my texts couldn’t be translated without euphemism, and we spent much time discussing that fix.”) Danny also dramatizes his own interrogation after Allen’s expulsion from Czechoslovakia. He defends his risqué conversations with Ginsberg by claiming that they had both been drunk the entire time. “We talked about mental associations liberated by alcohol,” Danny explains to the interrogator. “Associations? Not a very clever way to explain it.” Perhaps not, but Ginsberg gave Škvorecký his reluctant approval to go ahead with the English translation of his novel.117 246

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Two years after The Engineer of Human Souls appeared, Škvorecký wrote an open letter to Ginsberg in celebration of the poet’s sixtieth birthday. The letter opens, “Of course it’s only yesterday that I heard your voice on the telephone, on that wintry night in Prague, and thought you were calling from New York, while you were actually standing in a booth on the Prague airport.” Škvorecký goes on to quote a couplet from “Kral Majales,” with Ginsberg’s lines alternating between a critique of communism and capitalism. “Kral Majales” had always been a poem about the “zone” between East and West, which Škvorecký and Ginsberg both inhabited despite their divergent politics.118 Škvorecký interrupts the poem to address Ginsberg directly: “Dear Allen! There are differences between us. To me the capitalists offer something precious, something that I have not had ever since the beginning of my writing days until I landed on the Capitalist shores.” Škvorecký quotes one more line from Ginsberg’s poem, this time a statement of poetic convergence (“and I am the King of May”), before completing his message to Ginsberg: And so, I love you Allen, in spite of your innocent politics, and remember how you came, in a storm, in Cherry Valley, and scratched on the tent and asked whether we were O.K., me and my wife, and we were, in that storm, because we were close to some goodness, to some friendship, to some human essence. We didn’t mind the storm, we didn’t mind the stinking shithouse of Cherry Valley.119 Despite their many differences, Škvorecký and Ginsberg remained allies in their fight on behalf of the imprisoned leaders of the Jazz Section in the mideighties. In 1987, Ginsberg added his name to the Jazz Section petition and also sought guidance from Škvorecký about how to reply to a message from the Czechoslovak ambassador to the United States, Miroslav Houstecky, about the Jazz Section.120 In response, Škvorecký let Ginsberg know he was planning to write one final article on the fate of the Jazz Section “as soon as the affair is definitively closed one way or another.”121 That fall, Vladimír Kouřil was released from prison. Karel Srp was released a few months later, in January 1988. As promised, Škvorecký published a final article called “Jamming the Jazz Section” in the New York Review of Books, informing readers that “after much suffering,” Srp 247

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had “immediately resumed his activities.”122 The leaders of the former Jazz Section were already back at work creating two new organizations— Artforum and Unijazz—that would continue the Jazz Section’s work of fostering an independent culture in Czechoslovakia. Unlike in Škvorecký’s earlier essays, there is no mention of the Gray Zone in his final essay about the Jazz Section. By the time of the Jazz Section trial, the organization’s persecuted leaders had stepped out of the Gray Zone and were now being labeled in the Western press as “dissidents.” In the eyes of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, there was now little distinction between the Jazz Section and other “illegal structures of anti-socialistic forces” inside Czechoslovakia, including Charter 77. The Czechoslovak Communist Party was bracing for two anniversaries in 1988—the fortieth anniversary of the party’s ascension to power in 1948 and the twentieth anniversary of the Prague Spring of 1968. In June, the Central Committee circulated a memo to several of its government ministries warning that “forces of internal and external enemies of socialism are being prominently activated.”123 A hastily translated typescript of the memo made it to Helsinki Watch in New York. In addition to describing the activities of Charter 77, the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted (VONS), and the Roman Catholic Church, the memo includes a section on the reconstituted Jazz Section: “Members of the ‘former’ Committee, in close coordination with Charter 77, VONS, and through the intermediary of some missions of capitalistic states in Prague and other international organizations, are presenting the procedure of Czechoslovak organs as violation of human rights and through slanted press reports are, in this respect, disorienting the members.”124 Even though Mikhail Gorbachev’s ideals of glasnost and perestroika were partially inspired by the Prague Spring, they were slow to arrive in normalized Czechoslovakia, where ideological hard-liners were still in control. But the Gray Zone was still expanding, including inside the Communist Party. According to Škvorecký in the New York Review of Books, it remained unlikely that the leaders of the Jazz Section would ever return to prison, thanks in part to increased public support inside Czechoslovakia. “But equally important will be international backing,” Škvorecký writes, “and also, unfortunately, the unpredictable climactic conditions of the Muscovy empire.”125 It was the summer of 1988, almost exactly two decades since the end of the Prague Spring, and the storm was not yet over. 248

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In the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution, both Philip Roth and Allen Ginsberg were finally able to return to Prague. The official reason for Roth’s visit in February 1990—his first since his tourist visa was canceled in 1976—was to conduct an interview with his old friend Ivan Klíma. During the interview, which would be published in the New York Review of Books that April, Roth reiterated his earlier statement comparing Czech and American literary cultures during the Cold War era: “There nothing goes and everything matters; here everything goes and nothing matters.” Unlike in the mid-1980s, Klíma now registered no objection to Roth’s chiasmic formulation. “Your comparison of the situation of Czech writers and writers in a free country is one that I have often repeated,” Klíma replied. “I’m not able to judge the paradox of the second half, but the first catches the paradox of our situation wonderfully.”1 After 1989, however, the situation in Prague was quickly changing. Recently banned writers like Klíma suddenly found themselves in a political and cultural environment in which “everything goes.” The Velvet Revolution was not caused by the circulation of literary dissent across the Iron Curtain.2 But the central role Václav Havel played 249

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in the popular movement that overthrew the one-party Communist dictatorship in power since 1948 only reinforced the romantic image of the persecuted dissident writer that had taken hold in the Western political imagination. At the start of 1989, Havel had found himself once again in prison, this time sentenced to nine months for his minor participation in a series of public protests commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Jan Palach’s self-immolation in 1969. Following domestic protests and an international outcry, including an editorial in the New York Times, Havel was released after just three months. But the regime’s heavy-handed response to the so-called “Palach Week” six months later would set the stage for the Velvet Revolution. On November 17, 1989, a large student protest was violently suppressed by baton-wielding riot police; within days, tens of thousands of Czechoslovak citizens spilled into Wenceslas Square. In the meantime, Havel and fellow Charter 77 activists quickly established the Civic Forum (Občanské forum), with its soon-to-be iconic headquarters in Prague’s Magic Lantern Theater.3 The purpose of the Civic Forum was twofold: to help organize a peaceful but chaotic popular movement and to negotiate with an imploding Communist regime. During this final phase of the Velvet Revolution, Havel became the Civic Forum’s most visible representative—and on December 29, 1989, the playwright-turneddissident was sworn in as Czechoslovakia’s first postcommunist president.4 Although Havel’s journey to the presidency was especially dramatic, he was not the only former dissident intellectual who went on to participate in Czechoslovakia’s post-1989 government. Take the example of Rita Klímová, Czechoslovakia’s first ambassador to the United States during the postcommunist era. Klímová was born in 1931 to Ukrainian Jews who had relocated to Prague the previous decade. Her father was the prominent left-wing journalist Stanislav Budín, who was expelled from the Communist Party in the late 1930s because of his unorthodox views. In 1939, shortly after the establishment of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the family fled from Prague to New York City. During the war years, Rita attended an American middle school and acquired her fluent, New York–accented English. Against Rita’s objections, the family returned to Prague in 1946 and enthusiastically participated in the transformation of Czechoslovakia into a socialist state based on the Soviet model. Klímová too embraced Stalinism in the 1950s, training to become an economist and writing her doctoral dissertation on the US economy during the Great 250

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Depression. She taught at Charles University until she was fired because of her embrace of reform communism during the Prague Spring. In the aftermath of the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, she was also purged from the Communist Party. When Roth visited Prague for the second time in 1973, Klímová and her father were among his first contacts. In fact, it was at her apartment that Roth was first introduced to both Ivan Klíma (no relation) and Milan Kundera. Roth and Klímová fell out of touch soon after Roth’s tourist visa was canceled by the Czechoslovak government in 1976. After her father signed Charter 77, Klímová lost her position as a technical translator. She would soon become a prominent dissident herself. Following the death of both her parents and husband, she helped her son distribute underground manuscripts and wrote her own tongue-in-cheek samizdat articles on economic topics under the pseudonym “Adam Kovář,” a Czech-language equivalent to “Adam Smith.”5 Because of her connections in the Englishspeaking world, she also became a first point of contact for Western human rights activists in the 1980s. In November 1989, Havel recruited Klímová to serve as his interpreter for the Civic Forum during its frequent press conferences with the foreign media. It was in her capacity as the Englishlanguage spokesperson for the Civic Forum that Klímová coined the phrase “Velvet Revolution.” She also became one of Havel’s most trusted advisers. In 1990, the newly elected president Havel appointed Klímová as Czechoslovakia’s ambassador to the United States. But Klímová was soon diagnosed with leukemia, and she would serve only two years, resigning several months before the breakup (or “Velvet Divorce”) of Czechoslovakia into the Czech and Slovak Republics. When Klímová passed away in late December 1993, the New York Times printed an obituary under a headline that captured the dramatic arc of her final years: “Rita Klimova, 62, Czech Dissident Who Became Ambassador to U.S.” But, as Roth would point out in a letter to the Times, the newspaper had missed one of Klímová’s hidden accomplishments. Almost a decade earlier, in 1985, Roth had received an unexpected package in the mail from Klímová. In a cover note to Roth, Klímová recalled one of their old conversations in Prague. “If you remember,” she wrote, “you suggested I try to translate from Czech into English the novel by Jiří Weil ‘Life with a Star,’ which somebody told you was good.”6 Roth first learned of the Czech Jewish writer during one of his earliest trips 251

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to Prague, and he immediately read the only two stories he could find in translation.7 But no English-language version of Weil’s masterpiece, the novel Life with a Star, yet existed. At the time, Roth only knew that a book called The Jews of Czechoslovakia had once designated Weil’s novel, set during the Nazi occupation of Prague, as “the outstanding Czech book published between 1945 and 1948.”8 Now, more than ten years after their first meeting, Klímová was informing Roth that she had finally completed her translation of Life with a Star. Because so much time had passed, Klímová didn’t know if Roth would still be interested in her translation or if his Other Europe series even existed anymore. Klímová apologized to Roth for the long delay, explaining, “I started the translation immediately after you left, but then I was sick, then I got married, we reconstructed a summer cottage we bought and especially after 1977 (the Charter) too much was happening.” Klímová proposed a coded system so that Roth could respond to her query directly without tipping off the Czechoslovak mail censors. She asked Roth to acknowledge receipt by sending a postcard to Klímová in Prague with one of three coded messages: A) greetings from you, where you happen to be = confirmation that you have received the manuscript and will look at it. B) this has been a lousy year, you have been sick, etc. = someone else has translated the book or for some other reason there is no hope of it being published. C) This has been a good year, you have done a lot of good work and are in good health = there is a good outlook for publication and in time I will get some money for it.9 Roth must have responded with the third message. An English-language translation of Life with a Star, with a preface by Roth, was finally published to critical acclaim in 1989. But because the Velvet Revolution was still several months away, Klímová wasn’t listed as the translator. After her death in late 1993, Roth wrote a letter to the Times to set the record straight. “At the time the manuscript was being prepared for publication, it would have been politically dangerous for Mrs. Klimova to take credit for the translation, so the name that appears on the title page, along with Roslyn Schloss, is a pseudonym Mrs. Klimova chose, Ruzena 252

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Kovarikova,” Roth explained. “But it was Rita Klimova who, with all her other brave and valuable accomplishments, introduced Weil’s remarkable novel to the United States.”10 Roth made no mention of his own involvement in the project. Another close ally of Havel’s at the Civic Forum, Jaroslav Kořán, was elected mayor of Prague after 1989. Like Klímová, Kořán had experience as both a dissident and a literary translator. During the communist era, he had translated a wide range of American writers, including Charles Bukowski, Robert Coover, Chester Himes, Raymond Chandler, Ken Kesey, Henry Miller, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., among many other English-language authors. He also collaborated with Josef Jařab on an anthology of contemporary US poetry that was set to be released by the Jazz Section in 1986 before proofs were seized by the Czechoslovak authorities. The project was finally published by Odeon three years later, in 1989, on the eve of the Velvet Revolution. Now, Kořán had been elected lord mayor of Prague.11 And in one of his first acts in office, Kořán welcomed an ailing Allen Ginsberg back to Czechoslovakia for the first time since he had been elected as King of May and then unceremoniously deported in 1965.12 The official purpose of Ginsberg’s visit in 1990 was to participate in the first postcommunist celebration of Majáles. Ginsberg wrote a poem for the occasion, entitled “The Return of the Kral Majales,” which he read in front of a large crowd in Prague’s Old Town Square: So King of May I return through Heaven flying to reclaim my paper crown And I am King of May with high blood pressure, diabetes, gout, Bell’s palsy, kidneystones & calm eyeglasses And wear the foolish crown of no ignorance no wisdom Anymore no fear no hope in capitalist striped tie & Communist dungarees13 Unlike in 1965, Ginsberg now left the romanticizing up to others. He followed his recitation by turning the crown over to a young student who had been elected as the new King of May earlier in the day. The symbolism was lost on no one. As the Prague-based writer Louis Armand later put it, “Ginsberg’s return . . . signified for many the inauguration of a new cultural 253

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moment.”14 Armand made this observation in the introduction to an anthology called The Return of Král Majáles, which collected Englishlanguage works from the period of Prague’s “international literary renaissance” in the decade after 1989. Armand quotes the American expatriate journalist Alan Levy’s boosterish claim from 1991: “We are living in the Left Bank of the Nineties.” In his Prague Post editorial, Levy continues, “For some of us, Prague is Second Chance City; for others, a New Frontier where anything goes, everything goes, and, often enough, nothing works.”15 Levy, like Ginsberg, had been expelled from Czechoslovakia during the previous era—in his case, after covering the aftermath of the 1968 Sovietled invasion for the foreign press. Now he too had returned to Prague. With Prague’s “Bohemian” reputation already well established by the English-language reception of Czech writers like Kundera, the city became a way station for a younger generation of expatriate writers and artists after 1989.16 Many of the aspiring writers who passed through Prague in the 1990s are included in Armand’s anthology, but only a few went on to publish novels that drew substantially on their Prague experiences. Among US-based writers, this short list includes Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2003), partly set in the imagined Central European expatriate haven of “Prava,” and Caleb Crain’s masterful Necessary Errors (2011). The same year that Crain published his novel, Joshua Cohen also published an experimental short story called “Cafédämmerung (or Allen in Prague, King of May Day, 1965).” The story is an extended riff on Ginsberg’s experiences in Prague during Majáles, but Cohen’s true protagonists are the countless “writerwaiters” employed at the city’s Austrian-style cafés. In Cohen’s surrealist reimagining of the Majáles affair, Ginsberg’s coronation takes place not in the Park of Leisure and Rest but in the café on the ground floor of the Hotel Ambassador, “where the waiters attending used to be writers, novelists and storywriters and poets now prevented from publishing freely, demoted to servitude.” But according to Cohen, the American poet has arrived too late. The city’s “wraiters” are all dying off. Cohen quotes the Prague-born poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “O it’s a long long while from May to December / but the days grow short when you reach September.” The title of Cohen’s story, “Cafédämmerung,” translates to “Twilight of the cafés.”17 Cohen’s sense of belatedness wasn’t shared by everyone. According to Armand, the Prague-based literary culture of the period was more accu254

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rately characterized by “hyper-anachronism.” He quotes the Czech writer Daniela Dražanová, who pointed out, “Czech literature in the 1990s exists in fast-forward and reverse. Publishers are printing the formerly banned works of ‘dissident’ authors, previously censored Czech classics, and the efforts of fresh and relatively unknown writers.”18 For instance, much of Ivan Klíma’s Czech-language writing, which had only appeared in samizdat or been released abroad by Sixty-Eight Publishers, was suddenly published in new editions at home for the first time since the sixties. The same was true of the work of well-known exiles like Josef Škvorecký. In Prague, Kafka-themed gift shops were not far behind. Milan Kundera, who remained in Paris, unlike Havel or Klíma, and began composing his novels in French, was a more “complicated” case.19 Roth’s interview with Klíma in the New York Review of Books precipitated a falling-out between Roth and Kundera, largely because of Klíma’s critical comments about Kundera. “The reproach that he is writing for foreigners rather than for Czechs is only one of the many reproaches addressed to Kundera and only a part of the more substantial rebuke,” Klíma told Roth, “that he has lost his ties to his native country.”20 For the rest of his life, Roth would work to repair his relationship with Kundera, even flattering the Franco-Czech writer with a winking cameo in The Human Stain, his celebrated 2000 novel about the purified cultural politics of the nineties. If no recent Czech writer has reached the status of Kundera in the English-speaking world, that may be because “the phenomenon ‘Milan Kundera’ is . . . as much sociocultural as literary.” At least this is the argument put forward by Andrew Baruch Wachtel in his probing book Remaining Relevant after Communism. According to Wachtel, the question of “relevance” in postcommunist Central and Eastern Europe “has less to do with literature per se than it does with the position and role of literature and those who produce it in a society.”21 As he argues, more than a decade after the fall of communism, “a black-and-white view of the relationship between official and unofficial spheres, as well as the question of the relative quality of the art produced by them, needs to be revisited.” To help him pursue both these goals, Wachtel provides the example of the Czech writer Jáchym Topol, who straddled both the pre- and post-1989 eras. Son of the playwright Josef Topol, Jáchym first cut his teeth as a lyricist for several underground rock bands in the 1980s, before publishing three samizdat collections of poetry in the final years of the communist era. He also 255

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cofounded the samizdat journal Revolver Revue, which would be reestablished as an above-ground literary magazine after the Velvet Revolution. Topol’s first novel, Sestra, published in Czechoslovakia in 1994, was translated into English as City Sister Silver by Alex Zucker in 2000. As Wachtel describes, Topol’s “kaleidoscopic” novel, with its “extremely loose streamof-consciousness style reminiscent of Jack Kerouac’s,” was a success with Czech critics but made a much less discernible impact in the United States. However, this may tell us much more about what matters in the place Roth once called “the little world around the corner” than it does about the future of Czech-language literature. Havel Reads Herzog

Back in the United States, an aging Cold War generation of literary intellectuals was taking stock of what it had all meant. Despite triumphalist declarations of the “End of History,” the 1990s were also a nostalgic and retrospective era in US literary culture.22 In 1992, Partisan Review cohosted a conference on the theme of “Intellectuals and Social Change in Central and Eastern Europe” at the Paul Robeson Center, a sprawling brutalist building on Rutgers University’s satellite campus in Newark, New Jersey.23 The conference drew an impressive range of international participants, from Susan Sontag and Doris Lessing to György Konrád and Adam Michnik. The first panel alone featured Ralph Ellison, Joseph Brodsky, and Saul Bellow as speakers. Still, the opening session of the conference was sparsely attended, its panelists ill prepared. As the proceedings began, no one could locate Brodsky, so the Polish American poet and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz was called up from the audience as a substitute. Following opening remarks by Lynne Cheney, the conservative culture warrior and chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the first participant to speak was Bellow.24 Bellow’s talk began inauspiciously: “In the middle of the night, I woke my wife, and she kindly agreed to take some notes.” He slowly built up to his point. After paying tribute to persecuted Soviet bloc writers and intellectuals like Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Wat, Andrei Sinyavsky, Irina Ratushinskaya, and Natan Sharansky, Bellow turned his attention to Czechoslovakia’s most celebrated dissident writer, Václav Havel. A few years earlier, Bellow told his audience at Rutgers, he had been reading 256

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some of Havel’s prison letters. “I came across a reference to literature in the West that stopped me in my tracks.” In a letter sent to his wife, Olga, on April 10, 1982, Havel had reported, “I came across a good book: Herzog, by Saul Bellow.”25 Here is how Bellow summarized Havel’s letter at the Rutgers conference: He had read Herzog in prison, and in this letter, he spoke of the difference between words spoken or written in the East as compared with the West. In the East, you were arrested and imprisoned for voicing your opinions, while in the West, you could make as many revolutionary statements as you pleased, and no one would give a damn or pay the slightest attention to you. In the East, it was a dictatorship and its jails, its gulags that waited for you if you spoke the truth as you saw it. In the West, what you said simply didn’t. There were no penalties, and therefore, there was no seriousness. Your freedom, therefore, was something of a joke. On its surface, Bellow’s paraphrase of Havel is an elaboration on Roth’s earlier comparison between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War era. But Bellow’s extended statement lacks the selfreflexive irony of Roth’s original formulation. From the standpoint of 1992, Bellow had also come to a new and different conclusion: “As the Stalinist world collapses, the problems of the West become the problems of the East.”26 However, Bellow’s reading of Havel’s letter might reveal more about an American novelist’s own cultural anxieties at this historical moment than it does about Havel’s interpretation of Herzog. Bellow’s novel was first published in Czech translation in 1968, amid the unfolding drama of the Prague Spring. The preface to the Czech edition of Herzog was written by Josef Škvorecký, who would emigrate a year later in the aftermath of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. According to Škvorecký’s reading, Herzog was a novel about a “humanitarian oriented intellectual” in an “affluent society” who is undergoing a philosophical crisis, but the book’s theme was really not so different from that of Ludvík Vaculík’s celebrated 1966 novel The Axe (Sekyra). Bellow’s interests were not in political or 257

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economic systems, at least in Cold War terms, he argues, so much as in older philosophical and aesthetic questions. For Škvorecký, Herzog “achieves the best possible contact between literature and reality—the contact of a mirror, in which contemporary man recognizes his own face,” even if that face is ultimately revealed to be an illusion.27 Fourteen years later, Havel offered a related interpretation of Herzog in a letter to his wife, Olga, from prison. As Kieran Williams has argued, taken together, Havel’s “Letters to Olga” can be read as a kind of epistolary novel, the same literary form Bellow plays with in Herzog.28 Many of Havel’s letters intermix mundane reports on daily prison life with passages of unsparing philosophical introspection. The Herzog letter was written on the day before Easter 1982. Havel begins by reporting that he has just broken a two-day fast, leaving him “grumpy, irritable and susceptible to melancholy.” To make matters worse, he had just discovered that all his cigarettes had been stolen. Did Havel see himself reflected in Bellow’s unraveling protagonist Moses Herzog? In his letter to Olga, Havel describes Bellow’s novel as being “about the crisis of intellectuality in conditions of complete intellectual freedom.” Havel observes that Herzog can read and think and write whatever he likes without fear of punishment, “but his thoughts are constantly in a whirl until at last it drives him batty.” Rather than spurring a political comparison between “East” and “West,” however, Havel was reflecting on a shared paradox of intellectual responsibility. The theme of Herzog fit precisely into Havel’s recent philosophical meditations, many of which were spurred on by letters he was receiving from his brother Ivan.29 Around the same time, Ivan had been sending Václav complex discussions of Martin Heidegger (also, by the way, one of Moses Herzog’s hobbyhorses).30 Havel had recently written to Olga about the challenge of reconciling words and deeds, and Bellow’s novel allowed him to expand on this theme: “Words that are not backed up by life lose their weight, which means that words can be silenced in two ways: either you ascribe such weight to them that no one dares utter them aloud, or you take away any weight they might have, and they turn into air.”31 Havel worried that in either case the final effect would be silence. The ending of Herzog only seemed to confirm his mounting pessimism. When Herzog’s graphomania finally subsides, the novel quietly concludes: “Nothing. Not a single word.”32 Of course, Havel’s own story did not end in silence. Letters to Olga was translated and published in English in 1988, a year before Havel became 258

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the global symbol of the Velvet Revolution and was elected as Czechoslovakia’s first postcommunist president. In February 1990, President Havel returned to the United States on a kind of victory tour. He became the first head of state from the former Eastern bloc to visit the White House and address a joint session of Congress, in which he pressed his audience to support the Soviet Union in its time of transition. He also gently pushed back against the idea that the world had entered a unipolar moment: “The main thing is, it seems to me, that these revolutionary changes will enable us to escape from the rather antiquated straitjacket of this bipolar view of the world and to enter at last into an era of multipolarity, that is, into an era in which all of us, large and small, former slaves and former masters, will be able to create what your great President Lincoln called ‘the family of man.’” Havel was making a philosophical as well as a geopolitical argument. History had not come to an end in 1989; instead, as he pointed out, “History has accelerated.” Echoing his earlier reading of Herzog, Havel concluded, “I believe that once again it will be the human mind that will notice this acceleration, give it a name and transform those words into deeds.” The future secretary of state (and Prague-born) Madeleine Albright would later recall that members of Congress were “perplexed” by Havel’s speech: “Czechoslovakia had just regained its freedom, and the legislators were anticipating a howl of Cold War triumph.”33 Nonetheless, Havel received seventeen standing ovations. As part of his trip, Havel also returned to New York City for the first time since the spring of 1968, when he had attended the premiere of his play The Memorandum at the Public Theater. The visit was a whirlwind: after a night of carousing with his old friend director Miloš Forman, he was honored in the morning at the offices of Human Rights Watch (renamed from Helsinki Watch in 1988), where a group of exiled Tiananmen Square activists presented Havel with their Chinese translation of “The Power of the Powerless.”34 That evening, Havel was rushed from a dinner hosted by the New York Review of Books to a large event at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. Lewis H. Lapham covered the latter occasion for Harper’s Magazine, and his biting first-person account is a classic of the genre: On a rainy Thursday night in late February, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in northern Manhattan, a choir of celebrities staged the political equivalent of the Academy Awards 259

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FIGURE E.1.  Václav Havel’s return to New York: with Saul Bellow, Olga Havlová, Henry

Kissinger, Paul Simon, Miloš Forman, and Harry Belafonte, at “An American Tribute to Václav Havel and a Celebration of Democracy in Czechoslovakia,” Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City, February 22, 1990. Courtesy of Tomki Nemec.

