Writing Underground

Reflections on Samizdat Literature in Totalitarian Czechoslovakia

Martin Machovec

Published by Charles University, Karolinum Press

Layout Zdeněk Ziegler

Typeset by DTP Karolinum

Proofreading by Peter Kirk Jensen

First edition

© Charles University, 2019

Text © 2019 by Martin Machovec

Translation © 2017 by Kip Bauersfeld, 2008 by Melvyn Clarke,

2017 by Vanda Krutsky, 2015 by Markéta Pokorná, 2017 by Marek Tomin,

2007, 2010 and 2018 by Gerald Turner

Cover photo © 1974 by Ivo Pospíšil

ISBN 978-80-246-4292-5 (epub)

ISBN 978-80-246-4291-8 (mobi)

ISBN 978-80-246-4151-5 (pdf)

ISBN 978-80-246-4125-6 (print)

CONTENTS

1. 1.    The Group of Writers Around the Půlnoc Series (1949–1955): a Specific Example of Underground Cultural Activities

2. 2.    Underground and “Under-the-ground”

3. 3.    Charter 77 and the Underground

4. 4.    Ideological Orientation and Political Views and Standpoints of Representatives of Czech Underground Culture, 1969–1989 (Underground and Dissidence – Allies or Enemies?)

5. 5.    The Theme of “Apocalypse” as a Key Building Block of Underground Literature During the Period of “Normalization”

6. 6.    Exploring Modern Art: Czech Underground Rock Musicians

7. 7.    The Types and Functions of Samizdat Publications in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1989

8. 8.    Three Examples of a Variety of Relations Between Czech Samizdat and “Tamizdat” Book Production of the 1970s and 1980s

9. 9.    My Itinerary Has Been Monotonous for Quite a While: Magor’s Swan Songs

10. 10.  Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival by Ivan Martin Jirous – Its Origins, Structure and Function

11. Selected Bibliography – Discography – Filmography

12. Underground Music

13. Documentary Films

14. Author’s Note

1. THE GROUP OF WRITERS AROUND THE PŮLNOC SERIES (1949–1955): A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE OF UNDERGROUND CULTURAL ACTIVITIES

Nowadays there is quite an extensive literature, comprising literary history, essays and memoirs[1] on the activities of the underground group of poets and prose writers who brought out their works in one of the first ever Czech samizdat series (discounting underground works under the Protectorate) in the Půlnoc [Midnight] series and as separate associated texts, in individual volumes sorted by names, which were dated 1951–1955, but which were mostly written between 1949 and 1953. As the actual literary work that was brought out in the Půlnoc series has been preserved more or less in its entirety and was then mostly published[2] as early as in the first half of the 1990s, the situation is now fairly clear.

Within the broad range of unofficial cultural activities which were originally given the avant-garde label and which existed at least in trace form after 1948 (hence leaving aside those writers who emigrated, fell entirely silent, were imprisoned or, of course, those who after “victorious February” attempted to comply or join the mainstream in one way or another), pride of place is taken by Teige and Effenberger’s surrealist group, which carried on its pre-1948 activities almost entirely in isolation. Its most prominent talents were clearly Mikuláš Medek and Karel Hynek. Activities also continued in Zbyněk Havlíček’s the “Spořilov” group and among some members of Skupina 42 [Group 42], particularly Jan Hanč, Jindřich Chalupecký, and Jiří Kolář. Entirely isolated from the other posthumous children of the Czech avant-garde was the Záběhlice surrealist group known as the Libeň psychics (librarian Zdeněk Buřil, 1924–1994, varnisher Jiří Šmoranc, 1924–2003, radio mechanic Vladimír Vávra, 1924–2005, and bookbinder Stanislav Vávra, *1933), whose 1950s work was as a whole considered lost or destroyed, so that it only very gradually penetrated the Czech literary context after 1989.[3] However, as early as 1948 the former avant-gardists became aware of Vladimír Boudník, with his first “explosionalist” manifesto on 14th August 1948. Bohumil Hrabal (and evidently Hrabal’s “neo-poetist” associate Karel Marysko, 1915–1988, who made a living as a performing concert musician) apparently got to know Jiří Kolář back in 1946, although awareness of Hrabal’s breakthrough 1950 texts that were so highly rated decades later[4] only got through to this very limited “public” some time later, perhaps around the mid-1950s. Skupina Ra [The Ra Group] entirely ceased its activities. Of those mentioned above, Teige and Hynek died shortly afterwards and none of those remaining were able to obtain vocation relating in any way to literature at least from 1949 until the mid-1950s. Most of them were engaged in working-class occupations. Kolář, who from 1948 to 1951 eked out a living at the Dílo co-