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ceremony in honor of the president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, and on the way uptown I wondered if I could expect to see Ivana Trump and the Solid Gold dancers.35 The evening featured a greeting from Arthur Miller, a reading of Havel’s prison letters by Susan Sarandon, and a speech by Henry Kissinger. “Instead of talking about Havel,” Lapham observed, during Kissinger’s “turgid and pompous” speech, the former secretary of state and accused war criminal “talked about himself.” Another speaker was Bellow, who spoke admiringly about Havel reading Herzog in prison. After the event, Bellow approached Havel with a congratulatory gift: an autographed copy of Herzog in its original English. As Lapham put it, “The evening collapsed in on itself like a dead star.”36 Had Havel’s message been overshadowed yet again, this time by a triumphant Western narcissism? In front of Congress, Havel had pointed out that the United States had “thousands of problems of all kinds, as all countries do,” including his own after decades of existence under a “totalitarian system.” Havel further argued that a “global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness” would be required before the world would be ready to confront mounting social and ecological catastrophes. His own country’s recent historical experience offered both hope and a cautionary tale. This had already been a major theme of Havel’s most famous 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless.” In a line too quickly forgotten after the essay was translated into English in the mid-1980s, Havel had asked, “Do we not in fact stand . . . as a kind of warning to the West, revealing to it its own latent tendencies?”37 City Lights at the Lucerna Palace

One of Václav Havel’s final diplomatic acts as president of the Czech Republic was to express support for a US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. In his unorthodox political memoir To the Castle and Back (first published in Czech as Prosím stručně in 2006), Havel attempted to explain his own ambivalence about this decision. Havel believed that “defending human beings is a higher responsibility than respecting the inviolability of the state.” But he also knew, on the basis of the experience of Czechs and Slovaks during the twentieth century, that this principle of “humanitarian” 261

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intervention could cut both ways. As he writes, “Our sovereignty was violated twice in the twentieth century—once by Hitler and once by Brezhnev—precisely in the name of an alleged defense of people or human values.”38 But neither the experience of 1939 nor that of 1968 offered him any clear lesson for navigating the post-9/11 world. While he was in DC in 2006–2007, Havel also completed his last play, Leaving (Odcházení), about the final days in office of a politician named Vilém Rieger.39 The play was first performed in 2008, just three years before Havel’s death at his beloved country home in Hrádeček. While many of the most celebrated Czech writers during the Cold War era, like Milan Kundera or Josef Škvorecký, have fallen out of fashion in the United States, Havel’s philosophy of dissent has enjoyed a posthumous renaissance in recent years. Since 2016, in particular, public intellectuals from Timothy Snyder and Masha Gessen to Rebecca Solnit and Pankaj Mishra have turned to Havel’s writing, particularly “The Power of the Powerless,” as a source of hope in dark times and as a possible model for resisting right-wing authoritarianism both in the United States and abroad.40 Mishra has also seized on Roth’s famous statement about working in a US literary culture where “everything goes and nothing matters,” arguing that “Roth’s unease about his comfortable isolation, frequently expressed through reflexive irony, rarely flowed into an empathetic understanding of those intractably embodying the will to change at home.”41 Since 2016, however, American writers and intellectuals appear much more eager to apply the lessons of Cold War dissidence on the home front. This renewed American interest in Havel also cuts both ways. Heterodox conservative intellectuals from Andrew Sullivan to Rod Dreher, the latter a “postliberal” apologist for Orbanism in Central Europe, have also claimed Havel’s ideal of “living in the truth” as an antidote to the “soft totalitarianism” of politically correct “wokeness” they claim is sweeping across the Western world.42 Gessen in particular has pushed back against this dubious exercise in false equivalence. “To compare the changing of the ideological tide in the United States to totalitarian ideology is to fail to take account of the power differential,” Gessen argues. “Totalitarian ideology had the power of the state behind it. The enforcers of totalitarian ideology—be they Central Committee members, Writers’ Union leaders, or the distributors of store-window signs—had the power of state institu262

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tions behind them.”43 Of course, as we’ve seen, conservative appropriations of dissident writing are nothing new. Although Saul Bellow had predicted that the “problems of the West” would soon become the “problems of the East” at Rutgers in 1992, many of the Partisan Review conference’s organizers were predicting nearly the opposite. Even in claiming victory in the Cold War, these intellectuals worried that the spirit (if not the letter) of Soviet-style censorship was now threatening the United States and Western Europe. But the bogeyman they had in mind was not any official form of governmentsponsored cultural regulation; it was a general atmosphere of political correctness and self-censorship. In her opening remarks at the conference, National Endowment for the Humanities chair Lynne Cheney acknowledged that political correctness was not nearly the same as the state repression recently faced by Eastern bloc intellectuals. “All the same, it is an orthodoxy, a set of ideas that inhibit free inquiry,” she argued. “And I think we should look to the experience of our friends in Eastern and Central Europe.”44 As it happens, the final word at the Partisan Review conference was given to Ivan Klíma. The subject of the closing panel at Rutgers was “The Humanities and Culture Heroes.” Klíma began his remarks by explaining that his luggage had been stolen on the way to Newark Airport. He would therefore have to reconstruct his planned comments from memory. In the early years of Charter 77, he explained, the “dissident” opposition had been composed largely of members of what he called “the humanist intelligentsia, which was persecuted more than any other group.” According to Klíma, the “principle advantage of the opposition, at least in its first key moments,” had been “the moral integrity and the trust it engendered in the people.” But the situation was already changing. “Everyone can express his opinion,” he observed. Just a few years after the Velvet Revolution, the relative handful of intellectuals who had risen to power were now perceived, however unfairly, by much of the population as another cadre of elites, a replacement nomenklatura disconnected from the democratic will of the people. Klíma outlined several reasons for this growing atmosphere of mistrust, including the conversion of many former members of the socalled “communist mafia” to the gospel of capitalism. In an era of postsocialist disillusionment, Havel himself remained a notable exception, a last culture hero. But it was only a matter of time until a new generation of 263

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politicians would rise to power—most consequentially, Havel’s rival, the neoliberal economist Václav Klaus.45 The dissenting intellectuals who came to power after the Velvet Revolution also faced another dilemma in the 1990s: the legacy of communistera collaboration. According to Klíma, “it could be assumed” that nearly every faction of the former opposition in Czechoslovakia had been “infiltrated by the omnipresent agents of the secret police.” And those who had crossed the blurry line between cultural dissidence and state collaboration during the communist era did not simply disappear after 1989. Indeed, former collaborators caused many headaches for Havel’s new government in the early nineties. “When exposed,” Klíma explained, “they refused to resign, so contributing to the fact that the representatives of the opposition were beginning to lose their greatest quality, their moral purity.”46 What if the Gray Zone had outlasted the Velvet Revolution? While writing the final chapter of this book on the international campaign to save the Jazz Section and their charismatic leader Karel Srp, I noticed a press release posted on a Czech-language website maintained by former members of the organization. Under the title “Srp and the 2017 Ethics Commission” (Srp a Etická komise 2017), I found the following announcement: After a quarter century of our tolerance and awareness of the moral decline of Karel Srp, chairman of the original Jazz Section of the Czechoslovak Union of Musicians (1971–1987), given his proven and active collaboration with the communistera state security, and aware of how this entire time he has been attacking many of his former colleagues while using the name of the Jazz Section only to further his own political ambitions, we distance ourselves from his preliminary appointment by President Zeman to the Czech Republic’s Ethics Commission for Recognition of Participants in the Resistance against Communism.47 I was already aware that Srp had been a registered agent of the StB between 1978 and 1982. The security services had even given him the code name Hudebník (the Musician). Given the unreliability of communist-era secret police documents, it remained unclear to me whether this was 264

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deliberate misinformation planted by the StB to incriminate or blackmail Srp or whether he was in fact a collaborator. Perhaps the answer was more ambiguous: there was some evidence that Srp was feeding the security services useless information to protect his friends.48 But old wounds were reopened in 2017 when President Miloš Zeman appointed Srp to a new “Ethics Commission” charged with honoring Czech citizens for their heroic “resistance against communism.” After former members of the Jazz Section renounced Srp, Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka rejected Srp’s appointment. Zeman responded with yet another provocation, nominating Srp to the board of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, or ÚSTR) in Prague. Following an outcry from the ÚSTR, led by the historian Petr Blažek, the Czech Senate also rejected this nomination. Subsequent lawsuits and court rulings have demonstrated the full extent of Srp’s collaboration with the StB, which Srp continues to deny. This book began for me on the day when Srp handed me a collection of secret police documents relating to Allen Ginsberg’s expulsion from Prague. In 1998, thirty years after the Prague Spring, the remnants of the Czech Jazz Section had helped organize a series of events in Prague, which they called the Beat Generation Fest. In the main arcade of the famous Lucerna Palace, an art nouveau complex built by Havel’s grandfather, they set up a special exhibition called On the (Beat) Road. The Lucerna Palace was a fitting location: the main concert hall had hosted Czechoslovakia’s first International Jazz Festival in 1964, and Louis Armstrong had recorded a live album in the same space a year later. As part of the Beat exhibition, Srp and his friends also prepared a special catalog “mapping only a few days in the year 1965” surrounding Allen Ginsberg’s election as King of May. As Srp writes in the preface, “We released the catalogue in order to make it harder for us to forget.”49 The Beat festival’s catalog made many of the secret police files associated with Ginsberg’s expulsion public in Czechoslovakia for the first time. These were the same documents Srp would hand to me when we met in his office a few years later. The guest of honor at the Beat Generation Fest was the septuagenarian poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who traveled all the way from San Francisco to visit the capital of Bohemia and take part in the festivities. Nearly forty years earlier, a photograph of Ferlinghetti standing in front of his famous City Lights Bookstore had been printed alongside Igor 265

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FIGURE E.2.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti, photographed by Harry Redl, in front of a “Banned

Books” display at his City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco in 1957. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems had just been cleared of obscenity charges.

Hájek’s landmark “American Bohemia” article in Světová literatura. In the 1958 image, Ferlinghetti has just placed a copy of Howl, recently cleared of obscenity charges, back into the window display of City Lights under a sign that reads “Banned Books.” Like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti had been beloved by a small subculture of readers inside Czechoslovakia ever since Jan Zábrana’s translation of Ferlinghetti’s poem “A Coney Island of the Mind” appeared in Světová literatura during the Thaw. The title of Ferlinghetti’s poem has an even more beautiful ring to it in Czech: Lunapark mysli. To mark the occasion of Ferlinghetti’s first visit to Prague in 1998, the Beat festival’s organizers arranged a marathon reading of his poetry.50 These “nonstop” readings would become an annual tradition: the next year they would read from the works of the Soviet dissident writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, including this famous quotation from The Gulag Archipelago: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.” Less frequently quoted are Solzhenitsyn’s next two sentences: “This line shifts,” he writes. 266

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“Inside us, it oscillates with the years.” The following year it would be Josef Škvorecký’s turn for a marathon rereading. For the Beat festival in 1998, the remnants of the Jazz Section also went as far as to construct a model replica of City Lights, scaled down to fit inside the Great Hall of the Lucerna Palace. This image returned to me again and again as I finished writing this book. The Cold War is now long over. So too is the brief interregnum following the Velvet Revolution. And yet this history continues to live inside our own moment. Political discourses shaped through the circulation of literature across the Iron Curtain are still with us today—from our debates over the limits of free expression and human rights to the ongoing struggle to reconcile liberalism and socialism. Many of us still seek to divide the world between clear moral alternatives: between freedom and authoritarianism, between heroes and cowards, between good and evil. Works of literature and art are still being created that challenge these binaries, bridging the possibilities that compete within each of us. It may be true that everything goes. But it is too soon to predict what forms of dissent will continue to matter.

267

A B B RE V I AT I ON S

ABS

Archiv bezpečnostních složek (Archive of the Czechoslovak Security Services), Prague, Czech Republic

AGP

Allen Ginsberg Papers, M0733, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA

FOMP

F. O. Matthiessen Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT

JSPF

Josef Škvorecký Papers, Fisher Library Collection, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

JSPH

Josef Škvorecký Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

JUP

John Updike Papers, 1940–2009 (MS Am 1793), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

PRP

Philip Roth Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC

269

N OT E S

Prologue: Ginsberg’s File

1. Allen Ginsberg, Planet News, 1961–1967 (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968), 90. 2. Václav Havel, preface to Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958– 1996, by Allen Ginsberg, ed. David Carter (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), ix. 3. Allen Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958–1996, ed. David Carter (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 533; Lou Reed, “To Do the Right Thing,” Musician, October 1, 1990. Introduction: A Novel Fusion

1. Vera Blackwell’s first English translation of The Memorandum from 1967 is included in Václav Havel, The Garden Party: And Other Plays (New York: Grove, 1994). 2. For more on Havel’s relationship with Papp, see Carol Rocamora, Acts of Courage: Vaclav Havel’s Life in the Theater (Hanover: Smith and Kraus, 2005), 90. 3. Although many official changes to state censorship laws did not go into effect until June 1968, in practice many censorship policies were lifted by late March. 4. In his explosive essay, Havel—who unlike many other prominent writers and intellectuals had never joined the Communist Party—argued for the creation of a true political opposition party outside of the Communistdominated National Front system. Václav Havel, “Na téma opozice,” Literární listy, April 4, 1968; for an English translation, see Robert Alison Remington, Winter in Prague: Documents on Czechoslovak Communism in Crisis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 64–71. 5. Antonín J. Liehm, The Politics of Culture, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Grove, 1973), 377.

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6. A day after the essay appeared, the Central Committee of the Communist Party finally ratified Dubček’s reformist Action Program, a set of policies and guidelines, which had been in development since January. Even if the government was struggling to keep pace with public demands, the Prague Spring had begun in earnest. 7. Stephen Klaidman, “Czech Writer, Here, Sees Opportunity for Liberals,” New York Times, May 5, 1968. 8. According to Barnes, Havel’s play was “not irrelevant” to our own “paternalistic corporation-structured society.” Clive Barnes, “Drama: Public Theater Presents ‘Memorandum,’” New York Times, May 6, 1968. 9. For more on Havel’s time in New York, see Rocamora, Acts of Courage, 88–93; Kieran Williams, Václav Havel (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 92–94; Michael Zantovsky, Havel: A Life (New York: Grove, 2014), 109–111; David Gilbreath Barton, Havel: Unfinished Revolution (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 60–63. Havel’s biographers disagree on several details, so I have tried to focus on information about Havel’s trip that I was able to corroborate. 10. Kieran Williams, “Civil Resistance in Czechoslovakia: From Soviet Invasion to ‘Velvet Revolution,’ 1968–1989,” in Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, ed. Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 117. 11. Václav Havel, To the Castle and Back, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 2007), 7. 12. Michelle Woods, “Václav Havel and the Expedient Politics of Translation,” New Theatre Quarterly 26, no. 1 (February 2010): 3–15. 13. Arthur Miller, “The Sin of Power,” Index on Censorship 7, no. 3 (May– June 1978): 175. 14. Harilaos Stecopolous was kind enough to let me read a draft of his chapter “Republic of Letters, Cockpit of Controversy: Arthur Miller, PEN International, and Literary Détente,” part of Telling America’s Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 15. Miller’s play was translated into Czech more than once. Zkouška ohněm was the Czech title given to the translation by Aloys Skoumal, published by SNKLU in 1962. The 1969 production, of the same title, is referenced in Tim West, “Destiny as Alibi: Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and the ‘Czech Question’ after 1968,” Slavonic and East European Review 87, no. 3 (2009): 422. 16. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove, 2013), 570. 17. “VONS” is an acronym for the organization’s Czech-language name: Výbor na obranu nespravedlivě stíhaných. 18. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” trans. Paul Wilson, Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture 2 (1983): 3–22; Wilson’s full translation of the essay was first published in Václav Havel et al., The Power of 272

NOTES TO PAGES 10–14

the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1985). 19. Miller’s monologue had first been performed at the Festival D’Avignon the previous summer, while Havel was still in prison. 20. Arthur Miller, “I Think about You a Great Deal,” Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture 2 (1983): 23–24. 21. Miller, Timebends, 571. 22. Miller, Timebends, 570. Elsewhere, Miller suggests that this Soviet occupation was taking place in a fundamentally “western cultural environment,” an old idea that Milan Kundera would help revive in the 1980s. Miller, “Sin of Power,” 174. 23. For Kundera, Central European societies like Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary were “culturally in the West and politically in the East.” Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984. 24. Many historical atlases repeat the unverified claim that Prague grew to become the third-largest city in Europe, after Constantinople and Rome, during this period. See, for example, Dennis P. Hupchick and Harold E. Cox, eds., The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of Eastern Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2001), map 21. 25. See Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 5–17. 26. Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 17. 27. On Prague’s modern transformations, see Chad Bryant, Prague: Belonging in the Modern City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). 28. For more on Wilson’s relationship to Masaryk, see Larry Wolff, Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021); on broader questions of “Eastern Europe” in the Western cultural imaginary, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 29. Just days before signing away the Sudeten territory to Hitler, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain famously referred to the crisis at the German-Bohemian border as “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” This would soon change. Chamberlain is quoted in P. E. Caquet’s history of the Munich crisis from the Czechoslovak perspective, The Bell of Treason: The 1938 Munich Agreement in Czechoslovakia (New York: Other Press, 2019), 173. 30. Arthur Miller, The Archbishop’s Ceiling / The American Clock: Two Plays (New York: Grove, 1989), viii. 273

NOTES TO PAGES 15–16

31. First performed in Washington, DC, in 1977, then revived in London in 1986, the play was later published by Grove Press in 1989 alongside Miller’s American Clock. 32. Miller, American Clock, ix. 33. This was a decidedly post-Watergate statement from Miller, but both wiretapping and the surveillance of writers—particularly Black writers—has a much longer history in the United States. See Brian Hochman, The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022); as well as William J. Maxwell, F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). It is worth noting that Maxwell draws on the methodologies of Eastern bloc surveillance studies. For instance, see Cristina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 34. Miller, “Conditions of Freedom,” in Archbishop’s Ceiling, viii. 35. Miller, Timebends, 571. 36. For Paul Wilson’s revised translation, published as part of a special issue on “The Power of the Powerless Today,” see Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” East European Politics and Societies 32, no. 2 (May 1, 2018): 380. 37. Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 2–3. 38. Peter Bugge, “A Western Invention? The Discovery of Czech Dissidence in the 1970s,” Bohemia 59, no. 2 (2020): 273–291. 39. Barbara J. Falk also explores the “definitions and origins” of the term “dissent” in Barbara J. Falk, “The History, Paradoxes, and Utility of Dissent: From State to Global Action,” in Dissent! Refracted: Histories, Aesthetics, and Cultures of Dissent (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 24. Falk has written extensively on the history of intellectual dissidence in East-Central Europe. See Barbara J. Falk, “Resistance and Dissent in Central and Eastern Europe: An Emerging Historiography,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 2 (May 1, 2011): 318–360; Barbara J. Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003). 40. Kacper Szulecki, Dissidents in Communist Central Europe: Human Rights and the Emergence of New Transnational Actors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 41. As Benjamin Nathans points out, “It is one of the paradoxes of dissidents under Soviet-style regimes that many of those to whom the label was applied—first as a badge of honor by Western journalists, then by the regimes themselves, sensing an opportunity to stigmatize nonconformists by branding them with a foreign word—disliked the term and at the same time found it 274

NOTES TO PAGES 17–18

virtually inescapable.” Benjamin Nathans, “Talking Fish: On Soviet Dissident Memoirs,” Journal of Modern History 87, no. 3 (2015): 581. There is a further irony that it was a phenomenon called “dissidence,” with its connotations of heroic individualism and forced isolation, that helped Czech writers like Havel forge new connections and lasting solidarities with their literary counterparts abroad. 42. Notably, the term “dissident” never appears at all in The Archbishop’s Ceiling. 43. “But at this point the analogy ends,” he quickly adds. Even in the face of official government lies about the Vietnam War, Miller believed that meaningful dissent had still been possible in the United States. “What one might call the unofficial underground reality,” he writes, “the version of morals and national interest held by those not in power, was ultimately expressed and able to prevail sufficiently to alter high policy.” Miller, “Sin of Power,” 176–178. 44. See György Konrád, Antipolitics: An Essay (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). For an excellent study of some cultural applications of the concept of “antipolitics,” see Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-totalitarian Rule 1956–1989 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017). 45. Timothy Garton Ash, “Does Central Europe Exist?,” New York Review of Books, October 9, 1986. 46. As the historian Mark Bradley has pointed out, Havel and other dissenting writers also helped bring a countercultural appeal to the Eastern bloc human rights movement. As Mark Bradley writes, “the palpable presence of a transnationally inflected underground countercultural element in Czech human rights politics” gave Havel, in particular, “a hipster quality in the West quite different from the more austere sensibilities of most Soviet dissidents.” Mark Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 174. 47. This remains the case. The theme of the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, held in Chicago, Illinois, was “Pedagogies of Dissent.” As the program guide announces, many panels at the conference “reflected a commitment to de-centering the U.S., by activating critical inquiry into the histories and practices of dissent in transnational and non-U.S. contexts.” 48. Italics in the original. See the updated preface in Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), xi–xl. The overreliance on the trope of “containment” in Cold War literary studies has not helped matters. As Morris Dickstein writes, “Based on a presumed ideological bent that can hardly be verified, such arguments depend on tenuous links between politics and culture that are sometimes suggestive but too 275

NOTES TO PAGES 18–19

often arbitrary or reductive.” Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2. For a review of this body of scholarship, see Robert Genter, “The Cold War Culture of Containment Revisited,” American Literary History 26, no. 3 (September 1, 2014): 616–626. For an examination of the trope of “containment” in New Historicist scholarship, see David Suchoff, “New Historicism and Containment: Toward a Post-Cold War Cultural Theory,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 48, no. 1 (1992): 137–161. 49. For a discussion of how Cold War–era US foreign policy elites came to imagine their geopolitical and ideological rivalry with the Soviet Union as, above all, “an East-West conflict, synthesizing and combining all the previous conflicts of East and West,” see Michael Kimmage, The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (New York: Basic Books, 2020), 10. Meanwhile, Louis Menand has explored how the exchange of art and ideas, both within and beyond the West, shaped Cold War–era conceptions of “the free world” in opposition to Soviet bloc “unfreedom.” See Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). 50. For an excellent and measured discussion of the “revisionist thesis” at the heart of cultural Cold War scholarship, see Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 2–11. For canonical works in this field, beginning with Christopher Lasch’s revelation of CIA involvement with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, see Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Knopf, 1969); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2001); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015). 51. See, for instance, Steven Belletto and Joseph Keith, eds., Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019). As Patrick Major and Rana Mitter pointed out in 2004, “Only very tentatively have some begun to tackle the view from the East, but still often through the lens of Western assumptions.” Consequently, they called for new work that, aided by the opening of archives across the former Eastern bloc, explores the “terra incognita of Eastern Europe and beyond.” Patrick Major and Rana Mitter, Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 5–6. For an important work that combines all the best impulses in the field, see Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 276

NOTES TO PAGES 19–20

52. According to Caute, many revisionist scholars present a unilateral Cold War with barely a trace of Russian, Polish, Czech, or East German actors. “It’s a Cold War which features Arthur Miller and Ralph Ellison but not Sartre and Camus,” he writes, “not Simonov and Havel, not Brecht, Romm, and Wajda.” Although Caute’s book does include discussions of both Miller and Havel, the two playwrights appear in separate chapters. David Caute, Dancer Defects, 614–615. 53. Friederike Kind-Kovács and Jessie Labov, eds., Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media during and after Socialism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 9. 54. Jessie Labov, Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture beyond the Nation (New York: Central European University Press, 2019). 55. Friederike Kind-Kovács, Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (New York: Central European University Press, 2014). 56. See Ralph Young, Dissent: The History of an American Idea (New York: NYU Press, 2017). On the other hand, cultural dissent is not a freefloating, transhistorical phenomenon; it is a set of discourses, traditions, and practices grounded in the material circulation of cultural texts. See Tariq Ali, The Verso Book of Dissent: Revolutionary Words from Three Millennia of Rebellion and Resistance, ed. Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim (London: Verso, 2016). 57. The latest research on East-Central European cultures of dissent under communism now emphasizes “cultural transfers between dissident milieus of different socialist countries, as well as across the Iron Curtain.” See Maciej Maryl et al., “New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent: Joint Review Report” (research report, Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, May 2019), 17, https://hal .archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02144983; Robert Brier, ed., Entangled Protest: Transnational Approaches to the History of Dissent in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2013). On the “America-trap” see Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, xxii. 58. Here again I am drawing on Bercovitch, who points to Franz Kafka’s story “Investigation of a Dog” as a model of “cross-cultural criticism.” As he explains, “Its terms are reciprocity, as against dichotomy: not canine or human, but the contingencies of both, as revealed (in degree) through the re-cognition of limitation.” Sacvan Bercovitch, Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 5. 59. Justin Quinn, Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 60. Even in the Czech-language context there is not perfect agreement about the relationship between “dissidence” (disidentství ) and related terms 277

NOTES TO PAGES 20–23

like “alternative culture” (alternativní kultura) or “underground literature” (podzemní literatura). See, in particular, the work of Martin Machovec, much of which has now been translated into English: Martin Machovec, Writing Underground: Reflections on Samizdat Literature in Totalitarian Czechoslovakia (Prague: Karolinum, 2020); Martin Machovec, “The Types and Functions of Samizdat Publications in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1989,” Poetics Today 30, no. 1 (2009): 1–26; Machovec, ed., Views from the Inside: Czech Underground Literature and Culture 1948–1989; Manifestoes, Testimonies, Documents (Prague: Katedra české literatury a literární vědy, Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Filozofická fakulta, 2006). For a history of “alternative culture” in Czechoslovakia, see Josef Alan, ed., Alternativní kultura: Příběh české společnosti 1945–1989 (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2001). 61. Havel actually uses the former term (disidentství ) throughout the original Czech-language version of “Power of the Powerless,” although Paul Wilson translates Havel’s memorable opening line as “A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’” For Wilson’s most recent translation, see Havel, “Power of the Powerless,” East European Politics and Societies, 355. 62. Here I am drawing on the work of Pascale Casanova, whose model emphasizes the importance of “the great, often polyglot, cosmopolitan figures of the world of letters,” who “act in effect as foreign exchange brokers, responsible for exporting from one territory to another texts whose literary value they determine by virtue of this very activity.” Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 21. 63. As Františka Zezuláková Schormová has pointed out, “While the Czechs saw a parallel between their own fate and that of African Americans, they turned a blind eye to the concept of race and the more complex workings of racism, including its dehumanizing power.” Františka Zezuláková Schormová, “African American Poets Abroad: Black and Red Allegiances in Early Cold War Czechoslovakia” (PhD diss., Charles University, 2020), 26. 64. Jan Matonoha, “Dispositives of Silence: Gender, Feminism and Czech Literature between 1948 and 1989,” in The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism (London: Routledge, 2014). 65. Philip Roth, “The Story behind ‘The Plot against America,’” New York Times, September 19, 2004. 66. See Jiřina Šmejkalová, “Censoring Canons: Transitions and Prospects of Literary Institutions in Czechoslovakia,” in The Administration of the Aesthetic: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere, ed. Richard Burt (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1994), 195–215; Šmejkalová, Cold War Books in the “Other” Europe and What Came After (Boston: Brill, 2011); Roar Lishaugen and Jiřina Šmejkalová, “Reading East of the Berlin Wall,” PMLA 134, no. 1 (January 2019): 178–187. 278

NOTES TO PAGES 23–29

67. Italics are mine. A revised edition of the translation was completed in 1964 by Rudolf Pellar a Luba Pellarová, who also translated Roth and Updike during these years. For more on the Czech translation history of Albee’s play, see Pavla Stejskalová, “České překlady hry Kdo se bojí Virginie Woolfové? od Edwarda Albeeho” (master’s thesis, Charles University, 2017). 68. Antonin J. Liehm, “Franz Kafka in Eastern Europe,” Telos 1975, no. 23 (March 20, 1975): 54. 69. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Die Abrüstung Der Kultur: Rede Auf Dem Weltfriedenskongreß in Moskau,” Sinn und Form 14, no. 4 (1962): 811–812 (my translation). Sartre wasn’t entirely correct: even before the Czech edition of The Trial in 1958, Polish-language editions of Kafka’s works had been appearing since 1957. 70. Liehm, Politics of Culture, 379. 1. The Man Who Disappeared: Franz Kafka between Prague and New York

1. For a bibliographic portrait of Kafka’s early reception in the United States, see Klaus W. Jonas, “Franz Kafka: An American Bibliography,” Bulletin of Bibliography 20 (April 1953). For the definitive, scholarly bibliography of Kafka, see Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr and Julius M. Herz, Franz Kafka: Internationale Bibliographie Der Primär- Und Sekundärliteratur (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2000). 2. Greif also refers to Kafka as “one of the single most important hidden influences on American fiction,” a position that is largely obscured by literary histories constructed in strictly national terms. Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 134. 3. See the “Publisher’s Note” in Franz Kafka, Amerika: The Missing Person, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 2011), xi. 4. Edmund Wilson, “A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka,” New Yorker, July 26, 1947, 58. 5. Wilson, “Dissenting Opinion,” 58. 6. In 1946, Wilson even stopped paying his income tax. See Edmund Wilson, The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963). 7. Wilson, “Dissenting Opinion,” 62. 8. Wilson, “Dissenting Opinion,” 58. 9. See “The Tragic Sense of Life,” Time, April 28, 1947, 104, 106. Michael Kimmage attributes this essay to Whitaker Chambers. See Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 145–146. 279

NOTES TO PAGES 29–34

10. Wilson, “Dissenting Opinion,” 58. 11. James Burnham, “Observations on Kafka,” Partisan Review 14, no. 2 (April 1947): 186–195. 12. As Louis Menand points out, Burnham “went from revolutionary Marxism and Trotskyism to right-wing anticommunism without passing through anything resembling liberalism.” Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 43. See also Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 165; Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 53. 13. Louis Menand, foreword to To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, by Edmund Wilson (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), xix. 14. Wilson, “Dissenting Opinion,” 63. 15. Wilson, “Dissenting Opinion,” 63–64. 16. Wilson, “Dissenting Opinion,” 58. 17. Edmund Wilson, “Stephen Spender and Georg Grosz on Germany,” New Yorker, January 4, 1947. 18. At one point in the discussion, Day Lewis describes a recent novel by Edward Upward as being “considerably more Kafka-esque” than a book by his compatriot Rex Warner. This instance appears to be the first time the word appeared in print, and it’s certainly possible that Wilson first encountered the word in the New Masses. Cecil Day Lewis, “A Letter from London,” New Masses, June 7, 1938, 21. 19. Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 148. 20. Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923 (New York: Schocken, 1988), 37. 21. Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 79. 22. Der Verschollene is alternatively translated as “The missing person,” as in Mark Harmon’s recent translation of Kafka’s novel. Stanley Corngold has sometimes opted for the translation “The man who sank out of sight.” 23. Franz Kafka and Milena Jenseká, “Topič,” Kmen, April 22, 1920. The original German-language version of “Der Heizer” had been released as a standalone volume in 1913. 24. Even the story’s Czech title helped connect Kafka’s writing to a burgeoning national literary culture in newly independent Czechoslovakia, as Topič was the name of a prominent publishing house in Prague at the time. Mark Christian Thompson, Kafka’s Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 42. 25. Anne Jamison, Kafka’s Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 50–51. 280

NOTES TO PAGES 34–35

26. Until very recently, very little scholarship on Kafka’s reception in Czechoslovakia was available in English. By far the leading expert on this subject is Josef Čermák, who has published numerous articles on Kafka in Czech since the 1960s. None of his Kafka work has yet been translated into English, but his Czech-language essays have now usefully been collected in one volume. See Josef Čermák, “I do daleka ceda cesta . . .”: Vybrané studie z literární komparatistiky a moderní německé literatury (Prague: Filozofická fakulta UK, 2017). Another leading Czech scholar on Kafka, Marek Nekula, has just published a volume collecting many of his essays in English. See Marek Nekula, Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts (Prague: Karolinum, 2015). The other major studies on Kafka’s relationship to Czech literary culture are Jamison, Kafka’s Other Prague; and Veronika Tuckerova, “Reading Kafka in Prague: The Reception of Franz Kafka between the East and the West during the Cold War” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012). 27. Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 207–208. 28. Kafka, Amerika (2011), 34. 29. As Annie Jamison points out, because of the story’s appearance in a left-wing publication, “we are primed to see it as a pro-worker allegory of the unhappy manual laborer who unsuccessfully takes his grievances to the captain of the ship and whose case is unsuccessful in part, the young bourgeois Karl Rossmann believes, because he is lacking the necessary rhetorical skills.” Jamison, Kafka’s Other Prague, 56. 30. For a useful survey of these political readings, see Bill Dodd, “The Case for a Political Reading,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, ed. Julian Preece (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 131–149. 31. Holitscher’s book receives by far the most attention from scholars like Michael Löwy, but Soukup’s travelogue might have had an even stronger influence on how Kafka imagined the opening chapter of his American novel. Kafka is known to have attended a presentation by Soukup after his return from the United States in which Soukup displayed images from his journey, including a cross section of a Hamburg-Amerika ocean liner. In the illustration, the ship is divided into nine levels according to class and function, with the ship’s stokers laboring on the lowest levels. To be sure, both these travelogues offer tantalizing clues, but the consensus among most Kafka experts is that Kafka was never an active socialist or anarchist whatever his sympathies. 32. Michael Löwy, Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer, trans. Inez Hedges (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). 33. Milena Jesenská, Křižovatky: výbor z díla, ed. Marie Jirásková (Prague: Torst, 2016). 34. Michelle Woods, Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 36. 35. Woods, Kafka Translated, 14. 281

NOTES TO PAGES 35–39

36. Nekula, Kafka and His Prague Contexts, 184–188. 37. Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, trans. Philip Boehm (New York: Schocken, 2015), 6. 38. Kafka, Letters to Milena, 119. 39. Woods has pointed out that, with all its “subterranean” language, Kafka’s letter to Jesenská can be read as a self-conscious pastiche of his own literary style. As Woods brilliantly points out, Kafka’s letter gets to “the heart of his stylistic aesthetic; namely his use of long, looping sentences and paragraphs to convey tone and meaning in his work, but he does so with humor, adding the parentheses to lengthen his thought as a kind of pastiche both of his work and his falling in love.” Woods, Kafka Translated, 19. 40. Kafka, Letters to Milena, 203. See also his letter on 64. 41. The Czech-language text of this obituary is quoted in Josef Čermák, “Recepce Franze Kafky v Čechach (1913–1963),” in Kafkova zpráva o světě: osudy a interpretace textů Franze Kafky, ed. Viola Fischerová et al. (Prague: Nakladatelství Franze Kafky, 2000), 20. 42. On Jesenská’s fate, see Woods, Kafka Translated, 13–43; Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 128. 43. According to Woods, when Jesenská’s former husband, Ernst Pollak, inquired about Kafka’s love letters in 1947, her close friend Staša Jílovská replied, “Czech circles are not very interested in Kafka, indeed almost no one knows him, and only The Castle is published.” Woods, Kafka Translated, 40. 44. Frederic Spotts, Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 120–122. During his long period of exile, Mann bounced around the capitals of Europe, and he also stopped off in Bohemia to be treated for an opiate addiction by Dr. Robert Klopstock, the same physician who had cared for Kafka near the end of his life. It was rumored that Dr. Klopstock had held Kafka in his arms as Kafka took his last pained breaths. Mann continued to write about Kafka during his short convalescence in Bohemia. 45. “Publisher’s Note” in Kafka, Amerika (2011), x. 46. “Publisher’s Note” in Kafka, Amerika (2011), x. 47. In 1934, Salman Schocken, a German Jewish department store magnate, had acquired the world publishing rights to Kafka after negotiating with his old friend Max Brod. Because Schocken Verlag specialized in books on “Jewish topics,” ostensibly aimed at a Jewish audience, at first they were allowed to continue operations under the Nazi regime. For a time, Kafka’s books were able to pass unnoticed into the hands of non-Jewish readers as well. See Anthony David, The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959 (New York: Henry Holt, 2004); Benjamin Balint, Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 140. 282

NOTES TO PAGES 39–44

48. Klaus Mann, The Turning Point: Thirty-Five Years in This Century, the Autobiography of Klaus Mann (New York: Markus Wiener, 1984), 349. For the original diary entry, see Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923, 224. 49. Jürgen Born, “Kafka in America: His Growing Reputation during the Forties,” in The Fortunes of German Writers in America: Studies in Literary Reception, ed. Wolfgang Elfe, James Hardin, and Gunther Holst (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 125–126. 50. See Klaus Mann, preface to Amerika, by Franz Kafka, trans. Edwin Muir (New York: New Directions, 1940), v. 51. Mann, preface to Kafka, Amerika (1940), ix. 52. Irving Howe describes Rahv as “bear-like.” Irving Howe, “Philip Rahv: A Memoir,” American Scholar 48, no. 4 (Autumn 1979): 487. 53. Harry Slochower, “Franz Kafka—Pre-Fascist Exile,” in A Franz Kafka Miscellany (New York: Twice a Year Press, 1946), 12. 54. Philip Rahv, “Frans Kafka’s Poor Richard,” Nation, October 26, 1940, 397. 55. Philip Rahv, “Frans Kafka: The Hero as Lonely Man,” Kenyon Review 1, no. 1 (Winter 1939): 68. 56. “Editorial Statement,” Partisan Review 3, no. 1 (December 1937). 57. Kacper Szulecki, Dissidents in Communist Central Europe: Human Rights and the Emergence of New Transnational Actors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 22. 58. Greg Barnhisel, “Perspectives USA and the Cultural Cold War: Modernism in Service of the State,” Modernism/Modernity 14, no. 4 (2007): 733. Barnhisel elaborates on Partisan Review’s image of “an alienated rebel, heir to the romantic tradition of the solitary artist doomed to be misunderstood and rejected by a philistine society.” 59. David A. Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 87. 60. Philip Rahv, “Trials of the Mind,” Partisan Review 4, no. 5 (April 1938): 3–11. 61. The latter is now more commonly translated as “Josefine the Singer.” 62. We should also note that just as the term “male” is missing from Fiedler’s sociological catalog, the figure of the modern artist celebrated by the New York intellectuals was almost always gendered as masculine. 63. Leslie Fiedler, contribution to “The State of American Writing, 1948: A Symposium,” Partisan Review 15, no. 8 (August 1948): 855–893. 64. Richard H. King, Arendt and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 12. 65. Philip Rahv, “Letter to Hannah Arendt, September 9, 1944,” Series: Correspondence File, Publishers, 1944–1975, n.d.—Partisan Review— 1944–1964, Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 283

NOTES TO PAGES 44–47

66. Arendt reads The Castle, in particular, as dramatizing “the relations of the stranger to the established patterns of village life.” She might have been suspicious of these “established patterns,” but she still believed that Kafka’s genius lay in his stubborn desire to “be a normal member of human society,” even when that society “ceased to be human.” Specifically, in regard to The Castle, Arendt claimed that “no better analogy could have been found to illustrate the entire dilemma of the modern would-be assimilationist Jew.” At the same time, Arendt thought that assimilation into a broken society was a dead end. According to her reading, K. ultimately discovers that “such things as human instinct, human rights, and plain normal life . . . had as little existence for the villagers as for the stranger.” And yet Arendt believed that Kafka’s genius lay in his stubborn desire to “be a normal member of human society,” even when that society had already “ceased to be human.” Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2 (April 1944): 116. 67. Lyndsey Stonebridge, Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and Refugees (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 30. 68. According to Arendt, “Kafka’s so-called prophecies were but a sober analysis of underlying structures which today have come into the open.” Hannah Arendt, “Franz Kafka: A Reevaluation,” Partisan Review 11, no. 4 (Fall 1944): 416. For a speculative discussion of how Kafka figured in Arendt’s thinking about totalitarianism, see Brian Danoff, “Arendt, Kafka, and the Nature of Totalitarianism,” Perspectives on Political Science 29, no. 4 (January 1, 2000): 211–218. 69. Arendt, “Franz Kafka: A Reevaluation,” 415. 70. Lyndsey Stonebridge, “Refugee Style: Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Rights,” Textual Practice 25, no. 1 (February 1, 2011): 71–85; Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 71. See David, Patron, part 3. 72. George Hutchinson, Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 33–34. 73. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 270. 74. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1978), 63. 75. “The ‘Liberal’ Fifth Column,” Partisan Review 13, no. 3 (Summer 1946): 293. “Having no totalitarian commitments anywhere in the world,” the editors declared, “we insist that no compromise be made with totalitarianism.” 76. Mann, preface to Kafka, Amerika (1940), iv. 77. Paul Goodman, Kafka’s Prayer (New York: Vanguard, 1947), xiii. 78. Goodman, Kafka’s Prayer, xiii. 79. Goodman, Kafka’s Prayer, xiii. 80. Wilson, “Dissenting Opinion,” 58. 284

NOTES TO PAGES 47–49

81. Irving Howe, “The New York Intellectuals,” in A Voice Still Heard: Selected Essays of Irving Howe, ed. Nina Howe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945–1970 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2002), 104–107; Kingsley Widmer, Paul Goodman (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 24. 82. Taylor Stoehr, Here Now Next: Paul Goodman and the Origins of Gestalt Therapy (San Francisco: Gestalt, 1997), 172. 83. Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 151; Wilford, New York Intellectuals, 40, 151. 84. A revised version of the chapter was finally published in Paul Goodman, The Structure of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). 85. An earlier translation by Eugen Jolas had attracted only limited attention in 1937 when it appeared in transition, a modernist little magazine that served as a bridge between increasingly isolated avant-garde literary communities in Europe and the United States. See Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 2, North America, 1894–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 719, 728. 86. Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis, trans. A. L. Lloyd (New York: Vanguard, 1946). 87. Vladimir E. Alexandrov, The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Routledge, 1995), 447. 88. Early in the book, the Goodman brothers claim that most people now found themselves living in communities that looked “exactly like the world of Kafka.” Like Arendt, Goodman thought that Kafka’s best writing pointed a way out of that world. See Percival Goodman and Paul Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 14. 89. Goodman, Kafka’s Prayer, xii. 90. Goodman, Kafka’s Prayer, 121. 91. Philip Rahv, “Idiosyncratic Genius,” Saturday Review, August 2, 1947. 92. Goodman, Kafka’s Prayer, 54. 93. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), s.v. “antinomian.” 94. David Bromwich, “The American Psychosis,” Raritan 21, no. 4 (Spring 2002): 33. 95. Howe believed that this sensibility had run amok in the student counterculture of the sixties, “which insists the ethic of control, like the ethic of work, should be regarded as spurious, a token of centuries-long heritage of repression.” Howe, “New York Intellectuals,” 113. 285

NOTES TO PAGES 49–52

96. Ross Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 192. 97. Goodman, Kafka’s Prayer, 35. 98. See Austin Warren, “Kosmos Kafka,” in The Kafka Problem, ed. Angel Flores (New York: New Directions, 1946), 60–75. 99. Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Viking, 1965), 171. 100. Trilling, Beyond Culture, 185. 101. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 313. 102. Goodman, Kafka’s Prayer, 178. 103. Goodman, Kafka’s Prayer, 17. 104. Goodman, Kafka’s Prayer, 17. If Kafka’s leopards were not understood as evil but rather as “providential” and “objects of faith,” then perhaps we should no longer call them leopards. “If the Evil is a necessary moment,” Goodman asks, “is it any longer appropriate to call it Evil?” 105. Kazin, New York Jew, 63. 106. According to Broyard, “Because they were displaced themselves, or angry with us for failing to understand history, the professors did their best to make us feel like exiles in our own country.” Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (New York: Vintage, 1997), 15. Broyard himself had complex reasons for his sense of internal displacement: raised in a Black family in New Orleans before the war, he passed as White after moving to New York. In Kafka Was the Rage, Broyard repeatedly describes his time in postwar Greenwich Village as a kind of reverse expatriation. Three years after Kafka Was the Rage was published, Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed that Broyard had been born a light-skinned Black man in New Orleans. Only after his family relocated to Brooklyn as part of the Great Migration did Broyard begin to pass as White. The revelation of Broyard’s secret past has opened up new ways of reading Broyard’s relationship to postwar Greenwich Village’s hipster scene—and, perhaps by extension, to Kafka. See Henry Louis Gates, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1997). Lee Konstantinou argues that Broyard “regarded hipness not as an expression of a racial essence, but as a symbolically formalized response to frustration and oppression, a kind of jive sublimation.” See Lee Konstantinou, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 51, 59. 107. Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage, 31. 108. Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage, 30. 109. Philip Roth, “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka,” in Reading Myself and Others (New York: Vintage, 2001), 281–302. 110. Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage, 69. 286

NOTES TO PAGES 52–57

111. Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage, 111. 112. Anatole Broyard, “A Portrait of the Hipster,” Partisan Review 15, no. 6 (June 1948). 113. Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage, 69. 114. Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923, 37. 115. For the most extensive discussion of Eisner’s work as Kafka’s most influential Czech translator and interpreter, see Tuckerova, “Reading Kafka in Prague,” 43–44. The details of this period of Eisner’s life are murky, but according to Tuckerova, the available evidence suggests that he was unable to secure the necessary travel documents to exit Czechoslovakia because of a case of mistaken identity. 116. Tuckerova, “Reading Kafka in Prague,” 53. 117. Hugo Siebenschein et al., Franz Kafka a Praha: Vzpomínky, úvahy, dokumenty (Prague: Vladimir Žikeš, 1947), 60. 118. Pavel Eisner, Franz Kafka and Prague (New York: Arts Inc., 1950), 14. 119. Eisner, Franz Kafka and Prague, 36. 120. Eisner, Franz Kafka and Prague, 52. In contrast to Neumann, Eisner’s Kafka was neither a Czech nor a radical; rather, he was as an “internal exile” within Prague’s vanished Jewish quarter, a “witness for a bygone world.” Eisner, 30. Opening a book by Kafka was like unsealing the entrance to a pharaoh’s burial vault, releasing a gust of “catacomb air.” Eisner, 14. 121. Čermák, “Recepce Franze Kafky,” 27. 122. Two of Čermák’s collected essays deal extensively with the Czech publishing history of Amerika: “Zmařená příležitost” (387–406) and “Český překlad Kafkova románu Nezvěstný” (508–519). See Čermák, “I Do Daleka Veda Cesta . . .” See also Alessandro Catalano, Rudá záře nad literaturou: Česká literatura mezi socialismem a undergroundem (1945–1959) (Brno: Host, 2008), 69. 123. Pavel Janáček, Literární brak: Operace vyloučení, operace nahrazení 1938–1951 (Brno: Host, 2004), 191. 124. Tuckerova, “Reading Kafka in Prague,” 53. See also Michal Bauer, Ideologie a pamet’: literatura a instituce na prelomu 40. a 50. let 20. století (Jinočany: H & H, 2003), 73–74. 125. David Caute, Politics and the Novel during the Cold War (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2010), 234. 126. Tuckerova, “Reading Kafka in Prague,” 74–75. 127. Pavel Reiman, “Předmluva,” in Amerika, by Franz Kafka, trans. Dagmar Eisnerová (Prague: SNKLU, 1962), 17. 128. Reiman, “Předmluva,” 12. 129. Nekula, Kafka and His Prague Contexts; Antonin J. Liehm, “Franz Kafka in Eastern Europe,” Telos 1975, no. 23 (March 20, 1975): 53–83. 130. See Tuckerova’s extensive discussion of Goldstücker in “Reading Kafka in Prague,” 137–220. 287

NOTES TO PAGES 58–66

131. The sword held by the Statue of Liberty at the novel’s open was once again a representation of the violence of US capitalist imperialism. As Goldstücker also reminded his socialist audience, it is a representative of the working class—the stoker—who rescues young Rossmann from the “Dantean labyrinths” of the ship’s hold in the novel’s opening chapter. Kenneth Hughes and Eduard Goldstücker, eds., “Franz Kafka from a Prague Perspective,” in Franz Kafka: An Anthology of Marxist Criticism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Clark University, 1981), 71. 132. Tuckerova, “Reading Kafka in Prague,” 17. See also Tuckerova, “Kafka—a Hanč? K českým překladům a literární recepci Franze Kafky 1948– 1963,” Revolver Revue, no. 113 (2018). 133. Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales from the Time of the Cult, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: New Directions, 2015), ix. The collection’s title was changed in translation, further highlighting Hrabal’s opening story. 134. For a discussion of the term “kafkarna” in the context of Hrabal’s writing, see Hana Píchová, “Kafkárna: Who Is Afraid of Franz Kafka,” in Between Texts, Languages, and Cultures: Festschrift for Michael Henry Heim, ed. Craig Cravens, Masako U. Fidler, and Susan C. Kresin (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers 2008), 237–243. 135. Josef Alan, ed., Alternativní kultura: Příběh české společnosti 1945– 1989 (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2001), 416. 136. Hrabal, Mr. Kafka, 13. 137. See Jan Zábrana, Celý život (Prague: Torst, 1992), 833; I’m quoting Nekula’s translation in Kafka and His Prague Contexts, 15–16. 138. Nekula, Kafka and His Prague Contexts, 16. 139. Kafka, Amerika (2011), 96. 140. Kafka, Amerika (1940), 100. 141. Alfred Thomas, Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 102. 2. Behind the Gold Curtain: F. O. Matthiessen on the Czechoslovak Road to Socialism

1. F. O. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 120. 2. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 120–121. 3. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 120–121. 4. George Blaustein, Nightmare Envy and Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 211–212. 5. In his history of Czechoslovakia during the communist era, Kevin McDermott describes how “this cautious emphasis on a specific, gradual and by implication democratic transition to socialism more attuned to indigenous 288

NOTES TO PAGES 66–67

Czechoslovak political culture and level of socio-economic development and eschewing overt forms of political repression struck deep chords among the party intelligentsia and many rank-and-file members even perhaps among some non-communist workers and intellectuals.” Kevin McDermott, Communist Czechoslovakia, 1945–89: A Political and Social History (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 39. 6. Ernest J. Simmons, “Statements by Friends and Associates,” Monthly Review 2, no. 6 (October 1950): 304. 7. Paul M. Sweezy, “Labor and Political Activities,” Monthly Review 2, no. 6 (October 1950): 240. 8. For an account of McCarthyism in the American universities, see Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 9. See, for instance, Donald Pease, “Moby Dick and the Cold War,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982–83, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 10. Mark Greif recently called American Renaissance “perhaps the most important book in the literary criticism of America during midcentury (and very likely the most influential book of literary criticism of America, ever).” Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 110. Since the end of the Cold War, Matthiessen’s life and work have been reevaluated from a range of methodological perspectives. For research focusing on the relationship between Matthiessen’s sexuality and the fate of his critical project during the Cold War, see Arthur Redding, Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 37–56; David Bergman, “F.O. Matthiessen: The Critic as Homosexual,” Raritan 9, no. 4 (Spring 1990): 62; Jay Grossman, “The Canon in the Closet: Matthiessen’s Whitman, Whitman’s Matthiessen,” American Literature 70, no. 4 (1998): 799–832. Matthiessen has also figured in attempts to reclaim the “radical roots” of American studies. See Elaine Tyler May, “The Radical Roots of American Studies: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 9, 1995,” American Quarterly 48, no. 2 (June 1996). For another recent reevaluation of Matthiessen, see Paul Giles, Transnationalism in Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 147. Giles highlights work that builds on Matthiessen’s scholarship, including Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 11. For three recent works that situate Matthiessen in a more international context, see Blaustein, Nightmare Envy and Other Stories; Merve Emre, 289

NOTES TO PAGES 68–71

Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Justin Quinn, Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Joseph Benatov has also recently used the example of Matthiessen’s engagement with Czechoslovak socialism to argue that “the Eastern Bloc has operated as the ‘disciplinary unconscious’ for the development of the field [of American studies] and the evolution of a post–Cold War political radicalism that has influenced the current transnational paradigm.” Joseph Benatov, “Transnational American Studies: A Postsocialist Phoenix,” Twentieth-Century Literature 65, no. 1–2 (March 1, 2019): 24. 12. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 106. 13. Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11. 14. The phrase is taken from Bradley Abrams’s study of postwar Czech intellectual culture and the rise of communism. See Bradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). 15. The idea of a “usable past” was first articulated by the critic Van Wyck Brooks in “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial, April 11, 1918, 337–341. 16. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), ix. 17. According to Gerald Graff’s formulation, Matthiessen “ingeniously blended the organicist poetics of Coleridge and Eliot with a homemade brand of Christian democratic socialism.” Gerald Graff, “American Criticism Right and Left,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 106. 18. In reconstructing Matthiessen’s inaugural lecture at Charles University, I have checked his summary of the speech in From the Heart of Europe against his written notes, preserved in his papers. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 105–108; F. O. Matthiessen, “Inaugural Lecture: Prague” n.d., Box 7, Folder: “Czech seminar materials,” FOMP. 19. Of the two articles to which Matthiessen might have been referring, both paint a picture of a Czechoslovakia quickly falling under the control of Stalin’s stooges in Prague. See “Bread, Votes & Treason,” Time, December 15, 1947; “The Mixture as Before,” Time, October 6, 1947. 20. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 107. 21. Despite their shared social background, Matthiessen and Luce had become ideological rivals. In 1941, the same year that Matthiessen published American Renaissance, Luce published his landmark essay, “The American Century,” in the pages of Life magazine. Here were two alternative articulations of American cultural nationalism, each defined in large part by a strong vision of postwar internationalism. But in contrast to Matthiessen, Luce rejected “all manner of socialist doctrines and collectivist trends” in favor of an interna290

NOTES TO PAGES 71–77

tional system organized around “free economic enterprise” and US military leadership. Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, 62. 22. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 107. 23. In Prague, Matthiessen described American literature and culture as being defined by an entire “series of contrasts”—the ideal vs. the material, the country vs. the city, the plutocrat vs. the poor man—but he singled out the overarching themes of “expansion” and “dissent” as the animating dialectic of his country’s literary history. See Matthiessen, “Inaugural Lecture.” 24. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 107. 25. Essays by Thoreau and Emerson were translated into Czech through Jan Laichter’s Otázky a názory (Questions and opinions) series at the turn of the century. To a limited extent, some of the more recent members of Matthiessen’s canon—Steinbeck, for instance—were also made available in Czech. See Marcel Arbeit, Bibliografie Americké literatury v českých překladech (Brno: Votobia, 2000), 29–32. 26. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 100. 27. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, ix. 28. Matthiessen calls this his “unorthodox postulate for literary history.” Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xiii. 29. In American Renaissance, it allowed him to locate his five writers within a dense network of associations, reaching from Shakespeare up to the modernists, including Franz Kafka. See Marc Dolan, “The ‘Wholeness’ of the Whale: Melville, Matthiessen, and the Semiotics of Critical Revisionism,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 48, no. 3 (1992): 27–58; Samuel Otter, “American Renaissance and Us,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 3, no. 2 (2015): 228–235. 30. Greif, Age of the Crisis of Man, 110. 31. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 313. 32. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 120–121. 33. See Grossman, “Canon in the Closet.” 34. See Balazs Trencsenyi et al., A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, vol. 2, Negotiating Modernity in the “Short Twentieth Century” and Beyond, part 1, 1918–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 404. 35. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1978), 168–169. 36. Simmons, “Statements by Friends and Associates,” 301–302. 37. Zdeněk Stříbrný, The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 18. 38. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 46. 39. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 129. 40. See John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 40. 291

NOTES TO PAGES 78–81

41. John Connelly, “Communist Higher Education,” in The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949, ed. Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii (New York: Routledge, 1997), 196–198. 42. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 32. 43. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 117. 44. A year earlier, Akhmatova had been attacked by the Soviet leader and cultural czar Andrei Zhdanov, and the situation had been hotly debated among the left intelligentsia in Czechoslovakia. See Jiří Holý, Writers under Siege: Czech Literature since 1945, trans. Elizabeth S. Morrison and Jan Culik (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 12. 45. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 48–49. 46. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 32, 95. 47. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 94. 48. The social club’s name is taken from the Czech-language word for “Varangian,” a regional term meaning “Viking.” 49. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 97–98. 50. Merve Emre writes that the singing of “John Brown’s Body” in Prague “interlaces the performative aesthetics of American literature with Matthiessen’s and his student’s physical bodies,” a perfect example of what she terms “bad reading.” According to Emre, a range of new postwar institutions, such as the newly created Fulbright Program, were spreading American literature around the world while encouraging a set of readerly protocols—including “reading for feeling”—that were far removed from the norms of postwar American criticism. Matthiessen’s own “unorthodox” approach to American literature certainly seems to fit Emre’s description. But the forms of “international literary socialization” that he was promoting in Prague were also far removed from the official goals of cultural diplomatic projects like the Fulbright Program, which would only begin sending its first representatives abroad the following year, in 1948. Even if From the Heart of Europe was not a “Fulbright memoir,” her reading of affect in this scene is brilliant. See Emre’s chapter “Reading for Feeling” in Paraliterary, 54–93. 51. David Reynolds argues, “It was a song that lent itself to verbal riffs. In that respect it was like the spirituals sung by slaves, who, as Frederick Douglass famously noted, made up words on the spur of the moment. Improvisation became a characteristic of African American music, as evidenced later by jazz and the blues, and it was a feature of the John Brown song as well.” David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 467–468. 52. See John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis, Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 53. Bruce A. Ronda, Reading the Old Man: John Brown in American Culture (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008), 131. 292

NOTES TO PAGES 82–87

54. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 114. 55. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 179. It’s worth noting that Matthiessen was staying at the opulent Hotel Paris, a striking art nouveau building later featured in Bohumil Hrabal’s novel I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 1971, trans. 1989). 56. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 101. 57. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 175. A direct translation of the Czech-language version of the socialist slogan would read “Proletarians of all countries, connect!” 58. Holý, Writers under Siege, 15. 59. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 173. 60. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 141. 61. Abrams, Struggle for the Soul of the Nation, 166. 62. Abrams, Struggle for the Soul of the Nation, 95. 63. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 141. 64. Orzoff, Battle for the Castle, 3. After the Communist takeover of 1948, Orbis would be moved to the Ministry of Information. 65. The promotional booklet is still sitting with Matthiessen’s personal papers and other correspondence related to his time in Prague. The title of Matthiessen’s travelogue might even owe something to this booklet, which opens with the question “Do You Know the Heart of Europe?” See “Czechoslovakia,” Box 7, Folder “Czech Background Material and Postcards (Czech VI),” FOMP. 66. Raymond Daniell, “Crossroads between Two Worlds,” New York Times, October 26, 1947, 60. 67. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 178. 68. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 193–194. 69. “COMMUNISTS: And Now, the Czechs,” Time, March 1, 1948. 70. Connelly, Captive University, 114–116. According to Connelly, “Well before their 1948 coup and the onset of high stalinism, KSČ functionaries repeatedly alluded to the stalinist methods they would employ after achieving full power, including the elimination of political opposition through coercive means, and the degradation of intellectual and cultural life.” 71. Igor Lukes, On the Edge of the Cold War: American Diplomats and Spies in Postwar Prague (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 72. Most of the American media was portraying the Communist takeover as a repeat of the Munich crisis a decade earlier, in 1938. But Matthiessen’s post-February correspondence highlights a key difference between the two: unlike the diplomatic betrayal at Munich, the Communists’ “Victorious February” was tentatively supported by a significant proportion of the Czechoslovak population, including many of Matthiessen’s former students. The extent of Soviet involvement in the takeover is still unclear, but a dictatorship of the proletariat was not simply imposed from outside. Of course, this only 293

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heightens the tragedy of what came next. See Gregory Curtis Ference, ed., The Portrayal of Czechoslovakia in the American Print Media, 1938–1989 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 55–73. 73. Vladimir Kosina, “Vladimir Kosina to F. O. Matthiessen,” n.d., Box 5, Folder “Salzburg Seminar (Charles University),” FOMP. 74. Jaroslav Schejbal, “Jaroslav Schejbal to F. O. Matthiessen,” April 5, 1948, Box 7, Folder “Czech seminar materials,” FOMP. 75. Zdenek Stříbrný, “Zdenek Stříbrný to F. O. Matthiessen,” February 29, 1948, Box 5, Folder “Salzburg Seminar (Charles University),” FOMP. 76. “Masaryk’s Suicide Seen: F. O. Matthiessen Calls Death a ‘Blow,’” Harvard Crimson, March 11, 1948. 77. Connelly, Captive University, 118. 78. Connelly, Captive University, 250. 79. Connelly, “Communist Higher Education,” 243–265. See also Connelly, Captive University, 10. Connelly writes, “The only common currency was radicalism: in the humiliation and removal of professors, in the interrogations and expulsions of students, in the penetration of university curricula with Stalinist thought.” 80. Květa Marysková, “Květa Marysková to F. O. Matthiessen,” April 14, 1949, Box 5, Folder “Salzburg Seminar (Charles University),” FOMP. 81. Kosina, “Kosina to Matthiessen.” 82. Jaroslav Schejbal, “Jaroslav Schejbal to F. O. Matthiessen,” February 3, 1949, Box 5, Folder “Salzburg Seminar (Charles University),” FOMP. 83. Stříbrný, Whirligig of Time, 25. 84. Schejbal, “Schejbal to Matthiessen,” April 5, 1948, Box 5, Folder “Salzburg Seminar (Charles University),” FOMP. 85. Stříbrný, Whirligig of Time, 20. 86. Dagmar Eisnerová, “Dagmar Eisnerová to F. O. Matthiessen,” January 17, 1949, Box 5, Folder “Salzburg Seminar (Charles University),” FOMP. 87. “Salzburg Seminar in American Studies: Newsletter I,” n.d., Box 5, Folder “Salzburg Seminar (Charles University),” FOMP. 88. Jaroslav Schejbal, “Jaroslav Schejbal to F. O. Matthiessen,” August 14, 1948, Box 5, Folder “Salzburg Seminar (Charles University),” FOMP. 89. Stříbrný, “Stříbrný to Matthiessen,” February 29, 1948. 90. Petr Koubek, “Petr Koubek to F. O. Matthiessen,” July 18, 1948, Box 5, Folder “Salzburg Seminar (Charles University),” FOMP. 91. The case has been reopened by Prague police investigators several times since 1948. Most recently, in March 2021, the Prague public prosecutor announced that they were still unable to determine the cause of Masaryk’s death. 92. In 1419, seven Prague city councilmen were thrown out a window, helping to ignite the Hussite Wars. Almost exactly two hundred years later, in 1618, two Catholic lords regent were thrown from Prague Castle, precipitating the Thirty Years’ War. 294

NOTES TO PAGES 93–97

93. Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 8. More broadly, the Czechoslovak coup set the Cold War on a new footing. The Truman administration used the coup as a justification for a rapid peacetime militarization. Congressional opposition to the Marshall Plan evaporated, and the European Recovery Program would soon be implemented. 94. “Masaryk’s Suicide Seen.” 95. In the first weeks after the Communist takeover, Matthiessen told an audience at Harvard that the “iron curtain” that already been drawn in the minds of so many before February still did not exist in Czechoslovakia. The changes inside Czechoslovakia had been exaggerated, he claimed, and the Communist Party was still “like any other party.” “Matthiessen Reports No Czech ‘Iron Curtain’ as Result of Red Intrusion,” Harvard Crimson, April 10, 1947. 96. Thomas W. Devine, Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 114–115. 97. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 187–189. 98. Franz Hoellering, “The Head and the Heart,” Nation, September 11, 1948. 99. “I think the book would have been more effective if you had kept your opinions more in the background and had placed all the spotlights on the people you met in Europe.” Malcolm Cowley, The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 388. 100. Henry Luce, “Henry Luce to F. O. Matthiessen,” September 18, 1948, Box 5, Folder “Salzburg Seminar (Charles University).” See also Box 5, Folder “Salzburg Seminar (Charles University),” FOMP. 101. Quoted in William L. O’Neill, A Better World: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990), 179. 102. Irving Howe, “The Sentimental Fellow-Traveling of F. O. Matthiessen,” Partisan Review 15, no. 10 (October 1948): 1125–1129. 103. Letter from Howe to Matthiessen, August 17, 1948, Box 5, “Reviews of From the Heart of Europe,” FOMP. 104. See “Journal, vol. 7,” in Alfred Kazin Collection, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. The quotation appears on page 358. 105. Although Matthiessen and many of Partisan Review’s editors and writers had been allies during the early years of the Popular Front era, they found themselves on opposite sides of many of the cultural and political debates of the late 1930s. As Michael Denning has pointed out, “the hostility towards Popular Front figures like Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, and F. O. Matthiessen on the part of Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, and the Partisan 295

NOTES TO PAGE 97

Review circle was not entirely determined by the divide between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists.” Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, new ed. (London: Verso, 2011), 62. Like many other “radical moderns,” including critics like Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson, Matthiessen came from a fairly established bourgeois background, and his aesthetic tastes had been shaped through an Ivy League education and travels in interwar Europe. In contrast, the editors of Partisan Review were proud of their more “plebian” backgrounds: urban, working class, and, in most cases, ethnically marked as Jewish. As Howe himself later admitted, the New York intellectuals “were suspicious of anything coming out of the Harvard English department, which they saw as a home of both native gentility and literary fellow-traveling.” Irving Howe, “Philip Rahv: A Memoir,” American Scholar 48, no. 4 (Autumn 1979): 495. Matthiessen returned their antipathy. In From the Heart of Europe, he refers to Howe’s circle as “those New York writers whose thought has never been nourished by first-hand participation in social action either abroad or at home.” Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 81. However, Matthiessen does not appear to have exhibited the same ugly anti-Semitism that can be found in the private remarks of either Cowley or Wilson. In a different era, Matthiessen might have even been able to bridge all these social and political differences. By 1948, it was too late: the events in Czechoslovakia helped bring all these simmering tensions to the surface. As Howe later recalled, “the coup in Czechoslovakia left a residue of anxiety and gloom, felt even by those who tried to resist Cold War simplifications.” 106. Letter from Matthiessen to Kazin, November 7, 1948, Box 7, “Letters from Matthiessen to Kazin (Photocopies),” FOMP. 107. In private correspondence, Chase was more direct: Matthiessen “loves Melville and Hawthorne, has a tragic view of life, believes even in original sin and nevertheless commits himself to the most childish, shallow, and unexamined political liberalism.” Quoted in Christopher Castiglia, “Cold War Allegories and the Politics of Criticism,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 224. 108. Richard Chase, Herman Melville, a Critical Study (New York: Macmillan, 1949), ix. 109. It’s no coincidence that in the same year Schlesinger referred to From the Heart of Europe as “an astonishing revelation of the modern Doughface justifying totalitarianism to himself.” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997), 80. 110. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2001); Terry Klefstad, “Shostakovich and the Peace Conference,” Music and Politics 6, no. 2 (Summer 2012).

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NOTES TO PAGES 98–105

111. Daniel S. Gillmor, ed., Speaking of Peace: The Widely-Discussed Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace (New York: National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, 1949), 79. 112. Gillmor, Speaking of Peace, 86–87. 113. “Red Visitors Cause Red Rumpus,” Life, April 4, 1949, 41. 114. “Red Visitors Cause Red Rumpus,” 42–43. 115. Simmons, “Statements by Friends and Associates,” 305. 116. “Professor’s Leap Laid to Worries,” New York Times, April 2, 1950. 117. “Howard Fast Hits U.S. Policies,” New York Times, July 2, 1950. 118. F. O. Matthiessen, The Responsibilities of the Critic, ed. John Rackliffe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 91–92. 119. Simmons, “Statements by Friends and Associates.” 120. Trencsenyi et al., History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, 303, 333. 121. Quinn, Between Two Fires, 90. 122. In particular, Štern objected to Kolář’s selection of epigraphs for his book Ódy a variance, which Štern believed signaled his dangerous aesthetic attachments. One of these epigraphs was from Franz Kafka, whom Štern rejected as a “writer whose novels reflect the absurdity of bourgeois life”: “Od Franze Kafky, spisovatele, který svými romány odráží absurdnost měšťáckého života.” Jan Štern, “Zběhnutí od praporu,” in Z dějin českého myšlení o literature 2: 1948–1958, ed. Michal Přibáň (Praha: Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, 2001), 9. 123. Around the time of the Prague Spring, Stříbrný agreed to stand for election as chair of the Faculty of Arts’ official Communist Party organization; he claims he did so to help “rehabilitate and reinstate all professors and students who had been dismissed from the university in the Stalinist purges following the Communist revolution in 1948.” Stříbrný, Whirligig of Time, 34. 124. Stříbrný, Whirligig of Time, 19. 125. Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire (New York: Vintage, 1994), 171. 126. See Schejbal’s brief essay in Jaroslav Schejbal, Hela Kunzová, Hana Rybáková, eds., American Literature in Czechoslovakia 1945–1965 (Prague: Czechoslovak PEN Club, 1966), 8. 3. The Cowards’ Guide to World Literature: Josef Škvorecký’s American Epigraphs

1. Ladislav Štoll, “Úkoly literatury v kulturní revoluci,” Literární noviny 8, no. 10 (March 7, 1959): 1–8. Here, I am quoting Michal Schonberg’s translation from Štoll’s speech. Michal Schonberg, “The Case of the Mangy Pussycat: An Account of the Literary Scandal Surrounding the Publication of The

297

NOTES TO PAGES 106–110

Cowards,” in The Achievement of Josef Škvorecký, ed. Sam Solecki (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 93. 2. For a detailed discussion of the Central Committee’s discussions about Škvorecký’s novel in the context of broader internal ideological debates about official literary culture in Czechoslovakia in early 1959, see Michal Bauer, “Zbabělci v lednu 1959,” supplement, Tvar, no. 13–14 (2000). 3. The name for this era is taken from the 1954 novel The Thaw (Оттепель), by the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg. For more on the Thaw in the Soviet Union, see Eleonory Gilburd, To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). 4. For a biographical study focused on the role of Náchod in Škvorecký’s fiction, see Aleš Fetters, Josef Škvorecký a Náchod (Liberec: Bor, 2012). 5. This Náchod establishment with an unlikely name really exists. See Tomáš Mazal, Putování k Port Arthuru: Cestopis zbabělců (Pardubice: Lithos, 2007). 6. Josef Škvorecký, The Cowards, trans. Jeanne Němcová (London: Penguin Classics, 2010), 19. 7. Schonberg, “Case of the Mangy Pussycat,” 91. Schonberg’s chapter quotes several of the most prominent attacks on The Cowards. 8. Schonberg, “Case of the Mangy Pussycat,” 90. 9. See Peter Šámal, “Setkání v Praze, s cenzurou. K cenzurní praxi let padesátých (případ Škvorecký),” Dějiny a současnost, September 2011. 10. For more on the official “rehabilitation” of Škvorecký and his novel, see Michal Přibáň and Kateřina Bláhová, “Druhý debut Josefa Škvoreckého,” Česká literature 52, no. 3 (2004): 385–408. 11. Jiřina Šmejkalová, “Censoring Canons: Transitions and Prospects of Literary Institutions in Czechoslovakia,” in The Administration of the Aesthetic: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere, ed. Richard Burt (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1994), 201. 12. I am quoting Jeanne Němcová’s translation of the “Author’s Preface” to the English-language edition. See Škvorecký, Cowards, 7. 13. Škvorecký, Cowards, 9. 14. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1915,” Nobel Foundation, accessed April 23, 2022, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1915/summary/. 15. Michael David-Fox, “The ‘Heroic Life’ of a Friend of Stalinism: Romain Rolland and Soviet Culture,” Slavonica 11 (April 1, 2005): 3–29. 16. The exact Czech term that Škvorecký uses is “zlomyslnost.” See Josef Škvorecký and Lubomír Dorůžka, Psaní, jazz a bláto v pásech: dopisy Josefa Škvoreckého a Lubomíra Dorůžky z doby kultů (1950–1960), ed. Michal Přibáň (Prague: Literární akademie, 2007), 118. See also Michael Špirit’s volume of “Komentář,” included with Zbabělci. Rukopis (Prague: Books and Cards, 2009), 17. 298

NOTES TO PAGES 111–118

17. Pavel Janoušek, Dějiny české literatury 1945–1989 (Prague: Academia, 2007), 235. 18. Škvorecký and Dorůžka, Psaní, jazz a bláto v pásech, 118. 19. Alena Přibáňová, “Jaký je Danny? A byl takový vždycky? Nad knižním vydáním rukopisu Škvoreckého Zbabělců,” Česká literatura 58, no. 1 (2010): 107. 20. All quotations are taken from the English translation of “Spectator on a February Night,” published in Josef Škvorecký, When Eve Was Naked: Stories of a Life’s Journey (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). 21. Škvorecký, “Spectator on a February Night,” 141. 22. Škvorecký, “Spectator on a February Night,” 124. 23. Škvorecký, “Spectator on a February Night,” 143. 24. Škvorecký and Dorůžka, Psaní, jazz a bláto v pásech, 104. 25. Shawn Clybor, “Laughter and Hatred Are Neighbors: Adolf Hoffmeister and E.F. Burian in Stalinist Czechoslovakia, 1948–1956,” East European Politics and Societies 26, no. 3 (August 1, 2012): 592. 26. Petr Šámal, the leading scholar of communist-era censorship in Czechoslovakia, translates the HSTD’s full name as “the Central Office of the Guardians of the Printed Word,” which, however Orwellian, does convey how many HSTD censors conceived of their own work. See Šámal’s English rendering of HSTD in Soustružníci lidských duší: Lidové knihovny a jejich cenzura na počátku padesátých let 20. století (Prague: Academia, 2009), 197. 27. Šmejkalová, “Censoring Canons,” 201. 28. For the complete list of over 7,500 works, see Šámal, Soustružníci lidských duší, 219–466. 29. Pavel Janáček, Literární brak: Operace vyloučení, operace nahrazení 1938–1951 (Brno: Host, 2004). 30. Janáček, Literární brak, 398. Janáček emphasizes the continuities in the “representation, rejection, and censorship” of popular literature before and after the establishment of Communism in Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, he argues that the two operative principles in the construction of a new “socialist literature” were exclusion and replacement, especially of popular genres, or brak. 31. See Gilburd, To See Paris and Die, 109–110. 32. Josef Škvorecký, “Josef Skvorecky, the Art of Fiction No. 112,” interview by John A. Glusman, Paris Review 31, no. 112 (Winter 1989): 125–126. 33. Josef Škvorecký, Talkin’ Moscow Blues, ed. Sam Solecki (Toronto: L. and O. Dennys, 1988), 45. 34. See Nikola Klímová, ed., SNKLHU Odeon 1953–1995: České knižní obálky v edičních řadách (Prague: UMPRUM, 2016). 35. Hana Ulmanova, “The Reception of American Literature in Czechoslovakia under Communism: 1945–1989,” American Studies International 33, no. 2 (October 1995): 34. 36. Přibáňová, “Jaký je Danny?” 104. 299

NOTES TO PAGES 118–124

37. See Josef Hiršal and Jiří Kolář, eds., Život je všude: almanach z roku 1956 (Prague: Paseka, 2005). 38. The following account of the fate of “The End of the Nylon Age” at Československý spisovatel draws on Šámal, “Setkání v Praze.” 39. Šámal, “Setkání v Praze,” 42. 40. The ultimate fate of Škvorecký’s novella, as Šámal has shown, demonstrates how the tentative experimentation and evolving censorship practices of the Thaw era entailed a complex process of negotiation among authors, editors, and censors—often with unpredictable results. 41. See Ernest Hemingway, ed., Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (New York: Crown, 1955), xiv; quoted in Josef Škvorecký, “Literární názory Ernesta Hemingwaye,” Světová Literatura, no. 2 (June 1956): 190–195; reprinted in Josef Škvorecký, Podivný pán z Providence a jiné eseje (Prague: Ivo Železný, 1999). 42. Škvorecký, Cowards, 9. 43. Inostrannaya literatura emerged as a chastened version of the earlier Soviet journal Internatsionalnaya literatura (International Literature), which had perished along with the Popular Front. Before the official shift to socialist realism, Internatsionalnaya literatura had published important avant-garde works in Russian, including several chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses. 44. As Justin Quinn writes, “The people involved in the magazine tried to continue the work of nationalist ideologues of the nineteenth century by conveying those works of foreign literature into Czech that they thought would best profit the language’s literature.” Justin Quinn, Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 97. 45. Josef Škvorecký, “Franz Kafka, Jazz, the Anti-Semitic Reader, and Other Marginal Matters,” Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture 2 (1983): 169–182. 46. Škvorecký, “Kafka, Jazz,” 178. 47. Škvorecký, “Kafka, Jazz,” 171–172. 48. Veronika Tuckerova, “Reading Kafka in Prague: The Reception of Franz Kafka between the East and the West during the Cold War” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012). 49. Škvorecký, “Kafka, Jazz,” 179. 50. Deming Brown, Soviet Attitudes toward American Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 309–310. For a more recent discussion of Hemingway in the Soviet Union, see Cary Nelson, “Hemingway, the American Left, and the Soviet Union: Some Forgotten Episodes,” Hemingway Review 14, no. 1 (1994): 36. 51. Brown, Soviet Attitudes toward American Writing, 311–313. 52. Josef Škvorecký, “Některé pohledy na americkou literaturu,” Světová literatura 1, no. 5 (November 1956): 179. 300

NOTES TO PAGES 124–130

53. Šámal, Soustružníci lidských duší, 302. 54. Howard would take over as editor of Masses & Mainstream and serve in the position until 1958. See Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 2, North America, 1894–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 837–857. 55. Milton Howard, “Hemingway and Heroism,” Masses & Mainstream 5, no. 10 (October 1952): 2. 56. Howard, “Hemingway and Heroism,” 6. 57. Škvorecký, “Některé pohledy,” 184. 58. Škvorecký, “Některé pohledy,” 186. 59. Audre Hanneman, ed., Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 176. 60. Škvorecký might be overstating his case. While “spisovná čeština” does refer to “literary” or “standard” Czech, as opposed to “obecná čeština” (spoken Czech), Škvorecký has a tendency to oversimplify the distinction, especially in Western interviews. See Škvorecký, “Art of Fiction No. 112,” 122. 61. Škvorecký, Talkin’ Moscow Blues, 33. 62. According to Hemingway, the mission of Men at War was to show modern soldiers “how all men from the earliest times we know have fought and died.” Hemingway, Men at War, xi. 63. Josef Škvorecký, Headed for the Blues: A Memoir (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1996), 95. 64. Balazs Trencsenyi et al., A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, vol. 2, Negotiating Modernity in the “Short Twentieth Century” and Beyond, part 1, 1918–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 411. 65. Štoll, “Úkoly literatury.” 66. This is the edited version of Mezzrow’s quotation, included in Škvorecký, Cowards, 9. 67. For the full quotation that Škvorecký borrowed for his epigraph, see Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues, ed. Ben Ratliff (New York: NYRB Classics, 2016), 111–112. 68. Mezzrow and Wolfe, Really the Blues, 5. 69. Mezzrow and Wolfe, Really the Blues, 224. 70. This was partly an act of self-preservation; he figured there was a much higher proportion of actual criminals among the prison’s White population. 71. “Case History of an Ex-White Man,” Ebony, December 1946, 11. 72. For Gayle Wald, Mezzrow’s doomed quest for Black authenticity demonstrates the limits of cross-racial performance. At the same time, Really the Blues “opens up a space for the historical analysis of the valorization of raced and classed ‘marginality’ as a form of politico-cultural dissent.” Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 20. According to 301

NOTES TO PAGES 130–134

Charles Hersch, “the experiments in identity” of Mezzrow and other Jewish jazz artists of the era “were not minstrelsy or exploitation, but attempts to find a platform of resistance against a tranquilized America and Jewishness.” Charles Hersch, “‘Every Time I Try to Play Black, It Comes Out Sounding Jewish’: Jewish Jazz Musicians and Racial Identity,” American Jewish History 97, no. 3 (2013): 282. 73. See the first epigraph in Josef Škvorecký, Zbabělci (Prague: Česko­ slovenský spisovatel, 1964), 9. In the glossary to Really the Blues, “yarddog” is defined as “low or uncouth person,” “gully-low” as “lowdown, unhappy.” See Mezzrow and Wolfe, Really the Blues, 395, 401. 74. Škvorecký removes the name of the Austin High Gang, an all-White jazz band that helped define the Chicago jazz sound of the 1920s. See Mezzrow and Wolfe, Really the Blues, 111–112. 75. As the musicologist Wolf-Georg Zaddach writes, “A vital jazz scene flourished in this ‘nylon age,’ as Josef Škvorecký described the period to emphasize the influence of, and orientation to, American culture.” Wolf-Georg Zaddach, “Jazz in Czechoslovakia during the 1950s and 1960s,” in Jazz and Totalitarianism, ed. Bruce Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2016). In making this claim, Zaddach is drawing on Vladimír Kouřil, “Czech Jazz of the 1950s and 60s,” Czech Music Quarterly, no. 2 (2010): 33–44. 76. Marcel Arbeit, Bibliografie Americké literatury v českých překladech (Brno: Votobia, 2000), 32. 77. Figures who bridged the world of the Harlem Renaissance and the Old Left were not hard to find. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the rich engagement between interwar African American literary culture and the Soviet-allied international communist movement. See William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Katherine Anne Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 78. For more on Du Bois’s visit to Prague, see Františka Zezuláková Schormová, “African American Poets Abroad: Black and Red Allegiances in Early Cold War Czechoslovakia” (PhD diss., Charles University, 2020), 1–3. 79. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The American Negro and Communism,” October 23, 1958, MS 312, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. 80. Peter Galassi, Roy De Carava: A Retrospective (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 20. 81. Langston Hughes, “Sladká mucholapka života,” trans. Josef Škvorecký, Světová literatura 3, no. 5 (1958): 1–39. 82. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 83. Škvorecký’s commentary in Hughes, “Sladká mucholapka života,” 39. 302

NOTES TO PAGES 135–139

84. Škvorecký’s commentary in Hughes, “Sladká mucholapka života,” 39. 85. Škvorecký, “Některé pohledy,” 188–189. 86. Benjamin Cawthra, Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 222. 87. As Eric Sandeen writes, “The international tour of The Family of Man took place in the bipolar world of Cold War nation-states,” beginning with a visit to West Berlin in 1955, which was attended by thousands of East German visitors. Eric J. Sandeen, “The International Reception of The Family of Man,” History of Photography 29, no. 4 (2005): 354. 88. Although revisionist scholars have attacked the traveling exhibition as yet another form of Cold War–era cultural propaganda, covering for American imperialism abroad, Frederick Turner has more recently defended the Family of Man tour as a radically utopian and antiauthoritarian project. See Fred Turner, “The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America,” Public Culture 24, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 55–84. 89. Ralph K. White, “Soviet Reactions to Our Moscow Exhibit: Voting Machines and Comment Books,” Public Opinion Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1959): 464. 90. Škvorecký, Cowards, 412–413. 91. Škvorecký, Talkin’ Moscow Blues, 95. 92. This anecdote opens Škvorecký’s review of Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917–1980, which is also reprinted in Škvorecký, Talkin’ Moscow Blues, 98. 93. “Because he tells, in the inimitably smooth and charmingly entertaining manner that is the trademark of all his writings, the story of his creative life,” Gleb Žekulin once cautioned, “he remains elusive as a person and partly as an artist.” Gleb Žekulin, “Life into Art: From Josef Škvorecký to Daniel Smiřický,” in The Achievement of Josef Škvorecký, ed. Sam Solecki (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 59. 94. Škvorecký, “Kafka, Jazz,” 175. 95. The new Czech title instead refers to the honorific title, “President,” given to the leader of a street gang called the “Royal Crocadiles” at the heart of the novel. The translated title preserves the novel’s deliberate misspelling of “crocadile.” 96. Even if The Cool World was forgotten in the United States, at the time of its publication James Baldwin called it “one of the finest novels about Harlem that has ever come my way,” a quote that was advertised on the novel’s cover. However, Langston Hughes was not a fan of either the dramatic or the film adaptations of The Cool World. See Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, 1914–1967, I Dream a World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 308. 97. According to Škvorecký, he first came across Miller’s novel in 1961 and secured the translation rights through Dilia, the state agency responsible for acquiring foreign books. See Josef Škvorecký, “O Honzovi a situacích,” Re303

NOTES TO PAGES 139–142

volver Revue Kritická příloha, no. 8 (1997): 112–113. For more on Dilia and the mechanics of securing foreign copyrights in Czechoslovakia, see Philip G. Altbach and Edith S. Hoshino, eds., International Book Publishing: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1995), 533. 98. Quinn, Between Two Fires, 75. The controversy flared up again in 1997 with the publication of Patrik Ouředník, “Prezydent, nebo krokadýl? Ke sporu o autorství jednoho překladu,” Revolver Revue Kritická příloha 7 (1997). In the next issue, Revolver Review published a debate on this controversy featuring essays by Škvorecký, Jiří Pelán, Jarmila Emmerová, Lubomír Dorůžka, Vladimír Justl, Michal Přibán, Zdena Slivarová, and Miloslav Žilina. See “Ad Prezydent krokadýů,” Revolver Revue Kritická příloha 8 (1997): 99–120. 99. Loren Glass has argued that Mezzrow’s Really the Blues “deeply influenced [the Beats’] cultural and aesthetic program.” Loren Glass, “The Mighty Mezz, Marijuana, and the Beat Generation,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 7, 2015. 100. Wald, Crossing the Line, 59. 4. The Kingdom of May: Allen Ginsberg through Springtime Prague

1. For an atmospheric description of this passage, with a vegetable shop and a butcher on either side, see Veronika Müllerová, Ostermannova Viola (Tábor: Kotnov, 2008), 12. 2. Allen Ginsberg, “Translation of Confiscated Prague Journal,” trans. Eva Zábranová, February 20, 1965, Series 2, Box 20, Folder 1; Allen Ginsberg, “Czech/USSR Journal,” May 4, 1965, Series 2, Box 18, Folder 4, AGP. 3. These StB documents were published in a catalog given to me by Karel Srp. On the (Beat) Road: Beat Generation Fest, exhibition catalog (Prague: Art­ forum—Jazzová sekce, 1998), 11. The catalog includes an untitled introductory text written by Srp, along with photocopies of documents related to Allen Ginsberg’s 1965 visit. I later corroborated the authenticity of the photocopied documents by examining Ginsberg’s personal StB file. See f. MV-KR, archive file no. 591839 MV, ABS, Prague, Czech Republic. Other security service documents related to the Majáles affair are identified and discussed in Petr Blažek, “Vyhoštění krále majálesu: Allen Ginsberg a Státní bezpečnost,” Paměť a dějiny, no. 2 (2011). This article is also available in English as Petr Blažek, “The Deportation of the King of May: Allen Ginsberg and the State Security,” in Behind the Iron Curtain (Prague: Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, 2012), 2:35–47. 4. On the (Beat) Road, 27. 5. According to Michael Schumacher’s introduction to Ginsberg’s Iron Curtain Journals, “his Czechoslovakian journal(s) disappeared, reappeared in police custody, and were never returned.” See Allen Ginsberg, Iron Curtain Journals: January–May 1965, ed. Michael Schumacher (Minneapolis: Univer304

NOTES TO PAGES 143–144

sity of Minnesota Press, 2018), x. But, as I discovered, a translated version of Ginsberg’s missing journal was waiting in his archives. 6. Beginning in the late fifties, “Beat writing became a model of resistance or dissidence within Cold War cultures.” Nancy McCampbell Grace and Jennie Skerl, eds., The Transnational Beat Generation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1. 7. Petra James, “Listening to the ‘Feverish Beat’: Between Alienation and Creative Resistance—the Czech Reception of the Beats,” in Beat Literature in a Divided Europe, ed. Harri Veivo, Petra James, and Dorota Walczak-Delanois (Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2019), 3. 8. As Todd F. Tietchen points out, “going ‘on the road’ is most often offered as an antidote to the stultifying demands of Cold War nationalism, as Beat writers (and their questing avatars) seek out social arrangements more robust and liberating than those being offered within postwar containment culture.” Todd F. Tietchen, “Ethnographies and Network: On Beat Transnationalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Beats, ed. Steven Belletto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 209. 9. Todd Tietchen argues that Beat encounters with Cuban politics and culture “allowed for the crystallization of Beat attitudes toward Cold War domestic and foreign policy, a group pronouncement of dissenting outlooks that had been deemed irrational, non-pragmatic, and even un-American.” Todd Tietchen, The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 9. Tietchen’s work is an example of the recent effort to resituate the Beats in the transnational context of the global Cold War. Many of these works reassess the trajectories of Beat writers and texts, showing that their social and aesthetic commitments often moved well beyond a politics of disaffection. See also Grace and Skerl, Transnational Beat Generation; Timothy Gray, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006). Gray, for example, shows how Snyder and others seized upon the idea of the Pacific Rim as a way to resist the Cold War division of East and West. Most recently, Harris Feinsod has described the emergence of “Beat-barbudo solidarity” in the late fifties and sixties, as a beard and long hair came to symbolize both political and poetic modes of dissent. See Harris Feinsod, The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 196–209. 10. As Feinsod puts it, Ginsberg “flaunted his revolutionary sexual politics in the face of state orthodoxy.” See Feinsod, Poetry of the Americas, 207; Barry Miles, Allen Ginsberg: Beat Poet (London: Virgin, 2010), 343. 11. For Ginsberg’s description, see Allen Ginsberg, “Journal: Cuba V,” February 18, 1965, Series 2, Box 18, Folder 2, AGP. 12. Allen Ginsberg and Louis Ginsberg, Family Business: Selected Letters between a Father and Son (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001), 230. 305

NOTES TO PAGES 144–146

13. Casa de las Américas was entering a final stage of participation in the cultural Cold War. See Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 200–201. 14. Just to get the required visas and permits for his trip, Ginsberg had to threaten an injunction against the State Department. Ginsberg even had to hire the Grove Press lawyer who had defended Naked Lunch and Henry Miller. See Andrew Lass and Allen Ginsberg, “The King of May: A Conversation between Allen Ginsberg and Andrew Lass,” Massachusetts Review 39, no. 2 (1998): 169. 15. Ginsberg, “Cuba V.” 16. Ginsberg and the Beats are most often linked to the Czech underground culture of the 1970s and 1980s, especially the antiestablishment poet Ivan Martin Jirous, who went by the nickname Magor (or Freak). For examples of this linkage, see Jiří Holý, Writers under Siege: Czech Literature since 1945, trans. Elizabeth S. Morrison and Jan Culik (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 157; Justin Quinn, Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 162. For a broader contextualization of Jirous and Czech underground culture, see Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 17. As Petra James writes, “the Czech underground movement found its inspiration in the Beat culture and lifestyle.” James, “Listening to the ‘Feverish Beat,’” 71. 18. Igor Hájek, “Americká bohéma,” Světová literatura 4, no. 6 (1959): 207–233. 19. As Peter Bugge argues, “by the mid-1960s ‘Western’ youth styles and modes of behavior were incorporated into what could be presented as a modern, Czechoslovak socialist culture.” Peter Bugge, “Swinging Sixties Made in Czechoslovakia: The Adaptation of Western Impulses in Czechoslovak Youth Culture,” in Pražské jaro 1968: občanská média, přenos politických a kulturních procesů, ed. Oldřich Tůma and Markéta Devátá (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2011), 147. 20. John G. Roberts, “The Frisco Beat,” Mainstream, July 1958, 12. Also quoted, in Czech translation, in Hájek, “Americká bohéma,” 207. All other English-language translations from “Americká bohéma,” not taken from Roberts’s essay, are mine. 21. Roberts, “Frisco Beat,” 17. 22. Norman Podhoretz, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” Partisan Review 25, no. 2 (1958): 305; Paul O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around,” Life, November 30, 1959. 23. Roberts, “Frisco Beat,” 11. 24. Hájek, “Americká bohéma,” 216. 306

NOTES TO PAGES 147–149

25. According to Zdenek Nebrensky, “Hitchhiking brought about potential conflicts among communist leaders and young people in the early 1960s, since it was associated with the past and the West, and its cultural meaning ascribed to a practice of dissent.” Zdenek Nebrensky, “Early Voices of Dissent: Czechoslovakian Student Opposition at the Beginning of the 1960s,” in Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960– 1980, ed. Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder, and Joachim Scharloth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 36. 26. Hájek also approvingly cites the reference to “Wobblies” in Ginsberg’s poem “America.” See Hájek, “Americká Bohéma,” 210. 27. Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 33–78. 28. Petr Kopecký, “Czeching the Beat, Beating the Czech: Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti in Czechia,” Sixties 3, no. 1 (2010): 98. 29. Josef Škvorecký, Talkin’ Moscow Blues, ed. Sam Solecki (Toronto: L. and O. Dennys, 1988), 54. 30. According to Škvorecký, “While I was working on the rough translation I realized that the poem contained many allusions to events, people and things unknown to me—don’t forget there were no American journals or books available in Prague. So I wrote Ginsberg several letters asking for clarification which Zabrana signed (I was already under the ban). In this way we exchanged several letters.” Josef Škvorecký, “Letter to Ms. Phillips,” October 11, 1996, Box 62, Allen Ginsberg Correspondence, JSPF. 31. The celebrated Czech poet Holub published a book of reportage on his 1962–1963 journey to the United States, titled Anděl na kolečkách (Angel on wheels), that included significant discussion of Ginsberg and the Beats. For an excellent discussion of this reportage, see Quinn, Between Two Fires, especially 112–131. For another brief discussion of Anděl na kolečkách, see Harold B. Segel, The Columbia Literary History of Eastern Europe since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 313–315. 32. For a history of the Viola and its owner, Jiří Ostermann, see Müllerová, Ostermannova Viola. 33. Ginsberg brought back a typical evening program from the Viola, which is still preserved in his archive. See “Viola Program,” Series 17, Box 46, Folder 5, AGP. 34. Prague also had its own indigenous Beat poetry scene in the mid­ sixties, with underground roots that went back to the Stalinist years. Josef Rauvolf, the most important Beat translator of the postcommunist period, emphasizes the parallels between the Beats and the writers who gathered around the early samizdat publication Edice Půlnoc (Midnight edition) in the fifties. Rather than being directly influenced by Ginsberg and the Beats, Rauvolf points to Edice Půlnoc as an example of “synchronicity” across the Iron Curtain. See Josef Rauvolf, “Prague Connection,” in The Transnational Beat 307

NOTES TO PAGES 149–155

Generation, ed. Nancy McCampbell Grace and Jennie Skerl (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 182. See also Egon Bondy, “The Roots of the Czech Literary Underground in 1949–1953,” in Views from the Inside: Czech Underground Literature and Culture 1948–1989, ed. Martin Machovec (Prague: Karolinum, 2018). 35. Müllerová, Ostermannova Viola, 9. 36. Paul Underwood, “Poets of Prague Challenge Party,” New York Times, October 20, 1963. 37. Ginsberg brought a copy of the magazine home with him; it is now deposited with his papers at Stanford University. See cover article, Rosemary Kavanová, “Poetic Venture,” Czechoslovak Life, April 1964. The issue is preserved in Series 13, Box 46, Folder 10, AGP. 38. Nebrensky, “Early Voices of Dissent,” 41. 39. Rosemary Kavanová, Freedom at a Price: An Englishwoman’s Life in Czechoslovakia (London: Verso, 1985), 212. 40. Kavanová, “Poetic Venture,” 7. 41. Kavanová, “Poetic Venture,” 7–8. 42. As H. Gordon Skilling has shown, over the course of the sixties, “the gap between the young people and the regime became more and more apparent.” By the midsixties, the student population in particular was becoming increasingly restive. H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 72. See also Nebrensky, “Early Voices of Dissent.” 43. Škvorecký, Talkin’ Moscow Blues, 54. 44. Many of the details of the next two sections are taken directly from Ginsberg’s travel notebooks, which can be found in the Allen Ginsberg Papers at Stanford University. His notes from Prague are scattered across several notebooks. See Ginsberg, “Cuba V”; Ginsberg, “Confiscated Prague Journal.” 45. Lass and Ginsberg, “King of May,” 172. 46. In several accounts of Ginsberg’s travels in 1965, it is suggested that Ginsberg never planned to visit Czechoslovakia at all and that the choice of destination was made for him in Havana. This is not the case. Ginsberg had always planned to stop in Prague on the way back to the United States, in part because of the complexities of getting to and from Cuba. The only thing that remains unclear is how long he had originally planned to be in Czechoslovakia before he decided to extend his stay. 47. Ginsberg and Ginsberg, Family Business, 228. 48. Ginsberg and Ginsberg, Family Business, 231. 49. Ginsberg and Ginsberg, Family Business, 228. Ginsberg likely meant Rabbi Loew (d. 1609), buried at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague. 50. Škvorecký, “Letter to Ms. Phillips.” 51. In his book about the Salzburg Seminar and his time in Prague, Matthiessen highlights events at which both these songs were sung. See 308

NOTES TO PAGES 155–157

F. O. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 31, 98. For my discussion of Matthiessen and “John Brown’s Body,” see Chapter 2. 52. Müllerová, Ostermannova Viola, 57. 53. Decades later, Baňka remembered, “It was a great experience, the first meeting was amazing for me. As there was a lonely and gray crowd of people marching there, unaware that they had one of the greatest poets in the world.” Müllerová, Ostermannova Viola, 43–44. 54. See Andrew Lass, “The King of May: An Update,” Massachusetts Review 39, no. 2 (1998): 165. Ginsberg’s StB file contains significant background on the Lass family. See a. č. 591839 MV, ABS, 12, 76. All page-number references from this file refer to stamped numbers in the upper right-hand corner of each page. 55. Müllerová, Ostermannova Viola, 68. 56. “Czech Slang,” Series 17, Box 46, Folder 5, AGP. 57. Ginsberg and Ginsberg, Family Business, 231. 58. Ginsberg, “Confiscated Prague Journal.” 59. See a. č. 591839 MV, ABS, 53. 60. Bohumil Hrabal, Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp, ed. László Szigeti, trans. David Short (Prague: Karolinum, 2008), 107. 61. Quoted in Rauvolf, “Prague Connection,” 192. 62. Zdeněk Stříbrný, The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 30. 63. Lass and Ginsberg, “King of May,” 173. 64. Other sources suggest that it was in fact Ginsberg’s translator Zábrana who recited the Czech versions of Ginsberg’s poems to the assembled crowd at the larger reading. See, for instance, Ginsberg’s recollection in Lass and Ginsberg, “King of May.” 65. Ginsberg and Ginsberg, Family Business, 231. 66. See a. č. 591839 MV, ABS, 53. 67. Ginsberg found ways of making himself symbolically available to audiences, even when there was a language divide. As Theodore Roszak has written about Ginsberg’s many public appearances during the sixties, “at poetry readings and teach-ins, he need not even read his verses: he need only appear in order to make this compelling statement of what young dissent is all about. The hair, the beard, the costume, the mischievous grin, the total absence of formality, pretense, or defensive posturing . . . they are enough to make him an exemplification of the countercultural life.” See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 12. 68. Igor Hájek, “Z Bradburyovského světa do pražského předjaří,” Lite­ rární noviny, March 20, 1965. The interview is titled “From a Bradbury-esque World to Prague’s Early Spring.” The reference to Ray Bradbury may seem 309

NOTES TO PAGES 158–163

odd, but Bradbury was well-known to readers in Czechoslovakia, thanks in large part to Škvorecký, who first translated excerpts from Fahrenheit 451 in the inaugural issue of Světová literatura. 69. Hájek, “Z Bradburyovského světa.” 70. The letter is quoted in Ginsberg, Iron Curtain Journals, 310. 71. For a discussion of Ginsberg’s visit to the Soviet Union that takes advantage of Russian archival sources, see Joseph Benatov, “Looking in the Iron Mirror: Eastern Europe in the American Imaginary, 1958–2001” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008). 72. Many sources, including Rauvolf, suggest that Majáles in 1965 was the first celebration in twenty years. This was also Ginsberg’s impression at the time, but he was evidently never informed about Majáles in 1956. 73. Peter Hruby, Fools and Heroes: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia (New York: Pergamon, 1980), 66. 74. As Zdeněk Nebřenský explains, “Due to the role of the youth committees in the student riots, party functionaries decided to place all youth organizations under the direct control of the Communist Party in 1958, a move which soon resulted in student disinterest in youth activities, as they changed into political rituals of particularly orthodox groups.” See Nebrensky, “Early Voices of Dissent,” 35–36. For the larger sociopolitical context of Majáles in 1956, see Kevin McDermott, Communist Czechoslovakia, 1945–89: A Political and Social History (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 94–100. For a detailed account of Majáles, see John P. C. Matthews, “Majales: The Abortive Student Revolt in Czechoslovakia in 1956” (working paper no. 24, Cold War International History Project, Washington, DC, 1998). 75. McDermott, Communist Czechoslovakia, 118. 76. On the (Beat) Road, 3. 77. An additional five hundred uniformed police officers were waiting in reserve. Srp, introduction to On the (Beat) Road, 3–6; Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution, 75. 78. Blažek, “Vyhoštění krále majálesu,” 40. 79. Lass and Ginsberg, “King of May,” 172. 80. See Allen Ginsberg, “Czech/USSR Journal,” May 4, 1965, Series 2, Box 18, Folder 4, AGP. Ginsberg reconstructed this version of his Prague journal from memory after the original was stolen. This version is also included in Iron Curtain Journals. 81. On the (Beat) Road, 9. 82. On the (Beat) Road, 9. 83. Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 440. 84. In the original Czech, the banner read, “GINSBERG KRÁLEM MAJÁLES / VÝRAZ PROLETÁŘSKÉHO INTERNACIONALISMU.” 85. On the (Beat) Road, 7; Blažek, “Vyhoštění Krále Majáles,” 41. 310

NOTES TO PAGES 163–170

86. As mentioned previously, the travel journal in which he recorded his notes throughout Majáles was later confiscated by the StB and never returned. But, as discussed early in the chapter, the StB’s Czech translation remains in the archive to this day and has been translated back into English by Eva Zábranová. 87. Lass and Ginsberg, “King of May,” 172. For an account of Ginsberg’s travels in India, see Deborah Baker, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (New York: Penguin, 2008). 88. For more on the history of the construction, and subsequent destruction, of the Stalin statue above Prague, see Hana Pichova, “The Lineup for Meat: The Stalin Statue in Prague,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008): 614–631. 89. Ginsberg, “Confiscated Prague Journal.” 90. Lass and Ginsberg, “King of May,” 177. 91. Sources cite figures ranging from 100,000 to 150,000, but the official estimate reflects the larger figure. See Blažek, “Vyhoštění krále majálesu,” 41. Noting the unanticipated crowds, the security services blamed a lack of proper event planning. See a. č. 591839 MV, ABS, 7–8. 92. For Mikhail Bakhtin’s elaboration of the concept of “carnivalesque,” see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1968). In a striking instance of synchronicity, for political reasons Rabelais and His World could not be published in the Soviet Union until 1965, the same year that Ginsberg participated in the carnival of Majáles. 93. Ginsberg, “Confiscated Prague Journal.” 94. Lass and Ginsberg, “King of May,” 178. 95. Lass and Ginsberg, “King of May,” 178–179. 96. At the time of writing, a video clip of the film is available on YouTube. See “MAJÁLES s Allenem Ginsbergem—1965—část 1–2.VOB,” filmed May 1, 1965, YouTube video, 09:00, posted February 4, 2012, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=vrB1Wb91LBM. 97. Lass and Ginsberg, “King of May,” 179. 98. Some of the files relating to Ginsberg were filed under a misspelled version of his first name (“Allan”) for decades, but now his entire file has been collected in a. č. 591839 MV, ABS. In 1998, a key document from Ginsberg’s file was translated into English and published in “Final Report of the Activities of American Poet Allen Ginsberg and His Deportation from Czechoslovakia,” Massachusetts Review 39, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 187–196. For the most complete examination of security services files related to Ginsberg’s visit, see Blažek, “Vyhoštění krále majálesu.” 99. Rauvolf, “Prague Connection,” 187. 100. Ginsberg did have his suspicions. As he wrote to Parra, Ginsberg noticed “a couple of business-suited middle-aged fellows who brought some Scotch and a tape recorder. Said they were trading officials but I supposed they were agents, perhaps I’m paranoid.” See Ginsberg, Iron Curtain Journals, 318. 311

N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 70 – 1 74

101. “Final Report,” 189. 102. “Final Report,” 189. See also On the (Beat) Road, 9–10; a. č. 591839 MV, ABS, 34–36. 103. Lass, “King of May: An Update.” 104. Ginsberg, “Confiscated Prague Journal.” 105. Ginsberg, Iron Curtain Journals, 321. 106. Rauvolf, “Prague Connection,” 187. The identity of the attacker is also confirmed in Blažek, “Vyhoštění krále majálesu.” 107. Lass, “King of May: An Update,” 181. 108. This was the charge according to Ginsberg’s memory. See Lass and Ginsberg, “King of May,” 182. 109. “Final Report,” 195. 110. According to Ginsberg’s file, “One could continue listing his homosexual encounters.” See “Final Report,” 195. 111. The Czechoslovak Criminal Code from the period is quoted in Bugge, “Swinging Sixties,” 155n445. 112. Quoted in Rauvolf, “Prague Connection,” 189. 113. “Allen Ginsberg a morálka,” Mladá Fronta, May 16, 1965. 114. I am quoting the translation of “Allen Ginsberg a morálka” that was distributed by wire services across the Eastern bloc and the West after Ginsberg’s expulsion. See “Allen Ginsberg and Morality (Translation),” Series 17, Box 46, Folder 5, AGP. 115. Rauvolf, “Prague Connection,” 188. 116. “Final Report,” 191–192. 117. “Final Report,” 188. 118. See Barry Miles, Allen Ginsberg: Beat Poet (London: Virgin, 2010), 364; Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 444. Schumacher has since changed his mind: “These points were made in these journals and I must confess, all these years later, that he was correct.” Schumacher, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Iron Curtain Journals, xii. According to Todd Tietchen, this kind of behavior was a “stock Beat theme” whenever they traveled abroad. As Tietchen writes, “these attempts to access a greater degree of moral license via transnational travel often lead to behavior that not only dissipates cosmopolitan ideals but also at times degenerates into wantonness and the victimization of others.” Although Tietchen was referring directly to Burroughs, his critique can be extended to other Beats. See Tietchen, “Ethnographies and Network,” 213. 119. Ginsberg and Ginsberg, Family Business, 234. 120. Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 412. 121. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 122. As Morris Dickstein has written, “Planet News was one of the richest, meatiest offerings of the decade, no relic of the Beat movement, no 312

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longer marginal, but close to the center of a new literary consciousness.” Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Liveright, 2015), 7–8. 123. One of the first critics to apprehend Ginsberg’s rising global status was Richard Kostelanetz, who opened his 1965 article on Ginsberg’s expulsion from Czechoslovakia by claiming, “To university students all over the world today, Allen Ginsberg is a kind of cultural hero and sometimes a true prophet.” Richard Kostelanetz, “Ginsberg Makes the World Scene,” New York Times Magazine, July 11, 1965. 124. Lass and Ginsberg, “King of May.” 125. Allen Ginsberg, interview with Thomas Clark, “Allen Ginsberg, The Art of Poetry No. 8,” Paris Review 10, no. 37 (Spring 1966). 126. Dickstein, Gates of Eden, 21. 127. Allen Ginsberg, “Kral Majales,” in Planet News, 1961–1967 (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968), 89. 128. Ginsberg, “Kral Majales,” 89. 129. Ginsberg called the poem his “big paranoid hymn” in his letter to Parra. Ginsberg, Iron Curtain Journals, 322. 130. For a discussion of the Beat, and Romantic modernist, attraction to anarchism during the Cold War, see Robert Genter, Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America, Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 35–36. 131. In his Paris Review interview, Ginsberg tells his interviewer, “I think it’s time for a new utopian system,” but he has trouble articulating exactly what he means, mentioning “Blake’s idea of Jerusalem” as one possibility. This provides another context for understanding the references to Blake and Albion in “Kral Majales.” See Ginsberg, “Art of Poetry.” 132. As H. Gordon Skilling writes, “Official criticism of the inadequacy of the ČSM mounted with each passing year, reaching a climax in late 1965 and during 1966.” Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution, 75; Vladimir V. Kusin, The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring: The Development of Reformist Ideas in Czechoslovakia 1956–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 138–139. Both Skilling and Kusin credit the emergence of a new generation of student leaders. 133. For a personal angle, see Rosemary Kavanová’s memoir. Her son Jan became a leader of the student movement, especially after the imprisonment of Müller. Kavanová, Freedom at a Price, 215. See also Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution, 77–78. 134. For a full account of the regime’s attack on the “vlasatci” and the links to Ginsberg’s visits, see Filip Pospíšil and Petr Blažek, “Vraťte nám vlasy!”: první máničky, vlasatci a hippies v komunistickém Československu (Prague: Academia, 2010). 135. Rauvolf, “Prague Connection,” 197. 313

NOTES TO PAGES 177–180

136. Balazs Trencsenyi et al., A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, vol. 2, Negotiating Modernity in the “Short Twentieth Century” and Beyond, part 1, 1918–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 415–416. 137. On the students and literary intellectuals coming together in the lead-up to the Prague Spring, see Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 55–56; Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution, 46, 79–80, 611; McDermott, Communist Czechoslovakia, 118; and for a personal angle, see Kavanová, Freedom at a Price, 224–225. 138. According to Skilling, as part of the new Action Program, “the party pledged itself to adopt a new approach which would treat the youth as allies and give them a voice in public matters, and to seek to improve their living and working conditions and recreational opportunities.” Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution, 598. 139. Bugge, “Swinging Sixties,” 150–151; Michal Svatoš, “Studentský majáes roku 1965 aneb Allen Ginsberg králem majálesu,” in Česká věda a Pražské jaro (1963–1970), ed. Blanka Zilynská and Petr Svobodný (Prague: Karolinum, 2001), 370. 140. As Kieran Williams describes, “On 16 May the annual student majales carnival, involving several thousand youths, became a sea of banners and placards criticizing the Dubcek leadership’s timidity. Yet none of these gatherings sparked any violence banners at the majales specifically declared solidarity with the peaceful demonstration in Paris on 13 May rather than the earlier Latin Quarter riots—and they were contained with ease.” Williams, Prague Spring and Its Aftermath, 86. For more on Majáles in 1968, see Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution, 72; Václav Kural and Miloš Barta, Československo roku 1968 (Praha: Parta, 1993), 90–92. 141. As Zdenek Nebrensky writes, “Voices of dissent among students could be heard much earlier than 1968.” Nebrensky, “Early Voices of Dissent,” 32. Indeed, the students were not as “quiescent” in the midsixties as Kusin suggests in Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring, 138–139. See Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution, 45; McDermott, Communist Czechoslovakia, 45; Peter Bugge, “Swinging Sixties,” 143–155. 142. Williams, Prague Spring and Its Aftermath, 179. 143. See Milan Kundera, “Český úděl,” Listy, č. 7–8, December 19, 1968. Others, including Václav Havel, disagreed. See Williams, Prague Spring and Its Aftermath, 42. 5. The Tourist: Philip Roth and the Writers from the Other Europe

1. See “TURISTA: Philip Roth,” a. č. 692253 MV, Archiv bezpečnostních složek, Prague, Czech Republic, 12–14. Here is Hoffman’s request in the 314

NOTES TO PAGES 181–184

original Czech: “Připravit operativní opatření při dalším příjezdu ROTHA do ČSSR.” The StB believed that Liehm was Roth’s key connection: “Jedná se o spojku A. J. LIEHMA na zájmové osoby do ČSSR, které se zůčastníly v roce 1968 aktivně progresivního pravicově oportunistického vývoje v ČSSR.” All translations of Roth’s StB file from the original Czech are mine. Page numbers refer to handwritten numbers in the upper right-hand corner of each page of the file. 2. Philip Roth, “In Search of Kafka and Other Answers,” New York Times Book Review, February 15, 1976, 6. 3. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 447. 4. Philip Roth, The Breast (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 3. 5. Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire (New York: Vintage, 1994), 168. 6. Zdeněk Stříbrný, The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 40. 7. See Roth, Professor of Desire, 173. 8. For more on these dramatic purges, see Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 35–37; Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 59–71. 9. Roth, Professor of Desire, 173. 10. For more on the normalization regime’s attack on Kafka, see Bren, Greengrocer, 67–68. For an account of Kafka’s ever-changing status in Czechoslovakia and the momentous 1963 conference on Kafka organized by Goldstücker, see Antonin J. Liehm, The Politics of Culture, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Grove, 1973), 280–283; Antonin J. Liehm, “Franz Kafka in Eastern Europe,” Telos 1975, no. 23 (March 20, 1975): 53–54; Veronika Tuckerova, “Reading Kafka in Prague: The Reception of Franz Kafka between the East and the West during the Cold War” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012), 221. 11. Bren, Greengrocer, 68–69. 12. “TURISTA: Philip Roth.” See references on pages 16, 21, 27, and 35. 13. According to a contemporary report on the attempts to publish Ulysses in Czech during normalization, “Now the onus for producing something acceptable to the censor rests entirely on the shoulders of the responsible editor. . . . If a book is rejected in this final stage, the entire run must be pulped, with enormous losses to the publisher. Thus the political conservatism is reinforced by the financial conservatism of someone who, naturally, does not want his firm to operate in the red.” Robert Hardy, “A Prague Odyssey,” Index on Censorship, no. 3 (May 1978): 55. 14. The proscription of certain titles at USIA libraries was most intense during the period of McCarthyism, but contradictory selection principles reigned well beyond the fifties. See Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, 315

NOTES TO PAGES 185–189

Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 113–116. 15. The play was included under its new title. Edward Albee, “Kdopak by se Kafky bál?,” in Hry, trans. Rudolf Pellar and Luba Pellarová (Prague: Orbis, 1964). 16. Years later, Roth observed, “Literature is put to all kinds of uses, public and private, but one oughtn’t to confuse those uses with the hard-won reality that an author has succeeded in realizing in a work of art. Those writers in Prague, by the way, were well aware that they were willfully violating the integrity of Kafka’s implacable imagination, though they went ahead nonetheless—and with all their might—to exploit his books to serve a political purpose during a horrible national crisis.” Philip Roth, “The Story behind ‘The Plot against America,’” New York Times, September 19, 2004. 17. Roth, Professor of Desire, 172. 18. Ivan Klíma, My Crazy Century: A Memoir, trans. Craig Cravens (New York: Grove, 2013), 308. 19. Philip Roth, Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 41. 20. Roth, Shop Talk, 44. 21. Ivan Klíma, My Crazy Century, 308. The English translation of My Crazy Century omits the adjective “American” from this passage, although Klíma writes “americký spisovatel.” This is a minor point, perhaps, but relevant to the focus of this essay. For the original, see Ivan Klíma, Moje šílené století II: 1967–1989 (Prague: Academia, 2010), 170. 22. Robert Silvers, “Letter to Philip Roth,” June 30, 1972, Box 31, Folder 10, PRP. 23. Antonín Liehm, “Letter to Philip Roth,” August 6, 1972, Box 20, Folder 1, PRP. 24. Liehm, Politics of Culture, 46. 25. Roth, “In Search of Kafka and Other Answers,” 7. 26. Roth, Shop Talk, 43. 27. Quotes like this from Roth haven’t always been helpful: “By the time it was over Vera looked like she’d had sex with both of us . . . pale, hair all over her face, and very excited from the conversation.” See Claudia Roth Pierpont, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 91. 28. Roth, Shop Talk, 46. 29. Friederike Kind-Kovács and Jessie Labov, eds., Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media during and after Socialism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 9. Jonathan Bolton also discusses the key role played by many women as copyists for samizdat presses but argues that “the overwhelming attention paid to a few male dissidents needs to be expanded in

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order to include more women, and to consider gender roles inside dissident thinking.” Bolton, Worlds of Dissent, 269. 30. Robert Silvers, “Letter to Philip Roth,” September 29, 1975, Box 35, Folder 13, PRP. 31. Ludvik Vaculik, “An Open Letter to the Secretary General,” New York Review of Books, October 30, 1975. 32. Bolton, Worlds of Dissent, 241. As Bolton points out, this stage of Vaculík’s career was far from devoid of written work. During the 1970s, he produced dozens of short feuilletons that were distributed in samizdat, some of which made it into translation. Most importantly, he completed Český snář (The Czech dream book), a 466-page manuscript that chronicled his daily life during the year 1979. Although this work has not yet been published in English, see Bolton’s extended discussion, 243–265. 33. Vaculik, “Open Letter.” 34. Václav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990 (New York: Vintage, 1992), 66. 35. Havel, Open Letters, 65. 36. Antonín Liehm, “Letter to Philip Roth,” n.d., Box 20, Folder 2, PRP. 37. Milan Kundera, “Letter to Philip Roth,” June 9, 1975, Box 17, Folder 14, PRP. 38. “Country Report #1: Czechoslovakia” (PEN American Center, August 1973). According to the text accompanying the report, the country reports “will be concerned with the writer in relation to his government, with the workings of restrictive laws and practices by which the writer is denied the right to work and publish freely. They will be concerned with violations on the terms of the international covenants to which the country is a signatory, particularly the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the Universal Copyright Convention, whose preamble states that UCC is intended to ‘ensure respect for the rights of the individual and encourage the development of literature, the sciences and the arts’ and to ‘facilitate a wider dissemination of works of the human mind.’” Future reports were planned for Greece, Portugal, Brazil, USSR, Indonesia, Spain, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Philippines, South Vietnam, and the United States—but only Roth’s country report on Czechoslovakia was ever published. 39. In further emphasizing the Kafka connection, Roth quotes the president of the French League for the Rights of Man, who declared, “In the land of Franz Kafka blind terror and an absurd revenge reflex are raging again.” “Country Report #1.” 40. Philip Roth, “Letter to Allen Ginsberg,” August 30, 1974, Series 1, Box 167, Folder 53, AGP. 41. The other names listed in Roth’s letter are Vladimír Blažek, Jiří Brabec, Vladimír Karfík, Sergej Machonin, Karel Kostroun, Jiří Gruša, Jaro-

317

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slav Putík, Petr Kabeš, Jan Trefulka, Karol Sidon, Milan Uhde, Alexandr Kliment, and Zdeněk Pochop. 42. Claudia Roth Pierpont also lists Arthur Miller, Arthur Schlesinger, and Alison Lurie as contributors to the Czech Ad Hoc Fund. For additional details on the Ad Hoc Fund, see Pierpont, Roth Unbound, 92. 43. Jerzy Kosiński, “Letter to Philip Roth,” June 24, 1975, Box 17, Folder 12, PRP. 44. As Roth told Pierpont, “It was a hole in the fabric and it worked.” See Pierpont, Roth Unbound, 92. 45. Philip Roth, Philip Roth: Novels and Other Narratives 1986–1991, ed. Ross Miller (New York: Library of America, 2008), 540. 46. Pierpont, Roth Unbound, 92–98. 47. Milan Kundera, “Letter to Philip Roth,” April 25, 1978, Box 17, Folder 14, PRP. 48. I have preserved all grammatical and spelling errors from Kundera’s letters to Roth. Kundera’s wife, Vera, who also served as an interpreter whenever he met with Roth, proofread many of his English letters, but Kundera’s most impassioned letters to Roth do not appear to have been edited. Also, the underlining in this quotation comes from Roth’s copy of the letter. 49. “Country Report #1: Czechoslovakia.” 50. In addition to editing the Penguin Modern European Poets series, Alvarez wrote a book comparing the politics of literature in the Eastern bloc and the United States. See Al Alvarez, Under Pressure: The Writer in Society; Eastern Europe and the U.S.A. (New York: Penguin, 1965). For a discussion of Alvarez, Holub, and other poetic transmissions during the 1960s, see Justin Quinn, Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 98–142. 51. In Czech, the titles are Směšné lásky and Morčata, respectively. For the remainder of this chapter, I will refer to works according to their English titles. 52. According to Derek Seyer, Vaculík’s novel was not consistent with “the newly established tasks of the publishing house.” Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 267. 53. For more on tamizdat, see Kind-Kovács and Labov, Samizdat, Tamiz­ dat, and Beyond; Peter Steiner, “On Samizdat, Tamizdat, Magnitizdat, and Other Strange Words That Are Difficult to Pronounce,” Poetics Today 29, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 613–628. 54. “TURISTA: Philip Roth,” 20. 55. Philip Roth, “Letter to Editor,” September 10, 1975, Box 27, Folder 1, PRP. 56. See front matter in each volume. In volumes published after the initial print run (1975–1976), “America” was changed to “the West.” 318

NOTES TO PAGES 197–203

57. Irving Howe, introduction to The Case Worker, by George Konrád, trans. Paul Aston, Writers from the Other Europe (New York: Penguin, 1987), viii. 58. Kundera returned the favor. See Charles Sabatos, “Can the Dissident Speak? The Czech Woman Writer in the Work of Philip Roth and Dominik Tatarka,” World Literature Studies 9, no. 4 (January 1, 2017): 77. 59. Philip Roth, “Introducing Milan Kundera,” in Laughable Loves, by Milan Kundera, trans. Suzanne Rappaport (New York: Penguin, 1975), xi. 60. Elizabeth Pochoda, introduction to The Farewell Party, by Milan Kundera, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Penguin, 1977), ix. 61. Milan Kundera, “Letter to Philip Roth,” October 5, 1977, Box 17, Folder 14, PRP. 62. Milan Kundera, “Letter to Philip Roth,” n.d., Box 17, Folder 14, PRP. 63. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New York: Perennial Classics, 2003), 9. 64. Kundera, Art of the Novel, 13. 65. Kundera, Art of the Novel, 14. 66. Kundera, Art of the Novel, 44. 67. Pierpont, Roth Unbound, 93. 68. “Writing American Fiction” is reprinted in Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others (New York: Vintage, 2001), 117–136. 69. Ross Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 57. The Other Europe series is an essential context for understanding Posnock’s transnational genealogy, which he only briefly mentions. This is a missed opportunity. In addition to discovering affinities with his own art, Roth was actively appropriating Gombrowicz, Schulz, and other writers to construct the larger counter-realist genealogy of the Other Europe. 70. Ross Posnock, “Planetary Circles: Philip Roth, Emerson, Kundera,” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 141–142. 71. See Marcel Arbeit, “Poe in the Czech Republic,” in Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities, ed. Lois Vines (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999). 72. Philip Roth, “Letter to Josef Škvorecký,” August 6, 1980, Box 58, Folder 10, JSPH. 73. Although Škvorecký may have overstated Poe’s influence on Hrabal, his 1949 short story “Kain” was indeed a kind of prototype for Closely Watched Trains. A later version was published under the longer title “Legendy o Kainovi” (The legends of Cain) in 1968. 74. See Josef Škvorecký, “American Motifs in the Work of Bohumil Hrabal,” Cross Currents 1 (1982): 207–208. 319

NOTES TO PAGES 203–205

75. Ludvík Vaculík, The Guinea Pigs, trans. Káča Poláčková (New York: Penguin, 1975), 6. 76. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, for instance, calls The Guinea Pigs “a Kafkaesque allegory of guinea pigs and their world; their arbitrary and sadistic treatment by their once-beneficent master serves as a metaphor for the totalitarian state and its treatment of its citizens.” Jean-Albert Bédé and William B. Edgerton, eds., Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 834. 77. In “The Black Cat,” the motive for the pet owner’s cruelty is said to be perverseness, “an unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself.” Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1996), 599. 78. Vaculík, Guinea Pigs, 6. 79. Roth, Shop Talk, 62. 80. Schulz figures prominently in fictions by Cynthia Ozick, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nicole Krauss. See Emily Miller Burdick, “The Ghost of the Holocaust in the Construction of Jewish American Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 348–352. 81. Roth, Shop Talk, 62. 82. Milan Kundera, “Letter to Philip Roth,” April 1985, Box 17, Folder 14, PRP. 83. Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984, 33. 84. Jessie Labov, Transatlantic Central Europe (New York: Central European University Press, 2019), 65–74. 85. Kundera, “Tragedy of Central Europe,” 35. Kundera himself redrew those borders depending on his audience. See Charles Sabatos, “Shifting Contexts: The Boundaries of Milan Kundera’s Central Europe,” in Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Brian James Baer (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2011). 86. For example, see Timothy Garton Ash, “Does Central Europe Exist?,” New York Review of Books, October 9, 1986; Jacques Rupnik, The Other Europe (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Tony Judt, “The Rediscovery of Central Europe,” Daedalus 119, no. 1 (January 1, 1990): 23–54. See further discussion in Balazs Trencsenyi et al., A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, vol. 2, Negotiating Modernity in the “Short Twentieth Century” and Beyond, part 2, 1968–2018 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 130. 87. Kundera, “Letter to Philip Roth,” April 1985. 88. Philip Roth, “Philip Roth, the Art of Fiction No. 84,” interview with Hermione Lee, Paris Review, Fall 1984. 320

NOTES TO PAGES 206–208

89. “Romantika útlaku” was published in the May 1985 issue of the samizdat journal Obsah. The title was actually taken directly from an excerpt of Roth’s interview that was published in Harper’s Magazine in February 1985. 90. Ivan Klima, “The Writer and Unfreedom,” trans. George Theiner, Harper’s, December 1985, 30. 91. Klima, “Writer and Unfreedom,” 31. 92. Jack Knowles, “‘How the Other Half Lives’: American Pastoral and Roth’s Other Europe,” Philip Roth Studies 16, no. 1 (2020): 14–32. 93. Michael Kimmage has suggested that Roth’s historical “mood” in the American trilogy “was European, and more Eastern European than Western.” Michael Kimmage, In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 5. 94. Many critics, including Posnock, have referred to Roth’s later novel The Counterlife (1986) as the crucial pivot in Roth’s development as a novelist. In fact, Roth’s manuscript drafts show that The Counterlife itself originated in an early version of The Prague Orgy. 95. Manuscript drafts of The Prague Orgy can be found in Boxes 189 and 190 in PRP. In a comment attached to one of his drafts of the novella, Roth writes, “The diary notes aren’t mine, though for many years after the 1968 Prague Spring, I was a frequent visitor to Prague and came to have some good friends there, particularly among the outcast novelists and poets. Any impressions I gathered, I eventually turned over to the fictional American novelist I call Nathan Zuckerman, and now, nearly a decade after I was last permitted to visit Czechoslovakia, Zuckerman, having plundered my memories and recollections, has composed a novella-length diary of his own about a quixotic journey he makes to Prague in 1976 to rescue from oblivion two hundred unpublished stories by an unknown Yiddish writer.” Roth, “Notes,” Box 190, Folder 5. Evidence of the alternative title can be found in “Copy A,” Box 189, Folder 1, PRP. 96. Philip Roth, The Prague Orgy (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 59. 97. Roth, Prague Orgy, 38. 98. Joseph Benatov argues that The Prague Orgy “gives voice to an array of internal Czech positions” to deconstruct the dominant Cold War narrative of “Eastern European suffering and oppression.” This narrative proceeds according to what he calls the “logic of tamizdat,” a discourse “symptomatic of the broader politics of representing life behind the iron curtain.” Joseph Benatov, “Demystifying the Logic of Tamizdat: Philip Roth’s Anti-spectacular Literary Politics,” Poetics Today 30, no. 1 (March 1, 2009): 107. 99. In Deception, Roth retorts, “No. I went to Czechoslovakia for the jokes.” Roth, Novels and Other Narratives, 541. Blake Bailey provides more context in his biography, suggesting that sex parties hosted by Jiří Mucha were the biographical basis for Klíma’s jest. Bailey seems to have missed the point of the joke. Nonetheless, his interest in these rumors might be a different kind 321

NOTES TO PAGES 208–210

of tell. See Blake Bailey, Philip Roth: The Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021), 383. 100. However, as Charles Sabatos points out, “Roth’s fictional voices are not fully free of traditional roles: while Bolotka uses sex as a metaphor for politics, Olga uses politics as a metaphor for sex, dividing even these liberated dissidents along gendered forms of expression.” Sabatos, “Can the Dissident Speak?,” 79. 101. Roth, Prague Orgy, 80. 102. Roth, Prague Orgy, 61. 103. Roth, Prague Orgy, 83. 104. Roth, Prague Orgy, 86. 105. Roth, Prague Orgy, 85. 106. Roth, Prague Orgy, 65. 107. See Barbara Sproul, “The Great Gift Friends Offer to One Another,” 2022, Philip Roth Personal Library, Newark Public Library. Sproul was also kind enough to speak to me and confirm some of the key details included in this chapter. 108. According to Kenneth Cmiel, “by the middle of the seventies, the information revolution on human rights was in full swing and the networks of activists increasingly agile. Communication circuits that had not existed ten years before were confidently pushing politically charged information around the globe.” Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1238. 109. Pierpont, Roth Unbound, 87. 110. Barbara Sproul’s reports in the New York Review of Books include “Czech Crackdown,” July 16, 1981; “Czech Prisoner,” April 1, 1982; “Before the Law,” December 8, 1983; “The Plight of Petr Uhl,” January 20, 1983; “Prisoners of Conscience,” February 2, 1989. 111. See Friederike Kind-Kovács, Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (New York: Central European University Press, 2014). 112. Foundational works in this growing area of study include Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012); Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). See also Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, Human Rights Breakthrough: Histories of the Global 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 113. Mark Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 170–179. 114. Bradley, World Reimagined, 166. It’s worth noting that Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle was also a selection in 1968 and became a source of far greater controversy. 322

NOTES TO PAGES 210–213

115. Roth refers to the “qualities of ironic wit, common sense, humane feeling, and disarming intellectual penetration that are Vaculík’s distinguishing characteristics as a political spokesman and an imaginative writer— qualities he holds in such abundance that, to both enemies and friends, he has come to seem an immovable obstruction in the path of a regime that would appear to like nothing better than to commit cultural genocide upon its own people.” “Country Report #1: Czechoslovakia.” 116. See Danilo Kiš, “Variations on the Theme of Central Europe,” Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture 6 (1987): 1–14. For an illuminating discussion of this essay alongside Kundera’s writing on “Central Europe,” see Labov, Transatlantic Central Europe, 48–54. 117. Historians now credit Konrád, along with Havel, for articulating a moral and antipolitical conception of human rights that rejected Cold War realism, with significant consequences for the direction of the human rights movement in the late seventies and eighties. While the rise of antipolitics has featured prominently in recent scholarship on the human rights breakthrough, much less attention has been paid to antipolitics as a literary style. But human rights, as a form of cultural antipolitics, must also be understood as a literary discourse that had to be translated and reframed for a Western audience. See György Konrád, Antipolitics: An Essay (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984). For an influential and revisionary account of the history of human rights discourse that places Havel and Konrád’s “antipolitics” at the heart of its argument, see Moyn, Last Utopia, 120–175. 118. György Konrád, Peter B. Reddaway, and Barbara Sproul, “The East: Three Reports,” New York Review of Books, November 5, 1981. Konrád’s essay is translated by Ivan Sanders, who also translated one of Konrád’s novels for the Other Europe series. 6. Across the Gray Zone: American Writers and the Czech Jazz Section

1. “Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, March 23, 1987, 25. 2. John Updike, “Letter to William Shawn,” January 10, 1987, Box 119, Folder 1793, JUP. 3. “Notes and Comment,” 25. 4. In recent years, the idea of a Gray Zone—defined as “the ambiguous realm between the official culture of former socialist countries on the one hand, and openly dissenting cultural activities on the other”—has made a comeback among scholars who study Eastern bloc cultures of dissent. By adopting the term as both “a category of analysis and as an empirical subject,” these scholars show how the Gray Zone can help us to “dismantle the sharp dichotomies and oppositions inherited from the Cold War paradigm between the oppressive state and dissident heroes.” See Maciej Maryl et al., “New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent: Joint 323

NOTES TO PAGES 213–215

Review Report” (research report, Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, May 2019), 10. 5. See Primo Levi, “The Gray Zone,” in The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), 25–56. Levi uses the phrase to describe the complex “network of human relationships” that operated in the “concentrationary universe” of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps, which, he argues, “could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors.” Rather than remembering the Holocaust as a black-and-white moral drama, Levi reveals shades of complicity. Levi frames his discussion of the Gray Zone with a broader rejection of the “Manichaean tendency” to divide the past into stable ethical categories: between collaboration and resistance, friend and enemy, hero and coward. Debates still rage about whether it’s ethically appropriate to extend Levi’s “zone of ambiguity” to cover other historical situations. See Michael Rothberg’s discussion of the concept in Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). 6. Jiřina Šiklová, “The ‘Gray Zone’ and the Future of Dissent in Czechoslovakia,” Social Research 57, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 347–363. Šiklová suggests that the expression had been coined a year earlier, in 1988, in a samizdat article for specialists on Czech historiography. See Rudolf Prokop, Ladislav Sádecký, and Karel Bína, “České dějepisectví včera, dnes a zítra,” Historické studie 22, no. 11 (January 1988). But Šiklová also makes it clear that its meanings were shaped through “conversations with friends abroad.” 7. Barbara Day also uses the phrase “gray zone” in her history of Czechoslovakia’s “underground universities” during this era. Her sense of the term’s meaning is very close to Šiklová’s, as she describes attempts to break down the boundary between the academic “gray zone” and the “ghetto” of Prague’s cultural underground. Barbara Day, Velvet Philosophers (London: Claridge, 2000). 8. Special thanks to Peter Bugge for allowing me to read his paper “Padesát odstínů šedi. O vymezení postavení Jazzové sekce v normalizačním Československu,” a version of which was presented at “Nedejte se – nedáme se – existujeme!,” an interdisciplinary colloquium on the Jazz Section, Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, Prague, Czech Republic, September 21, 2016. I have included my translation of the original Czech-language quotation from “mk,” included in Bugge’s paper: “Pro mk je „šedivá zóna‘ tak vědomým hledáním třetí, umělecky svobodné cesty mezi zpolitizovanými póly režimního a disidentského umění.” 9. Josef Škvorecký, “Hipness at Noon,” New Republic 191, no. 24 (December 17, 1984): 28. 10. Mike Zwerin, “Imprisoning Jazz in Czech ‘Gray Zone,’” International Herald Tribune, December 3, 1986, 11. 11. “Notes and Comment,” 25. 12. The Jazz Section’s continued prominence has been encouraged by the archival efforts of former members. In addition to two books published by 324

NOTES TO PAGES 215–220

former leaders of the Jazz Section in the 1990s, veterans of the organization also maintain an archival website at https://jazzova-sekce.cz. The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů) maintains its own website commemorating the Jazz Section: https://jazz.ustrcr.cz /docs.html. See Karel Srp, Výjimečné stavy: povolání jazzová sekce (Prague: Pragma, 1994); Vladimír Kouřil, Jazzová sekce v čase a nečase, 1971–1987 (Prague: Torst, 1999). 13. The petition was also reprinted in Cross Currents. See “American Artists Protest Arrest of Jazz Section,” Cross Currents 6 (1987): 65–66. 14. In addition to the range of samizdat publications being produced inside Czechoslovakia, the other significant players in this transnational publishing circuit included the Palach Press in London, the Ivan Medek Press Service in Vienna, the magazine Svedectvi (Testimony) based in Paris, Listy (Leaves, or Sheets) founded in Rome, the small publisher Rozmluvy (Conversations) in London, and the larger publisher Index Verlag based in West Germany, which was something of a competitor with Sixty-Eight Publishers. 15. Josef Škvorecký, “Letter to Philip Roth,” February 22, 1974, Box 30, Folder 15, PRP. 16. Blake Bailey, Philip Roth: The Biography (New York: Norton, 2021), 629. 17. Philip Roth, “Letter to Allen Ginsberg,” October 17, 1985, Series 1, Box 286, Folder 10, AGP. 18. Josef Škvorecký, “Philip Roth: Zuckerman Bound,” n.d., Box 7, Folder 7, JSPF. 19. “Letter to Škvorecký,” dated May 20, 1995 (but must be 1985), Box 58, Folder 10, JSPH. 20. “Letter to Škvorecký.” 21. Philip Roth, Pražské orgie, trans. Jiřiina Kynclová and Karel Kyncl (Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1988). The samizdat version was distributed through Časopis SPUSA, a publication associated with the Friends of USA Society (Společnost přátel USA). The afterword to the Czech edition of Roth’s novella was written by none other than Igor Hájek, the author of the 1959 essay on the Beats titled “Americká bohéma” (American Bohemia). 22. Josef Škvorecký, “Josef Škvorecký, the Art of Fiction No. 112,” interview with John A. Glusman, Paris Review 31, no. 112 (Winter 1989): 114. 23. Škvorecký, “Art of Fiction,” 148. 24. It’s hard to imagine anyone besides Paul Wilson translating this novel. Before becoming an important translator of Czech writing, the Canadian-born Wilson had been a member of the band Plastic People of the Universe in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. His own experience as a cultural intermediary between Prague and North America during this period would come in very useful in translating The Engineer of Human Souls. 25. This quote, which originated in a letter from Kundera to Škvorecký, was included as a blurb on the back of the English-language translation of 325

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Engineer of Human Souls. See Jeffrey M. Heath, ed., Profiles in Canadian Literature 7 (Toronto: Dundurn, 1991), 149. 26. James Lasdun, “The Great or the Good? Recent Fiction,” Encounter, August 1984, 47. 27. Antonín J. Liehm and Peter Kussi, eds., The Writing on the Wall: An Anthology of Contemporary Czech Literature (Princeton, NJ: Karz-Cohl, 1983). Edited by Antonín Liehm and the translator Peter Kussi, the volume includes works by Lumír Čivrný, Ladislav Dvořák, Jiří Gruša, Jiří Hájek, Václav Havel, Jiří Hochman, Jaroslav Hutka, Eva Kantůrková, Ivan Klíma, Alexander Klement, Pavel Kohout, Eda Kriseová, Pavel Landovský, Segej Machonin, Milan Šimečka, Jan Trefulka, Vlastimil Třešňák, and Ludvík Vaculík. 28. Josef Škvorecký, “Prague Winter,” American Spectator, September 1983, 23. It’s worth noting that Škvorecký uses “dissident” without quotation marks but does note that “they themselves don’t like this label, since it’s not they but rather the government that dissents from the Constitution.” 29. The high-profile conference also drew the participation of Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, Josef Brodsky, and others. See Josef Škvorecký, Talkin’ Moscow Blues, ed. Sam Solecki (Toronto: L. and O. Dennys, 1988), 249. 30. Bugge, “Padesát odstínů šedi.” 31. Dorůžka writes, “Takže Šero má opravdu širokou škálu.” A more literal translation would be “So, Dusk has a wide spectrum.” Lubomír Dorůžka et al., Na shledanou v lepších časech: Dopisy Josefa Škvoreckého a Lubomíra Dorůžky z doby marnosti (1968–1989), Vyd. 1 (Prague: Books and Cards SGJŠ, 2011), 346. 32. Škvorecký, “Hipness at Noon,” 28. 33. “The fact that an organization not permitted de jure emerged de facto, and that although formally dependent on the Musicians’ Union, it acted with remarkable independence,” Škvorecký suggests, “was made possible by the existence of what I like to call the Gray Zone.” Škvorecký, “Hipness at Noon,” 28. 34. Škvorecký, “Hipness at Noon,” 28. 35. Škvorecký, “Hipness at Noon,” 32. 36. Škvorecký, “Hipness at Noon,” 28. 37. Škvorecký, “Hipness at Noon,” 28. 38. A digitized version of this issue is available on the website of the Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů (Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes) in Prague: https://jazz.ustrcr.cz/docs.html. The website maintained by former members of the Jazz Section also includes a full list of their publications, including issue 26 of Jazz: https://jazzova-sekce.cz/bulletin-jazz-c-26/ 39. Škvorecký estimates that these quasi-samizdat publications reached an audience of one hundred thousand readers, but it’s unclear how he arrives at this figure. See Josef Škvorecký, “Hipness at Dusk,” Cross Currents 6 (1987): 326

NOTES TO PAGES 226–228

54. As Peter Bugge and others point out, even if the figure is much lower, the semilegal status of the Jazz Section allowed their publications to reach a much larger audience than either the musical underground or other samizdat presses. 40. Marcel Arbeit and Michal Peprník, “Living Cultural Plurality: A Tribute to Josef Jařab,” Moravian Journal of Literature and Film 1, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 9. 41. Josef Jařab, “Understanding African American Culture: A Central European View,” 1996 All-University Excellence in Diversity Lecture, JMScene Newsletter 3, no. 3 (1997). 42. Notably, Baldwin’s novel was translated by Michael Žantovský. See Josef Jařab, “Up from Invisibility,” in A New Literary History of America, ed. Werner Sollors and Greil Marcus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 733–734. 43. Hana Ulmanova, “The Reception of American Literature in Czechoslovakia under Communism: 1945–1989,” American Studies International 33, no. 2 (October 1995): 36. 44. The anthology wouldn’t be published until 1989, when it was finally released by Odeon. 45. For a discussion of and extensive excerpts from Czechoslovak government reports on the Jazz Section trial, as well as StB files on the larger operation targeting the organization, see Karel Tomek, “Akce JAZZ,” Securitas Imperii 10 (2003). Peter Bugge makes use of Tomek’s work in his indispensable article “Normalization and the Limits of the Law: The Case of the Czech Jazz Section,” East European Politics & Societies 22, no. 2 (May 1, 2008): 282–318. 46. See Josef Škvorecký, “Letter to Leon Wieseltier,” May 5, 1986, Folder 7, Box 39, JSPH. 47. Established at the University of Michigan in 1982, Cross Currents was one of several publications at the heart of a new “transatlantic Central European imaginary,” as Jessie Labov has argued, the product of an “entire system of cross-border circulation of texts and ideas.” Jessie Labov, Transatlantic Central Europe (New York: Central European University Press, 2019), 12. 48. “Letter to Norman Podhoretz,” November 18, 1986, Folder 8, Box 56, JSPH. 49. Here, Škvorecký’s description of the Gray Zone begins to converge with Šiklová’s articulation of the concept two years later. 50. “When, after thirteen years of existence, the Jazz Section was finally, for all practical purposes, forced out of existence,” Škvorecký points out, “the event went unnoticed in the West.” He conceded, “the bloodless demise of a small group of jazz lovers does pale in the reddish light of a world where even genocide is of declining newsworthiness.” Škvorecký, “Hipness at Noon,” 27. 51. Bugge, “Normalization and the Limits of the Law,” 305. 52. Bugge, “Normalization and the Limits of the Law,” 294. 327

NOTES TO PAGES 229–231

53. The original op-ed appeared in the New York Times on December 14, 1986. 54. “Notes and Comment,” 26. 55. See John Updike, “On Not Being a Dove,” Commentary, March 1, 1989, 28. 56. John Updike, The Complete Henry Bech (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2001), 8. 57. Bech is, in fact, a composite of several postwar American Jewish writers (and Updike himself, of course). In a metafictional foreword to the story collection, Bech acknowledges his own passing resemblance to a number of Jewish American novelists: Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, I. B. Singer, Henry Roth, J. D. Salinger, and, perhaps most tellingly, Alexander Portnoy. According to Malcom Bradbury, Henry Bech “is in the tradition of Jewish-American modernism, in line with the fiction of angst, alienation and protest. His literary culture is the world of Partisan Review and Commentary; he comes from the counter-strand of American fiction, the dissenting, immigrant, anguished, and extreme.” In the first Bech story, “The Bulgarian Poetess,” Updike describes how Bech “felt himself sink, in his fiction, deeper and deeper into eclectic sexuality and bravura narcissism, as his search for plain truth carried him further and further into treacherous realms of fantasy and, lately, silence.” This sounds an awful lot like Roth at his point of midcareer crisis. Updike, Complete Henry Bech, xii, 40. 58. John Updike, “Letter to Philip Roth,” April 4, 1985, Box 35, Folder 10, PRP. Updike’s postcard to Roth, dated 1986, is in the same folder. 59. In 1981, Updike again visited the Luerses at their post abroad—this time in Caracas, Venezuela—where Bill Luers was now the US ambassador. Bech would also make the trip in one of Updike’s short stories. See Adam Begley, Updike (New York: Harper, 2014), 263, 313–314. 60. Updike to Luers, November 20, Box 252, Folder 4893, JUP. The year is not specified in the original letter. 61. Like Updike, Edward Albee had met the Luerses in Moscow in the sixties, while on a tour of the Eastern bloc that also took him to Czechoslovakia. The Czech title of Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? is Kdopak by se Kafky bál? The translation was completed in 1964 by Rudolf Pellar a Luba Pellarová, who also translated Roth and Updike during these years. The title might have been updated to Who’s Afraid of Václav Havel? in the eighties. Wendy Luers recalls the stir that was created when Havel appeared at the performance of Sam Shepard’s play Hawk Moon, which Albee directed during his visit to Prague in 1985. For brief references to both of Albee’s trips to Czechoslovakia, see Mel Gussow, Edward Albee: A Singular Journey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 205, 332. 62. Wendy Laber, quoted in Friederike Kind-Kovács, Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (New York: Central European University Press, 2014), 319. 328

NOTES TO PAGES 231–236

63. Ivan Klíma, “The Unexpected Merits of Oppression,” Law & Literature 2, no. 1 (1990): 37–42. 64. “Country Reader: Czech Republic–Czechoslovakia,” Oral History, Country Reader Series (Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training), https://adst.org/Readers/Czech-Republic.pdf, 218–219. 65. “Notes and Comment,” 25. 66. Škvorecký, “Hipness at Dusk,” 55. 67. Sarah Brouillette, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). 68. Sam Westgate, “Letter to John Updike,” December 22, 1986, Box 119, Folder 1793, JUP. 69. “Notes and Comment,” 25. 70. Harilaos Stecopoulos, “Cold War Postmodernism,” in Postmodern/ Postwar and After: Rethinking American Literature, ed. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden, New American Canon (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 73–80. 71. Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 72. Stecopoulos, “Cold War Postmodernism,” 75. 73. John Updike, Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel (New York: Knopf, 1998), 8. 74. Begley, Updike, 314. 75. John Updike, “Bech in Czech,” New Yorker, April 13, 1987, 34. 76. Updike, “Bech in Czech,” 49. 77. Updike writes, “His presence here had squeezed these tattered volumes—all out of print, since Communist editions are not replenished—up from the private libraries of Prague.” Updike, “Bech in Czech,” 35. 78. See interview with William Kiehl in “Country Reader,” 221. 79. More than one Czech translation of “Bech in Czech” circulated in samizdat form in Czechoslovakia in 1988. Hájek’s version, “Bech co Čech,” was published in 150000 slov, a samizdat journal put out by the émigré publishing organization Index. Another version, “Bech v Česku,” translated by Saša Vondra, appeared in Revolver Revue. See Marcel Arbeit, Bibliografie americké literatury v českých překladech (Brno: Votobia, 2000), 1623–1625. 80. Updike crossed out the word “dissident” in an early draft of the story, replacing it with the more subtle “unofficial.” The after-party in the story takes place at an apartment that may have been based on the home of Ivan and Helena Klíma. 81. Updike writes, “The Russians could not quite seal off this old heart of Europe as tightly as they could, say, Latvia or Kazakhstan.” Updike, “Bech in Czech,” 36. 82. Updike, “Bech in Czech,” 48. 83. Přidal was likely the mode for Vítěslav Syzygy, the Czech translator with an “unpronounceable” name in Updike’s story. In 1986, Přidal had visited 329

NOTES TO PAGES 236–242

Updike at his home in Massachusetts after Updike returned from Prague. The Czech translator was on his way to a fellowship at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. As the US Embassy official William Kiehl wrote to Updike in a letter, “Your fictional Antonin Přidal et al brought back a lot of good memories and have prodded me to thank you for taking such good care of A. P. during his stay in the U.S. last winter.” William Kiehl, “Letter to John Updike,” April 25, 1987, Box 248, Folder 1, JUP. 84. Updike, “Bech in Czech,” 49. 85. See “American Artists Protest Arrest of Jazz Section,” 65–66. 86. Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 87. See Toni Morrison, preface to Robert L. Bernstein, Speaking Freely: My Life in Publishing and Human Rights (New York: New Press, 2016), ix. 88. Bernstein, Speaking Freely, 148. 89. See Jeri Laber, The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 242. 90. Laber, Courage of Strangers, 244. 91. It seems their efforts were at least somewhat successful. For instance, at one point, the British representative to the official forum indirectly addressed a Czechoslovak delegate making a speech in favor of “cultural freedom”: “I would commend to him the Jazz Section of the Union of Musicians in his country which is currently under a cloud.” See Timothy Garton Ash’s reporting on the Cultural Forum for The Spectator. 92. A. Heneka et al., A Besieged Culture: Czechoslovakia Ten Years after Helsinki (Stockholm: Charta 77 Foundation and International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, 1985). 93. This series has recently been republished in Jiří Kolář, Responses / Kafka’s Prague, trans. Ryan Scott (Prague: Twisted Spoon, 2021). 94. The Soviet Union released the dissident Yuri Orlov a month before the Helsinki Review Conference in Vienna in November 1986; meanwhile, Poland released almost all of the remaining imprisoned Solidarity activists. See Laber, Courage of Strangers, 258. 95. Violations of the Helsinki Accords, Czechoslovakia: A Report Prepared for the Helsinki Review Conference, Vienna, November 1986, Helsinki Watch Report (New York: US Helsinki Watch Committee, 1986), 3. 96. In her introductory remarks, Sontag refers to Hrabal’s novel as “one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature.” She also calls the appearance of the novel, translated by Michael Henry Heim, in Cross Currents “a great event in my life.” A recording of the event is currently available on PEN’s website: https://archive.pen.org/asset?id=152. 97. A copy of the postcard is preserved in Folder 6, Box 39, JSPH. 98. “Discordant Notes in Prague,” Time, March 23, 1987. 330

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99. Kenneth Roth, “Prague and the Perils of Jazz,” Commonweal 114, no. 11 (June 5, 1987): 353. 100. As if anticipating this exchange, supporters of the Jazz Section had adopted a new slogan: “EXISTUJEME” (We exist). Soon, both the slogan and the insignia of the Jazz Section—a winged pencil sprouting from the body of a saxophone—began to appear around Prague, stamped in ink onto public surfaces across the city. According to one StB report, an agent even discovered one of these stamps inside a bathroom stall at the courthouse during the trial. 101. For a discussion of and extensive excerpts from Czechoslovak government reports on the Jazz Section trial, as well as StB files on the larger operation targeting the organization, see Tomek, “Akce JAZZ.” 102. “Notes and Comment,” 26. 103. Roth, “Prague and the Perils of Jazz,” 354. 104. Škvorecký, “Hipness at Dusk,” 60. 105. Josef Škvorecký, The Engineer of Human Souls: An Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life, Women, Fate, Dreams, the Working Class, Secret Agents, Love, and Death, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1984), 126. 106. This shouldn’t be surprising. The “antipolitical politics” of human rights and dissent at the end of the Cold War were nothing if not coalitional. 107. Sam Westgate, “Letter to John Updike,” December 22, 1986, Box 119, Folder 1793, JUP. 108. Norman Podhoretz, “An Open Letter to Milan Kundera,” Commentary 78, no. 4 (1984): 34. 109. Škvorecký, “Art of Fiction,” 154. 110. Josef Škvorecký, “Letter to Norman Podhoretz,” December 4, 1986, Folder 8, Box 56, JSPH. 111. Norman Podhoretz, “Letter to Josef Škvorecký,” November 26, 1986, Folder 8, Box 56, JSPH. 112. Škvorecký mentions this visit in a 1996 letter, writing, “If you are interested in that—but why should you?—read my novel The Engineer of Human Souls.” Josef Škvorecký, “Letter to Ms. Phillips,” October 11, 1996, Box 62, Allen Ginsberg Correspondence, JSPF. 113. Michele Hardesty, “‘If the Writers of the World Get Together’: Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Literary Solidarity in Sandinista Nicaragua,” in The Transnational Beat Generation, ed. Nancy M. Grace and Jennie Skerl (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 115–128. 114. Allen Ginsberg, “Letter to Josef Škvorecký,” April 1, 1984, Box 30, Folder 14, JSPH. 115. Škvorecký, Engineer of Human Souls, 288. 116. “I was the only one [Allen] knew in Prague,” Škvorecký writes. “That was because I’d once translated Howl into Czech and a part of it had been published in the literary monthly World Literature.” Although Škvorecký certainly provided some assistance, it was Zábrana who translated “Howl” for in Světová 331

NOTES TO PAGES 246–250

literatura in 1959. Škvorecký would repeat this dubious claim in his private correspondence. 117. Škvorecký, Engineer of Human Souls, 289–290. 118. As Justin Quinn writes, during the Cold War, “Ginsberg occupied a locus of global conflict—the seam that ran between East and West—and wrote poetry in that zone (‘Kral Majales’ was written on the plane to London after his expulsion from Czechoslovakia) and about that zone.” Justin Quinn, Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 8. 119. Josef Škvorecký, “Dear Allen,” n.d., Folder 14, Box 30, JSPH. 120. Houstecky replied, “I have the honor to ensure [sic] you that the current criminal investigation against certain members of the former Jazz Section has nothing to do with repression of artistic creativity in Czechoslovakia.” Miroslav Houstecky, “Letter to Allen Ginsberg,” January 28, 1987, Folder 14, Box 30, JSPH. 121. Josef Škvorecký, “Letter to Allen Ginsberg,” n.d., Folder 14, Box 30, JSPH. 122. Josef Škvorecký, “Jamming the Jazz Section,” New York Review of Books, June 30, 1988, 40–42. 123. “Internal Memo Distributed at a Meeting of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party,” in Series IV, Janet Fleischmann Files, Box 11, Human Rights Watch Archives, Columbia University, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. 124. “Internal Memo.” 125. Škvorecký, “Jamming the Jazz Section,” 42. Epilogue: Everything Goes

1. See Philip Roth, “A Conversation in Prague,” New York Review of Books 37, no. 6 (April 12, 1990): 14–22; reprinted in Philip Roth, Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) 53. 2. For two excellent histories of the Velvet Revolution, see Jiří Suk, Labyrintem revoluce: aktéři, zápletky a křižovatky jedné politické krize (od listopadu 1989 do června 1990) (Prague: Prostor, 2009); James Krapfl, Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989–1992 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 3. See Timothy Garton Ash’s reporting, much of which was first published in the New York Review of Books and later collected in Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Vintage, 1999). 4. There is not perfect agreement about whether to use the term “postcommunist” or “postsocialist” (with or without hyphens) to describe this 332

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period in former Eastern bloc countries. I have opted for the former in this Epilogue, to emphasize the change in government regime, but Claudia Sadowski-Smith and Ioana Luca make a compelling case for the latter term in their introduction to a special issue exploring US immigrant literature from writers born in former Eastern bloc countries. See Claudia Sadowski-Smith and Ioana Luca, “Introduction: Postsocialist Literatures in the United States,” Twentieth-Century Literature 65, no. 1–2 (March 1, 2019): 5–6. 5. See Václav Havel, “On Rita Klímová (1931–1993),” trans. Paul Wilson, New York Review of Books, February 3, 1994, 6. 6. Rita Klímová, “Letter to Philip Roth,” October 18, 1985, Box 17, Folder 9, PRP. 7. In 1974, Roth wrote a brief introduction to two of Weil’s stories, translated by Káca Polachova. See Philip Roth, “Introduction: Jiri Weil, Two Stories about Nazis and Jews,” American Poetry Review 3, no. 5 (1974): 22. 8. Roth, “Two Stories about Nazis and Jews,” 22. 9. Klímová, “Letter to Philip Roth.” 10. Philip Roth, “Letter to the Editor: Czech Dissident Also Translated War Novel,” New York Times, January 7, 1994. 11. Meanwhile, Josef Jařab, an important scholar and translator of American literature, would serve in the Czech Republic’s Senate beginning in the midnineties. Jařab was one of the first people I interviewed in Prague about this research project. 12. Ginsberg would return to Prague two more times in the nineties. In 1993, for instance, he put on a special event at his old haunt, the Viola café. As one recent volume suggests, these “Beat connections gave local actors symbolic capital that could be transformed into positions of power after the collapse of the communist regime” in Czechoslovakia. They do have a point, but I think this suspicious reading of the “institutionalization of counterculture” in postcommunist Central Europe is still too cynical. See Harri Veivo, Petra James, and Dorota Walczak-Delanois, eds., Beat Literature in a Divided Europe (Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2019), 8. 13. Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947–1997 (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 982. 14. Louis Armand, ed., The Return of Král Majáles: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance 1990–2010; An Anthology (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia Books, 2010), 12–13. 15. Alan Levy, editorial, Prague Post, October 1, 1991. 16. Ironically, by this point, Kundera was a Moravian exile who now preferred to compose his novels in French. 17. Joshua Cohen, “Cafédämmerung (or Allen in Prague, King of May Day, 1965),” White Review, no. 2, June 2011. An earlier version of the story was included in Armand, Return of Král Majáles. 18. Armand, Return of Král Majáles, 2. 333

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19. See Michelle Woods, Translating Milan Kundera (Bristol: Channel View, 2006). 20. Roth tried to defend Kundera in the NYRB: “There appears to be a controversy over what might be called his ‘internationalism.’ Some people have suggested to me that, in his two books written in exile, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he is writing ‘for’ the French, ‘for’ the Americans, etc., and that this constitutes some sort of cultural misdemeanor or even betrayal. To me he seems rather to be a writer who, once he found himself living abroad, decided, quite realistically, that it was best not to pretend that he was a writer living at home, and who had then to devise for himself a literary strategy, one congruent not with his old but with his new complexities. Leaving aside the matter of quality, the marked difference of approach between the books written in Czechoslovakia, like The Joke and Laughable Loves, and those written in France does not represent to me a lapse of integrity, let alone a falsification of his experience, but a strong, innovative response to an inescapable challenge.” See Roth, “Conversation in Prague.” For additional context, see Blake Bailey, Philip Roth: The Biography (New York: Norton, 2021), 523–525. 21. Andrew Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1. 22. Samuel Cohen, After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009). 23. The proceedings were reprinted in “Intellectuals and Social Change in Central and Eastern Europe,” special issue, Partisan Review 19, no. 4 (1992). 24. For more on Lynne Cheney’s participation in the so-called culture wars, see Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 25. Václav Havel, Letters to Olga: June 1979–September 1982 (New York: Knopf, 1988), 306. 26. “Intellectuals and Social Change,” 531–534. 27. Josef Škvorecký, “Poznámka k smyslu Herzogova poselství,” in Herzog, by Saul Bellow, trans. Heda Kovályová (Prague: Odeon, 1968), 353– 359. Reprinted in Škvorecký, Podivný pán z Providence a jiné eseje (Prague: Ivo Železný, 1999), 171–177. 28. Kieran Williams, Václav Havel (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 130–140. 29. Ivan M. Havel et al., eds., Dopisy od Olgy (Prague: Knihovna Václava Havla, 2011). 30. Aviezer Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 135–142. 31. Havel, Letters to Olga, 306–307. 32. Saul Bellow, Novels, 1956–1964 (New York: Library of America, 2007), 763. 334

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33. Madeleine Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937–1948 (New York: Harper, 2012), 10. 34. See Jeri Laber, The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 347–352. 35. Ivana Trump was born in Czechoslovakia. See Lewis H. Lapham, “Notebook: Play on Words,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1, 1990, 12. 36. Lapham, “Play on Words,” 16. 37. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” East European Politics and Societies 32, no. 2 (May 1, 2018): 367. 38. Václav Havel, To the Castle and Back, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 2007), 435; Michael Zantovsky, Havel: A Life (New York: Grove, 2014), 434–437, 491–492. 39. The play is filled with echoes from Shakespeare’s King Lear, but as Kieran Williams writes in his critical biography, the film version (which was also directed by Havel) is closer to “The Cherry Orchard on phenmetrazine.” Williams, Václav Havel, 196. 40. See, for instance, Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Crown, 2017); Masha Gessen, “The Threat of Moral Authority,” New York Review of Books (blog), January 18, 2017, http:// www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/01/18/threat-of-moral-authority-john-lewis -trump/; Pankaj Mishra, “Václav Havel’s Lessons on How to Create a ‘Parallel Polis,’” New Yorker (online), February 8, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/ books/page-turner/vaclav-havels-lessons-on-how-to-create-a-parallel-polis; Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). 41. Pankaj Mishra, “How Well Does Contemporary Fiction Address Radical Politics?,” New York Times, September 22, 2013, Sunday Book Review, 35. 42. See, for instance, Rod Dreher, “The Power of Weaponized Political Correctness,” American Conservative, February 26, 2018; Andrew Sullivan, “Is There Still Room for Debate?,” New York Magazine, June 12, 2020, https:// nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/andrew-sullivan-is-there-still-room-for -debate.html. 43. Masha Gessen, “Why Are Some Journalists Afraid of Moral Clarity?,” New Yorker (online), June 24, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our -columnists/why-are-some-journalists-afraid-of-moral-clarity. 44. “Intellectuals and Social Change,” 529–530. 45. “Intellectuals and Social Change,” 740–747. For a discussion of Václav Klaus in the context of broader, neoliberal transformations in post-1989 Europe, see Philipp Ther, Europe since 1989: A History, trans. Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmüller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 46. “Intellectuals and Social Change,” 742. 47. “Srp a Etická komise 2017,” Jazzová sekce, February 28, 2017, https:// jazzova-sekce.cz/srp-a-eticka-komise-2017/. 335

NOTES TO PAGES 265–266

48. See Peter Bugge, “Normalization and the Limits of the Law: The Case of the Czech Jazz Section,” East European Politics & Societies 22, no. 2 (May 1, 2008): 294. Bugge draws on research first presented in Karel Tomek, “Akce JAZZ,” Securitas Imperii 10 (2003). 49. “Vydali jsme jej proto, aby se nám hůř zapomínalo.” See On the (Beat) Road: Beat Generation Fest, exhibition catalog (Prague: Artforum—Jazzová sekce, 1998). 50. Petra James, “Listening to the ‘Feverish Beat’: Between Alienation and Creative Resistance—the Czech Reception of the Beats,” in Veivo, James, and Walczak-Delanois, Beat Literature in a Divided Europe, 76.

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AC K N OWL E D G MEN TS

When I was twenty years old, I decided to “stop out” from college because I had a hunch about a Beat poet in Prague. This book has been shaped by all the people who entered my life as a consequence of that gut feeling. Little went according to plan, but I have carried an image of the book I wanted to write in my head ever since. At every step, I was fortunate enough to find mentors who encouraged this idiosyncratic project and provided me with the tools and language to help me better understand what it was I was trying to do. After my return to Stanford University, Shelley Fisher Fishkin convinced me that, counterintuitively, the only way to write about what I’d found in Prague was by majoring in something called American studies. My work was shaped by the advice and friendship of many other great teachers at Stanford, including Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Adam Johnson, Gavin Jones, and Hilton Obenzinger. At the University of Oxford, I had the opportunity to learn from Hermione Lee, who opened my eyes to new ways of writing about Philip Roth, as well as from Paul Giles and the late David Bradshaw. Through a stroke of luck, I was able to share a seminar room with two legendary Americanists at Oxford: Alan Trachtenberg and Leo Marx. My time as a resident at Worcester College would have been much lonelier without brilliant and boisterous friends like Cristina Psomadakis and Dan-el Padilla Peralta. Ever since Oxford, Jesse Freedman has been the VV to my Hotel; I’m still not convinced we left the Great Tew. All the pieces of this book started to come together at Harvard University, where John Stauffer welcomed me into the radically flexible Program in the History of American Civilization (now American Studies). No one shaped how I think and write about the American art and ideas of the Cold War era more than Louis Menand. At Harvard, I also had the extreme good fortune of working with Jonathan Bolton, a model of scholarly rigor and generosity who transformed my understanding of Czech dissent. My chapter “Josef Škvorecký’s American Epigraphs” began as a seminar paper written under the guidance of Werner Sollors. Thank you also to Nancy Cott, Glenda Carpio, Jill 337

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Lepore, Andy Jewett, the late Svetlana Boym, Nora Hampl, Veronika Tuckerova, and Jessie Labov, who I learned so much from during her time at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. At Harvard and beyond, I was also introduced to an incredible community, including George Blaustein (who introduced me to F. O. Matthiessen), Eli Cook, Maggie Doherty, Nick Donofrio, Holger Droessler, Dan Farbman, Katie Gerbner, Maggie Gram, Jack Hamilton, Brian Hochman, Michael Kimmage, Pete L’Official, Charles Petersen, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Kathryn Roberts, and Stephen Vider. Annie Wyman and Rebecca Kastleman provided a crucial bridge from previous phases of my life and kept me laughing. The colloquiums of the New England Americanist Collective—spearheaded by Jennifer Schnepf and Angela Allan—provided a model of what a scholarly community could be. Thank you to my brilliant and inspiring cohort: Steven Brown, Theresa McCulla, Eva Payne, and Sandy Placido. Whenever things got tough (or just really cold) in Cambridge, there was always a group of scientists just down the road: Alex Broad, Scott Burger, Alan Lai, Jacob Rubens, and Adam Freedman, whose apartment always provided safe harbor. This project also benefited from a great deal of institutional support at Harvard, including grants and fellowships from the Davis Center and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. My initial research in the Czech Republic was funded through a Foreign Language and Area Studies grant and a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, and I began conducting research for my chapter on Franz Kafka thanks to generous support from the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. I would also like to thank the librarians and archivists at the Library of Congress, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Hoover Institution Archives and Special Collections at Stanford University, the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto, and the Archiv bezpečnostních složek in Prague. I am also grateful to Wai Chee Dimock, who helped me locate my work in wider conversations about American literature in the world. During my year as a postdoctoral instructor in human rights at the University of Chicago, I found another great mentor in Mark Phillip Bradley. Mark is an ideal reader, and his comments have strengthened the book considerably. At Chicago, I also had the opportunity to receive feedback from standing workshops on “Human Rights” and “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.” With support from the Pozen Center, I organized a standalone workshop on “Histories of Dissent across the US, Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia,” where I exchanged works in progress with the brilliant Benjamin Nathans. My time at Chicago was further enriched through conversations with Susan Gzesh, Tara Zahra, Ben Laurence, Eleonory Gilburd, Kathy Scott, Eric Slauter, Michaela Appeltova, Ilana Miller, and Emma Stone Mackinnon. Without Hadji Bakara, who read more of this manuscript than anyone, none of this would have been possible.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m very fortunate to have landed at Arizona State University, where I have found supportive colleagues across the Department of English, Center for Jewish Studies, and Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. Claudia-Sadowski Smith has been indispensable in helping me navigate an institution as dynamic, and enormous, as ASU. Thank you also to Joni Adamson, Krista Ratcliffe, Doris Warriner, Elizabeth Horan, Richard Newhauser, Julia Himberg, Jacob Greene, Kathryn Pruitt, Anna CichopekGajraj, Anna Holian, Natalie Lozinski-Veach, and Irina Levin who all helped me move this project forward, either directly or indirectly. A special thank-you to Hava Samuelson for her sage counsel and to the Center for Jewish Studies for providing financial support that made many of the book’s images possible. Speaking of images, every effort has been made to identify copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. Notification of any additions or corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book would be greatly appreciated. This book’s production was also supported by the Institute for Humanities Research at ASU. To all my students in ENG 242, 333, and 494: this book has benefited from your open minds and boundless curiosity. It hasn’t always been easy finding a community of friends in Arizona while raising two small children during a pandemic, so thank you to Jenny Dyck Brian, Illya Riske, Darshan Karwat, Alisa Oyler, Angela Rojas, Rowan Moore Gerety, Lena Jackson, and Katie Davis-Young for bearing with two exhausted (but fun!) parents. Generous feedback from both Alex Young and Harry Stecopoulos helped me see the light at the end of the tunnel. I still might never have completed this book if Charles Petersen hadn’t started a daily writing group back in the dark days of December 2020. Thank you to all the Chronophages for the advice, camaraderie, and jumping jacks, especially the regulars: Erin Hutchinson, Cecilia Weddell, Amy Zanoni, Dylan Gottlieb, and Isabel Gómez. A special shout-out to Daniel Immerwahr, who read and commented on significant portions of the book. And to Eva Payne, who returned just in time for the home stretch. Much of the text of “Philip Roth’s Other Europe: Counter-Realism and the Late Cold War,” American Literary History, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 717–740, is incorporated into Chapter 5. I would like to thank Gordon Hutner and the anonymous reviewers at ALH, who provided valuable feedback at a key juncture in this project. Thank you to John Kulka, who saw the early promise of the book and brought me on board at Harvard University Press. Kathleen McDermott stewarded the manuscript with patience and wisdom from its earliest version to final submission. Thank you to my anonymous readers, as well as Aleksander Kaczorowski, Jan Koura, and Łukasz Kamiński for their very helpful comments. Chris Lura, Aaron Wistar, and Stephanie Vyce all provided editorial support and guidance as we crossed the finish line.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During every one of the phases in the writing process, I have had the opportunity to return to Prague. There is one person I’ve been lucky enough to learn from during every visit: Justin Quinn. Thank you for your hospitality, for the conversations over pivo at Kavárna Liberál, and for showing me the way to Beroun. Ivan Klíma and Helena Klímová invited me to their apartment to talk over zázvorová limonáda, and, back in the United States, Barbara Sproul was gracious enough to confirm much of what I learned in Prague. My research also benefited greatly from conversations with scholars at the Ústav pro českou literaturu, particularly Petr Šámal, Michal Přibáň, and now Františka Schormová. Thank you to Viktor Hanslík for introducing me to the convivial group of friends formerly known as Ty holky, especially Anna Muehlenberg, Alžběta Václavů, and Petra Brodilová. To all my friends who visited me in Prague over the years, you made my Czech education much less lonely: Tyler Gutierrez, Robbie Cahill, Brian Haines, James Joyce, Michael Conti, Daniel Callahan, Nick Silvas, Ben Stillman, Zach Henick, Arturo and Viviana Alonso, Graham Brant-Zawadzki, Michael Zell, and Sasha Buscho. Alexander C. Payne still owes me a trip. This book is dedicated to my parents, and for good reason. From Prague to Phoenix, they have always shown up just when I need them. While I was trying to finish this book during a pandemic, they helped us raise two wild, determined, and precocious little boys: you are loved by so many, Milo and Augie. Thank you also to Dale and Mary Hemberger for their love, support, and house projects. Back in the United States, it has taken a village. Finally, to Alison: you have been my enthusiastic and supportive partner through all the extremes of parenthood, book authorship, and temperature. From Cambridge and Monrovia to Chicago and Phoenix—and all the treks in between—you always push us to search for that brighter sunset, and then you find us a nice place to sit and rest. Wherever we go from here, the next one is for you.

340

I NDE X

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abrams, Bradley, 84 Akhmatova, Anna, 78, 158 Albee, Edward, 11, 23, 184–185, 193, 215, 231, 328n61 Albright, Madeleine, 259 Alvarez, Al, 195 “America” (Ginsberg), 147 “American Bohemia” (Hájek), 145–147, 153–154, 173, 266 The American Jeremiad (Bercovitch), 18 “American Motifs in the Work of Bohumil Hrabal” (Škvorecký), 202 “The American Negro and Communism” (Du Bois), 132 American Pastoral (Roth), 206–207 American Renaissance (Matthiessen), 50, 62, 64, 65, 69, 73 Americans for Intellectual Freedom, 98 Amerika: Heute und Morgen (Holitscher), 35 Amerika: Řada obrazů z amerického života (Soukup), 35, 281n31 Amerika (Kafka), 32, 35, 39–42, 40, 43, 56–57, 60–61, 77, 185 Amnesty International, 210, 229 antinomianism, 49, 71, 81 antipolitics, 17–18, 211, 215 antisemitism, 43–44, 180, 184, 295n105 Arbeit, Marcel, 226 The Archbishop’s Ceiling (Miller), 15, 274n42 Arendt, Hannah, 38–39, 44–46, 222, 284n66, 284n68

Armand, Louis, 253–255 The Art of the Novel (Kundera), 200, 205 Ash, Timothy Garton, 17, 238, 241 “At Apollinaire’s Grave” (Ginsberg), 147 Babel, Isaac, 137 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 165 Baňka, Pavel, 155 Beat literature: “American Bohemia” (Hájek) and, 145–147, 153–154, 173, 266; American criticism of, 146; censorship and, 148; Czech youth embrace of, 4, 143–146, 148; interest is European avant-garde movements and, 147; translation of into Czech, 147–148; Viola Wine Bar and, 141, 148–150, 152. See also Ginsberg, Allen Becher, Bedřich, 23, 185 “Bech in Czech” (Updike), 233–235 Bellow, Saul, 43, 147, 193, 256–258, 261, 263 Benatov, Joseph, 208 Beneš, Edvard, 14, 38, 85, 87 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 18–19 Bernstein, Robert, 237 A Besieged Culture, 238, 239, 240 “The Black Cat” (Poe), 203–204 Blažek, Petr, 161, 169 The Bloody Crossroads (Podhoretz), 245 Bohemia, 12, 14, 145 Böll, Heinrich, 197, 238 Bolton, Jonathan, 16 Borowski, Tadeusz, 204

341

INDEX The Breast (Roth), 183, 207 Bren, Paulina, 184 Brent, Jonathan, 217 Brik, Lilya, 158 Brod, Max, 32, 36, 39, 61 Brodsky, Joseph, 197, 256 Bromwich, David, 49 Browder, Earl, 81 Broyard, Anatole, 51–53, 286n106 Budínová, Rita, 188 Budín, Stanislav, 180, 188, 250 Bugge, Peter, 16, 214, 222, 228 Burnham, James, 29–30, 280n12 “The Burrow” (Kafka), 122 “Can’t Prague Leave Even Jazz Alone?” (Vonnegut), 229 Čapek, Karel, 125, 156 Capote, Truman, 147 CARE (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe), 87 Casa de las Américas, 143–144 The Case Worker (Konrád), 197 The Castle (Kafka), 37, 40, 45, 122, 284n66 Čerepková, Vladimíra, 149, 155 Čermínová, Marie (Toyen), 37 Černý, Václav, 84 Československý spisovatel, 118, 123, 128 Chalupecký, Jindřich, 118 Charter 77 human rights movement, 4, 10, 16–17, 101–102, 214, 241–243, 248, 250 Chase, Richard, 97, 296n107 Cheever, John, 147 Cheney, Lynne, 256, 263 Cheney, Russell, 67 “Chronicle of Everyday Repression” (Charter 77), 240 City Sister Silver (Topol), 256 Civil Disobedience (Thoreau), 18 Closely Watched Trains (Hrabal), 127, 202, 218 Clybor, Shawn, 114 Cohen, Joshua, 254 Cold War, 18–19, 67, 93, 143, 182, 295n93 Commentary magazine, 48, 245 Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS), 10

Communitas (Goodman), 48 “Conditions of Freedom” (Miller), 14–15 “A Coney Island of the Mind” (Ferlinghetti), 266 Connelly, John, 86–87 The Cool World (Miller), 138–139 The Cowards (Škvorecký): American literary influences and, 107–108; association with Hemingway and, 125–126; contradiction of Socialist realist depiction of Communist takeover, 107; as cultural hybrid, 109–110; denunciation of, 105–108, 127–128; Hemingway epigraph of, 109, 120, 126, 128, 138; jazz and, 137; Mezzrow epigraph of, 109, 128–130, 138–139; popularity of, 108; publication of, 119; Red Badge of Courage and, 126–127; Rolland epigraph of, 109–111, 128; as set at a crossroads, 136–137 Cowley, Malcolm, 95 Crain, Caleb, 254 Crane, Hart, 71 Cross Currents, 10, 19, 25, 222, 228, 241 The Crucible (Miller), 10 Csáth, Géza, 201 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace (1949), 97–98, 99, 100 Czech Ad Hoc Fund, 193–194 Czechoslovak Communist Party: campaign against literary trash, 115–116, 127–128; censorship and, 23, 38, 114–119, 157, 183–184; Communist takeover of 1948 and, 86–93, 112–113; Czech intelligentsia and, 77–78; Dubček’s leadership of, 6; exchange in higher education after Communist takeover and, 89–92; glasnost/perestroika and, 248; jazz and, 131; Jesenská and, 38; Majáles festival and, 160–161; National Front and, 66; Prague Spring and, 177; Social Democrats and, 79–80, 83–84, 92; Western ties and, 84–85, 91 Czechoslovakia: Action Committees and, 89–90; African American literature and, 131–132, 135, 139–140, 226; American intellectuals and, 11–12, 14; Beat literature and, 139–140, 141, 143–148; breakup of Czech and Slovak Republics 342

INDEX and, 251; as bridge between East and West, 14, 82–86; censorship and, 23, 38, 114–119, 157, 183–184; Central European counter-realist novel tradition and, 201; Central European vs. Eastern European idea and, 11–12, 13, 199–200, 204–205, 273n23; Communist Party seizure of, 64, 86–93, 112–113; Czech literary culture in 1990s, 253–255; Czechoslovak road to socialism and, 14, 63, 66–67, 70, 77, 81–82, 100–101; during the Thaw, 109, 152; First Czechoslovak Republic and, 14; glasnost/ perestroika and, 248; Hitler’s annexation of, 39; idea of Bohemia and, 12, 14; jazz and, 130–131, 137; Liblice conference on Kafka and, 57–58; literary censorship during Stalinization and, 114–115, 117; Masaryk and, 14, 68, 70, 93, 294n91; National Front and, 66, 79, 83; normalization period and, 10, 178, 181–182, 192–193; reform movement leading to Prague Spring and, 176–179; students and, 75–78; thaw-era literary culture in, 21, 23, 120–122; Warsaw Pact crackdown on Prague Spring, 8, 14, 178, 216; Western conservative view of, 70–71; women in literary culture of, 189, 316n29; youth counterculture movement and, 145, 150, 152, 156, 176–177 Czechoslovak Life, 150, 151, 152 Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party, 78–79, 83–84, 92 Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. See Czechoslovakia Czechoslovak Union of Youth, 161, 176 Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, 105–106, 108, 154 Czech Technical University, 161–162 “A Decade of Dedication: Charter 77 1977–1987,” 241 DeCarava, Roy, 133, 135, 136 Deception (Roth), 190 Demetz, Petr, 54 Devětsil group, 38 Devine, Thomas, 94 Dharma Bums (Kerouac), 225

Diaries (Kafka), 46 Dickstein, Morris, 175 dissent, in American literature, 17–20, 67–68, 71 “Dissenting Opinion on Kafka” (Wilson), 28–29, 47 “Dissent on Billy Budd” (Chase), 97 dissidents, 42–43, 189, 192–193, 211. See also individual people dissident, term, 15–17, 42, 274n41, 278n61 Doctorow, E. L., 215, 231, 237, 241 Dorůžka, Lubomír, 110–114, 128, 131, 147, 222 Dos Passos, John, 71, 107 Dražanová, Daniela, 255 Drda, Jan, 110–111 Dreher, Rod, 262 Dreiser, Theodore, 71, 100, 117 Dubček, Alexander, 6, 177 Du Bois, W. E. B., 11, 97, 131–132 Edice Petlice (Padlock Editions), 190, 196, 221 Eisnerová, Dagmar, 57, 77, 91 Eisner, Pavel, 37, 53–54, 56–57, 74, 123, 287n120 Eliot, T. S., 69, 71, 115 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 49, 69 “The End of the Nylon Age”(Škvorecký), 118–119 The Engineer of Human Souls (Škvorecký), 219–221, 244 The Family of Man (Steichen show), 136 FAMU (Filmová atelevizní fakulta Akademie múzických umění v Praze), 168, 169 The Farewell Party (Kundera), 199 A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway), 115, 125 Fast, Howard, 97, 100, 117 Faulkner, William, 71, 107, 115 Ferdydurke (Gombrowicz), 201 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 102, 265–266, 266 Fiedler, Leslie, 43–44 Filosofská historie (Jirásek), 159–160 Formations, 217 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), 124–125

343

INDEX “Franz Kafka: A Reevaluation” (Arendt), 44 Franz Kafka and Prague (Eisner), 56 Franz Kafka a Praha: Vzpomínky, úvahy, dokumenty, 54 “Franz Kafka–Pre-Fascist Exile” (Slochower), 41 “Friday Men” group, 68 From the Heart of Europe (Matthiessen), 65–66, 73, 86, 94–95 Fučík, Julius, 38 Galassi, Peter, 133 Gessen, Masha, 262–263 The Ghost Writer (Roth), 207 Ginsberg, Allen: aftereffects of Czech visit of, 172–173; American politics and, 157–158; arrival in Prague, 140, 153; ban of after expulsion, 225; in Cuba, 143–144; Czech Ad Hoc Fund and, 193; Czech Jewish sites and, 154; Czech poetry royalties and, 154; Czech politics and, 156; Czech travel journal of, 142–143, 156, 163–165, 167, 170–171; deportation from Cuba of, 1, 140, 143–144; on The Engineers of Human Souls, 245–246; expulsion from Czechoslovak Socialist Republic of, 1–2, 14, 142, 171–172; Formations and, 217–218; Hájek interview and, 157–158; Hanzlberk and, 156–157; Jazz Section and, 2, 244, 247; Kafka and, 43, 154, 164; as King of May, 1–2, 3, 21, 144, 163–166; “Kral Majales” and, 2, 4, 142, 174–176, 247, 313n131; pictured, 164, 167, 169; return to Prague after Velvet Revolution and, 249, 253–254, 333n12; role of in Majáles festival, 159, 162–168, 173–174; role in reform movement leading to Prague Spring, 22, 178–179; on sex, 156, 158, 170; sexuality and, 171–172; Škvorecký and, 140, 153–155, 162, 173, 245–247; StB case against, 142, 156–157, 169–173; StB file of, 2, 142, 156, 172, 265; Stříbrný and, 102–103; as symbol of antiestablishment revolt in Czechoslovakia, 144; Viola Wine Bar and, 141, 149, 155 The God That Failed, 135 Gogol, Nikolai, 30

Goldstücker, Eduard, 57–58, 131n288, 177, 184, 192 Gombrowicz, Witold, 201, 218 Goodman, Paul, 43, 47–51 The Good Soldier Švejk (Hašek), 135 Gorbachev, Mikhail S., 243, 248 Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin), 226 Gottwald, Klement, 66, 87 Graham, Shirley, 97 Grass, Günter, 8 Gray Zone (Šedá zóna) concept, 22, 213–215, 228, 243–244, 323n4, 324n5 “The ‘Gray Zone’ and the Future of Dissent in Czechoslovakia” (Šiklová), 213–214 Greenberg, Ivan (Philip Rahv), 41 Greif, Mark, 27, 73 Gross, František, 83 Grosz, George, 31 Growing Up Absurd (Goodman), 48 Gruša, Jiří, 238 The Guinea Pigs (Vaculík), 195–196, 203–204 The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn), 210, 266–267 Hájek, Igor, 145–146, 157–158, 173, 177, 233 Hájek, Jiří, 82, 101, 107–108 Harman, Mark, 60–61 Hašek, Jaroslav, 135 Hauková, Jiŕina, 83 Havel, Václav: affinity of American writers for, 20; on Beat literature, 4; Czech reform movement and, 6, 15–18, 177; dissident term and, 15–17, 210, 244; election of as president of Czech Republic, 4, 250, 259, 261–262; Helsinki Watch and, 237, 240; on Herzog, 257–258; Jazz Section trial and, 243; Kafka and, 24–26; Miller and, 9–11; normalization and, 193; open letters of, 191; prison sentence of, 8–10, 223; return to New York as Czechoslovak president, 259, 260, 261; Rita Klímová and, 251; Roth and, 191; socialism and, 11; use of human rights and, 17–18, 275n46; Viola wine Bar and, 155; visit to New York in 1968, 5–8, 7; Život je všude and, 118

344

INDEX Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 49–51, 69, 73, 117 Heidegger, Martin, 258 Helsinki Accords, 238, 241 Helsinki Review Conference, 238, 240 Helsinki Watch, 215, 237, 240; Charter 77 and, 248. See also Human Rights Watch Hemingway, Ernest, 71, 107, 109, 111–112, 114–115, 119–120, 123–126, 128 Herman Melville: A Critical Study (Chase), 97 Hersey, John, 193 Herzog (Bellow), 257–259, 261 Hicks, Granville, 90 “Hipness at Dusk” (Škvorecký), 228 “Hipness at Noon” (Škvorecký), 222–223, 238 Hiršal, Josef, 118 Hitler, Adolf, 38–39 Hlavní správa tiskového dohledu (Main Administration of Press Supervision, HSTD), 114, 119, 157, 299n26 Hoellering, Franz, 94–95 Holitscher, Arthur, 35 Holmes, John Clellon, 147 Holub, Miroslav, 148, 180, 188, 195 Hook, Sidney, 98 The Horn (Holmes), 147 Host do domu, 59 House Un-American Activities Committee, 9, 97 Howard, Maureen, 241 Howard, Milton, 124–125 Howe, Irving, 49, 95–96, 197 Howe, Julia Ward, 81 “Howl” (Ginsberg), 147–148, 157 Howl and Other Poems (Ginsberg), 145–146 Hrabal, Bohumil, 58–59, 118, 156–157, 202–203, 225 Hrabě, Václav, 149 Hruby, Peter, 160 HTSD. See Hlavní správa tiskového dohledu (Main Administration of Press Supervision) Hughes, Langston, 129, 131–135 human rights: antipolitical language and, 17–18, 211, 215; Jazz Section and, 237; Kafka and, 238, 240; literary language

and, 211, 323n117. See also Amnesty International; Charter 77 human rights movement; Helsinki Watch Human Rights Watch, 259. See also Helsinki Watch The Human Stain (Roth), 189, 255 Huňát, Čestmír, 227 Husák, Gustav, 191 “Imprisoning Jazz in Czech ‘Gray Zone’” (Škvorecký), 214–215 “The Increased Difficulty of Concentration” (Havel), 6 Index on Censorship, 17, 196, 217, 237, 241 International Jazz Federation, 232 Invisible Man (Ellison), 226 Invisible Writing (Koestler), 31 Inzerát na dům, ve kterém už nechci bydlet (Hrabal), 58 I Served the King of England (Hrabal), 157, 225 Jameson, Anne, 33–34 “Jamming the Jazz Section” (Škvorecký), 247–248 Jánaček, Pavel, 115 Janousek, Pavel, 111 Jaŕab, Josef, 225–227, 253 Jazz, 223–225, 224 Jazz Section: after trial of, 248, 324n12; American literary campaign for, 21, 215, 229, 231–233, 236–237, 241; arrest of the leaders of, 213, 227, 240; Beat Generation Fest (1998), 265–267; Charter 77 and, 241–243; countercultural community and, 213; dissident label and, 248; as exisitng in the Gray Zone, 213; Helsinki Watch and, 237–238, 240; Helsinki Watch letter and, 215, 236–237; human rights network and, 229; international strategy and, 232, 240–241; new musical forms and, 223–225; peace trees and, 229, 232–233, 240–241; publishing wing of, 225, 227; Škvorecký and, 222–223; slogan of, 331n100; Srp role in StB and, 2, 264–265; subject matter of Jazz and, 224–225; trial of, 242–243; Updike and, 212–213, 232–233; Vonnegut and, 21, 229, 232

345

INDEX Jesenská, Milena, 32–33, 35–38, 57 “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” (Arendt), 44 Jirous, I. M., 123 Judt, Tony, 182 “Kaddish” (Ginsberg), 156 Kafka, Franz: American Jewish writers and, 43–44; antinomianist reading of, 49, 51, 62; anti-Stalinist reading of, 40–41; anti-totalitarian reading of, 44–46; Arendt and, 38–39, 44–46, 222, 284n66, 284n68; association with Prague and, 20, 23, 54, 56–60; banning of works by, 22–23, 28, 39, 53, 56–57, 62, 183–184; Brod and, 32, 36; Broyard on, 51–53; Burnham on, 29–30; connection between East and West and, 61–62; cultural absorption of, 29; Czech reception of, 21, 28, 33–38; dissenting readings of, 24; Eisner and, 37, 54, 56–58, 123, 287n120; Ginsberg and, 43, 154, 164; Goodman on, 47–50, 286n104; Hawthorne comparisons and, 49–51, 73; human rights activism and, 238, 240; ideological evolution of American left and, 30–31; as interpreter of totalitarianism for the West, 21, 27–28; interwar Czech surrealists and, 37; Jesenská and, 35–37; “kafkárna” and, 58–60; Liblice conference and, 57–58; Klaus Mann and, 38–39, 38–40, 46, 282n44; Marxist-Flaubertian formula view of, 30; Matthiessen and, 50, 73; normalization-era Czech writers and, 185–186; Partisan Review and, 42–43; political interpretations of, 35, 40–41, 44–46, 56–57; post–World War II Prague reception of works of, 53–54, 57–62; reception of in West, 21, 27–30, 39, 42–43, 62; rehabilitation of, 24, 28, 57–58; Roth and, 43, 181, 183; socialist allegory interpretation, 34–35, 57; subterranean reading of, 36–37, 61; Der Verschollene/“Topič,” 32–33, 36; “The Weaponization of Culture” address by Sartre and, 24; Wilson on, 28–30 A Kafka Miscellany, 29 The Kafka Problem (Warren), 29, 50

Kafka’s Prayer (Goodman), 47–49, 51, 286n104 Kafka Was the Rage (Broyard), 51–53 Kalivoda, Robert, 193 Kavanová, Rosemary, 152–153 Kavan, Pavel, 152 Kazin, Alfred, 43, 51, 75, 96 Kiehl, William, 231–233 Kind-Kovács, Friederike, 19, 189 Kirschner, Zdeněk, 147 Kiš, Danilo, 195, 204, 206, 211, 218, 238 Kissinger, Henry, 260, 261 Klíma, Ivan: American writers and, 20, 186, 231; Czech Ad Hoc Fund and, 193; expulsion from Communist Party of, 177; Helsinki Watch and, 237; Kafka and, 185; on Kundera, 255; on life after the Velvet Revolution, 263–264; pictured, 187; publishing ban and, 185, 192; response to Roth’s comments about Prague, 206, 208–209; Roth and, 180, 185–186, 188–189, 194, 206, 208–209, 249; Updike and, 230 Kliment, Alexandr, 193 Klímová, Helena, 186, 189, 192 Klímová, Rita, 250–252 Kmen, 32–35, 58 Knowles, Jack, 206–207 Koestler, Arthur, 31, 222 Kohout, Pavel, 10, 177, 185, 193 Kolář, Jiří, 23, 59, 101, 118, 185, 239, 240 Komunistická revue, 36 Konrád, György, 17, 17–18, 195, 211, 218, 238, 256, 323n117 Konwicki, Tadeusz, 204 Kořán, Jaroslav, 225, 227, 253 Košice Program, 79 Kosík, Karel, 193 Kosiński, Jerzy, 193–194 Kott, Jan, 218 Koubek, Petr, 78–80, 92–93, 96 Kouřil, Vladimír, 227, 241, 243, 247 Kozák, Jan, 68–69, 89 “Kral Majales” (Ginsberg), 2, 4, 142, 174–176, 247, 313n131 Kritický měsíčník, 54 Křivánek, Tomáš, 227

346

INDEX Kropotkin, Petr, 48 Kundera, Milan: after Velvet Revolution, 255; American writers and, 20; Central European vs. Eastern European ideas, 199–200, 204–205, 273n23; conception of the Central European novel and, 200; confessional mode and, 204; Czech reform movement and, 177; exile in Paris of, 188; firing from FAMU of, 192; Formations and, 218; human rights activism and, 240; Jewish heritage and Central European novel and, 205; Kafka and, 62; language of dissidence and, 211; pictured, 190; Podhoretz on, 245; Roth and, 20, 180, 188–189, 192, 194, 199–200, 207, 255, 334n20; sexual transgression in writing of, 22; “The Tragedy of Central Europe” and, 12, 205, 220, 273n23; Warsaw Pact crackdown on Prague Spring and, 178; Writers from the Other Europe series and, 195, 197–199 Kundera, Vera, 189 Květen, 128 Laber, Jeri, 237–238, 241 Labov, Jessie, 19, 189 Lapham, Lewis H., 259, 261 Lass, Andrew, 155–156, 162, 165–168, 174 Laughable Loves (Kundera), 195, 197 Leaving (Havel), 262 Lee, Hermione, 205 Letters to Milena (Kafka), 35, 57, 282n39 Letters to Olga (Havel), 258 Levy, Alan, 254 Lewis, Sinclair, 71 Liberal Imagination (Trilling), 100 Liehm, Antonín, 23–24, 177, 180, 187–188, 191–192 Life Is Elsewhere (Kundera), 199 Life magazine, 98, 124 Life of John Brown (Gold), 81 Life with a Star (Weil), 251–253 Litanie z Atlanty (A Litany of Atlanta), 131–132 Literární listy, 6 Literární noviny, 157–158, 177, 187

“The Literary Opinions of Ernest Hemingway” (Škvorecký), 119–120 Love and Garbage (Klíma), 186, 189 Löwy, Michael, 35 Luce, Henry, 71, 95, 100, 124, 290n21 Luers, Wendy, 229, 231–232 Luers, William, 229–231 Machuková, Inka, 149 Mailer, Norman, 97, 139, 147, 229 Main Currents in American Thought (Parrington), 72 Mainstream magazine, 146. See also Masses & Mainstream Majáles festival: after 1965, 178; banning of, 159–160; Ginsberg’s role in 1965 festival, 159, 162–168, 173–174; history of, 159–160; pictured, 164, 165, 166, 169; politics of, 161–163; role of in reform movement leading to Prague Spring, 178–179; uncrowning of Ginsberg and, 168 Mann, Klaus, 38–39, 46, 282n44 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue, 14, 68, 70, 93, 294n91 Masky a tváře černé Ameriky (Masks and faces of Black America), 226 Masses & Mainstream, 124, 139. See also Mainstream magazine Matthiessen, F. O., 11, 14; American dissenting tradition and, 67–68, 71; American politics and, 67, 69, 86, 93–94, 96, 295n105; American Renaissance of, 50, 62, 64–65, 73; belief in Czechoslovakia as East-West bridge, 82–86; Chase on, 97, 296n107; Cheney and, 67; Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia and, 87–93, 96; Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace (1949), 97–98, 99, 100; current reevaluation of, 289n10; Czech Communists and Social Democrats and, 79–80, 82–84; Czechoslovak road to socialism and, 14, 63, 66–67, 70, 77, 81–82, 100–101; Czech students of, 75–80, 87–93, 98, 101–102; death of, 65, 67, 100; dissenting canon of American literature of, 69–75; From the Heart of Europe of, 65–66, 73, 86, 94–96; 347

INDEX Matthiessen (continued ) inaugural lecture at Charles University, of, 69–70; invitation to teach at Charles University, 11, 21, 63–64; Kafka and Hawthorne and, 50, 73; Kazin and, 75, 96; Kozák and, 68–69; Luce and, 71, 95, 290n21; on Masaryk’s death, 93; on reception of Kafka in Prague, 65; Salzburg Seminar and, 65, 75, 76; Schejbal on legacy of, 103–104; Skupina 42 and, 83; on Whitman, 73–74 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 78 Mazal, Tomáš, 157 Medek, Mikuláš, 59 Melville, Herman, 69, 117 The Memorandum (Havel), 5–8, 259 Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time, 120, 121, 125–127, 301n62 Menzel, Jiří, 127 The Metamorphosis (Kafka), 37, 48 Mezzrow, Milton “Mezz,” 109, 128–130, 136, 301n72 Miller, Arthur, 9–12, 14–15, 17, 186, 215, 237, 240, 261 Miller, Warren, 138 Miłosz, Czesław, 195, 256 Mináč, Vladimír, 107 Mishra, Pankaj, 262 Mladá fronta (Young front), 56, 78, 172–173 Moby-Dick (Melville), 97, 103, 183 “Modern American Literature” (Voćadlo), 72 Morrison, Toni, 215, 217, 226, 237 Muir, Edwin, 54 Müller, Jiří, 161–162, 176 Müllerová, Veronika, 149 Munich Agreement, 14 Musicians’ Union of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, 213, 227 Nabokov, Vladimir, 48 Nation, 46, 94–95 Native Son (Wright), 115, 135 Nekula, Marek, 60 Němcová, Božena, 125 Neumann, Stanislav Kostka, 33–37, 56–57 “The New Canterbury Tales” (Śkvorecký), 112

New Republic, 46, 214, 222, 227–228 New Yorker, 88, 215, 229 New York Review of Books, 19, 190, 205, 210, 222 New York Times, 6, 149, 251, 253 New York Times Magazine, 85 Nezval, Vítězslav, 125 Novak, Jan, 220 Novotný, Antonín, 6, 172, 177 Obranu lidu, 108 “Observations on Kafka” (Burnham), 29 Odeon, 148, 184, 226 The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway), 123–125 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn), 210 On the Road (Kerouac), 147, 153 “On the Theme of an Opposition” (Havel), 6 “An Open Letter to Milan Kundera” (Podhoretz), 245 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 44, 46 Orwell, George, 222–223 Orzoff, Andrea, 68 Ostermann, Jiří, 149 Palach, Jan, 10, 216 Papp, Joseph, 5, 7 Parrington, V. L., 72 Partisan Review, 29–30, 41–44, 46, 50, 52, 95, 97, 146, 256, 295n105 Pellar, Luba and Rudolf, 184–185 PEN International, 9, 181, 191, 193–194, 241 Peprník, Michal, 226 Petr, Václav, 56 Phillips, William, 41–42, 95 “The Pilgrims Have Landed on Kerouac’s Grave” (Hentoff ), 225 Plastic People of the Universe, 4, 223 The Plot against America (Roth), 23 Pochoda, Elizabeth, 199 Podhoretz, Norman, 48, 146, 244–245 Poe, Edgar Allan, 30, 71, 77, 202–203 The Politics of Culture (Liehm), 187–188 Popular Front, 69, 81, 97 Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth), 182, 184

348

INDEX “Portrait of the Hipster” (Broyard), 52–53 Posnock, Ross, 201–202 “The Power of the Powerless” (Havel), 10, 15–16, 220, 261–262, 278n61 Prague: as Central Europe, 11–12; jazz and, 130–131; Kořán’s election as mayor of, 253; literary counterculture of, 20–21; reform movement leading to Prague Spring, 1–8, 176–179; Warsaw Pact crackdown on Prague Spring, 8, 14, 178, 216. See also Majáles festival The Prague Orgy (Roth), 189, 206–209, 218–219, 230, 321n95 “Prague Winter” (Škvorecký), 221 Prezydent krokadýlů (President of the Crocadiles), 138–139 Přidal, Antonín, 236 Přítomnost, 38 Procházka, Jan, 193 Procházka, Vladimír, 83 The Professor of Desire (Roth), 103, 183, 185, 208 Projsa, Karel, 56 El Puente, 143–144 Quinn, Justin, 20, 101, 139, 148

Roth, Kenneth, 242–243 Roth, Philip: antinomian reading of Kafka and, 49; banning of from Czechoslovakia, 23, 181, 194–195; censorship and, 184; Central European counter-realist novel tradition and, 201–202, 204, 207; Czech Ad Hoc Fund, 193–194; Czech writers and, 11, 20–21, 181, 187–193, 211; effect of association with Czech writers on work of, 182; Formations and, 217–218; Havel and, 191; Index on Censorship and, 217; Kafka and, 43, 181, 183–185; Klíma and, 180, 185–186, 188–189, 194, 206, 208–209; Rita Klímová and, 251–252; Kundera and, 180, 188–189, 192, 199–200, 207, 255, 334n20; Liehm and, 187–188, 191–192; military service and, 229–230; pictured, 187, 190; return to Prague after Velvet Revolution and, 249; run-in with Czech agents and, 194; Sixty-Eight Publishers and, 217–219; StB file of, 180, 184, 209; Stříbrný and, 103; trope of immaturity and, 201–202; United States Information Agency (USIA) and, 184; Updike and, 230; Writers from the Other Europe series and, 182, 195–200

Rahv, Philip (Ivan Greenberg), 41–42, 44, 48–50 Rauvolf, Josef, 157, 171, 176 Really the Blues (Mezzrow and Wolfe), 128–130, 136, 139 Red Badge of Courage (Crane), 126 Reiman, Pavel, 57 Remaining Relevant after Communism (Wachtel), 255 The Republic of Whores (Škvorecký), 113 “The Return of the Kral Majales” (Ginsberg), 253 Revolver Revue, 256 Roberts, John G., 146 Robeson, Paul, 132 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 71 Rodokaps, 116 Rolland, Romain, 109–110 “Rolling Thunder Stones” (Ginsberg), 225 “The Romance of Oppression,” 205–206

Salinger, J. D., 147, 184 Salivarová, Zdena, 216, 228 Šámal, Petr, 108 Sanitorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (Schulz), 230 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8, 24, 238 Saudková, Věra, 103 Schejbal, Jaroslav “Jarka,” 75–77, 88, 90–92, 100–101, 103–104, 125 Schocken Books, 45–46 Schocken, Salman, 45, 282n47 Schocken Verlag, 39, 282n47 Schonberg, Michael, 108 Schulz, Bruno, 201, 204, 207 Schwartz, Delmore, 43, 52 Seifert, Jaroslav, 240 Sekal, Zbyněk, 59 Sestra (Topol), 256 Shapiro, Karl, 43 Shop Talk (Roth), 189 349

INDEX Shteyngart, Gary, 254 Sidon, Karol, 188 Siebenschein, Hugo, 54 Šiklová, Jiřina, 213–214 Silvers, Robert, 187, 190 Simmons, Ernest T., 66, 100 “The Sin of Power” (Miller), 17 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 16 Sixty-Eight Publishers, 216–219, 228 Skalník, Joska, 227, 240 Skupina 42, 58, 83 Škvorecký, Josef: African American literature and, 129–131, 138; American literary sources and, 21; career of after The Cowards, 128; Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia and, 112–113; The Cowards as cultural hybrid and, 109–110; defense of The Cowards and, 108–109; denunciation of The Cowards and, 105–108, 127–128; emigration to Canada, 216; The Engineer of Human Souls and, 219–222, 244; exile in Toronto and, 137; firing of from Světová literatura, 128; Formations and, 218; Ginsburg and, 140, 153–155, 162, 173, 245–247; Gray Zone concept and, 221–223, 228; habit of stretching the truth and, 138; on Hemingway, 119–120, 124–145; Herzog and, 257–258; on Hrabal, 202–203; Hughes and, 132–135; inclusion of Mezzrow epigraph and, 128–130; jazz and, 130–131, 137, 216, 243; Jazz Section and, 214–216, 222–223, 227–228, 238, 241–243, 247; Kafka and, 24, 122; literary censorship and, 118–119, 124; literary language and, 126, 133–135, 138; Majáles festival and, 162, 173; as mediator between American and Czech literary worlds, 106, 138, 216, 218, 244; normalization and, 192; pictured, 112; Podhoretz and, 244–245; political evolution of, 221–222; publication of the The Cowards and, 119; “really existing socialism” and, 222; reception of The Cowards and, 108; school years of, 111–112; sexual transgression in writing of, 22; Sixty-Eight Publishers and, 216–219, 228; Slovak

writers’ congress support and, 149; the Soviet Thaw and de-Stalinization and, 106; Svétová literatura and, 104, 106, 119–123, 125, 128, 132–134; translation of Beat literature and, 106, 148; Voice of America (VOA) and, 218; Writers from the Other Europe series and, 202, 218; Život je všude and, 118 Slochower, Harry, 41 Šmejkalová, Jiřina, 23, 108, 114 SNKLHU (Státní nakladatelství krásné literatury, hudby a umění), 116–117, 120, 128, 148. See also Odeon socialist realism, 21, 23–24, 83, 109, 116, 121 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 16, 210, 266–267 “Some Views on American Literature” (Škvorecký), 124–125, 135 Sontag, Susan, 11, 215, 238, 241, 256 Šotola, Jiří, 193 Soukup, František, 35 Soviet Union: Brezhnev, Leonid, 178; contraband and, 137–138; crackdown on Prague Spring and, 8, 14, 178, 216; dissident term and, 16; expulsion of Solzhenitsyn and, 210; The Family of Man (Steichen show) and, 136; Ginsberg’s trip to, 158; Gorbachev reforms and, 243, 248; Great Terror in, 42; Hemingway and, 123–124; Inostrannaya literatura, 120–121, 123–124; Khrushchev and, 106, 120; Stalinization and, 106; Thaw of, 109 “Spectator on a February Night” (Škvorecký), 112, 118 Spektrum, 233, 234 Spolek výtvarných umělco[o] Mánes, 37 Sproul, Barbara, 181, 209–210 Srp, Karel, 1–2, 227–228, 238, 240–243, 247–248, 264–265 Stafford, Jean, 147 Stansell, Christine, 12 Státní bezpečnost (StB): Ginsberg and, 2, 142, 156–157, 169–173, 265; Jazz Section and, 227; Majáles festival and, 161, 163; on Müller, 176; Pellars and, 184; Roth and, 180, 196; Sproul and, 209–210 Steichen, Edward, 136 Steinbeck, John, 71, 115

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INDEX Štern, Jan, 78–80, 84, 92, 101, 297n122 Štoll, Ladislav, 105–106, 127 Stonebridge, Lyndsey, 44–45 Stoppard, Tom, 238 Stříbrný, Zdeněk, 76, 88–89, 91–92, 94, 101–103, 117, 157, 183, 188 Styron, Rose, 11, 238, 241 Styron, William, 11, 186, 193, 231 Svědectví, 214 Svétová literatura: African American literature and, 226; Beat literature and, 145–147; cultural hybridity and, 109; Majáles festival and, 160; Pellars and, 184; Škvorecký and, 104, 106, 119–123, 125, 128, 132–134; Updike and, 233 Sviták, Ivan, 162 The Sweet Flypaper of Life (Hughes), 132–136 Sweezy, Paul, 67 tamizdat, 196, 208 Thomas, Alfred, 62 Thoreau, Henry David, 49, 69, 81 Tichý, František, 123 Time magazine, 86, 95 A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Kiš), 206 “Topič”/“The Stoker” (Kafka), 32–34. See also Amerika (Kafka) Topol, Jáchym, 255–256 To the Castle and Back (Havel), 261 “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (Kundera), 12, 205, 220, 273n23 The Trial, 37, 42, 50, 53, 57, 73–74, 123, 154, 209 “Trials of the Mind” (Rahv), 42 Trillin, Lionel, 50 Tuckerova, Veronika, 58, 123 The Turning Point (Mann), 39 Tvorba, 78, 84, 101 “Two Thousand Word Manifesto” (Vaculík), 190 Ulmanová, Hana, 226 The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera), 189, 220 United States: Cold War narrative and, 18–19; Communist Party of, 81; dissent

and, 18; literary interaction with Eastern bloc societies, 19; Marshall Plan and, 93; Popular Front and, 69, 81; State Department, 232–233; United States Information Agency (USIA), 184 Updike, John: anticommunist views of, 230; Bernstein and, 237; Czech Ad Hoc Fund and, 230; Formations and, 217; Helsinki Watch petition and, 215; Jazz Section and, 21, 215, 229, 233–234; Jazz Section sentences and, 243; military service and, 229–230; New Yorker piece and, 212–213, 215; Roth and, 230; visits to Prague and, 11, 216, 230–233, 234; Writers from the Other Europe series and, 197, 230 Utitz, Emil, 54 Vaculík, Ludvík: American writers and, 20; Czech Ad Hoc Fund and, 193; Czech reform movement and, 177; expulsion from Communist Party and, 190; The Guinea Pigs and, 195–196; Helsinki Watch and, 237; Kafka and, 62; language of dissidence and, 211; letter to UN of, 190–191; normalization and, 192; Poe and, 203–204; Roth and, 180, 188; Writers from the Other Europe series and, 198–199 Vanćura, Zdenék, 72, 91, 111, 117, 132 Velvet Revolution of 1989, 4, 9, 249–250, 253–254, 333n12 Vidal, Gore, 147, 193 Vietnam War, 7, 17, 229 Viola Wine Bar, 141, 148–150, 151, 152 “A Visitor’s Notes on Kafka’s City” (Roth), 192 Voćadlo, Otakar, 72, 91, 102 Vodrážka, Karel, 170 Voice of America (VOA), 218, 245 Volpin, Alexander, 158 Vonnegut, Kurt, 11, 21, 193, 215, 229, 232, 237, 241 VONS. See Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS) Voznesensky, Andrei, 158, 170 Vrba, František, 123 Wachtel, Andrew Baruch, 255

351

INDEX Wald, Gayle, 139–140 Waldheim, Kurt, 190 Wallace, Henry, 94, 97 Ward, Herbert and Jacqueline, 137 Warren, Austin, 29, 50 The Ways of White Folks (Hughes), 132 “The Weaponization of Culture,” 24 “White Negro” (Mailer), 139, 147 Whitman, Walt, 69, 73–74 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, 2, 184–185 Who Would Be Afraid of Kafka? (trans. of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?), 2, 185 Wieseltier, Leon, 227–228 Williams, Kieran, 258 Wilson, Edmund, 28–31, 47 Wilson, Paul, 220 Wolfe, Bernard, 129 Woods, Michelle, 35 Wouk, Herman, 147 Wright, Richard, 115, 135

Writers from the Other Europe series: Cold War détente and, 182; confessional mode and, 204; counter-realist novels and, 201–204, 210–211; human rights movement and, 210–211; pictured, 198; publication of, 195–200; Roth and, 182; Updike and, 230 “Writing American Fiction” (Roth), 201 The Writing on the Wall, 221 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 8, 158 Zábrana, Jan, 59–60, 118, 128, 137–139, 147–148, 153, 155–156, 171 Zábranova, Eva, 142, 163 Žantovský, Michael, 148 Zeman, Miloš, 264–265 Žert (The Joke, Kundera), 90 Život je všude: Almanach z roku 1956, 118 “Zone” (Apollinaire), 147 Zuckerman Unbound (Roth), 206

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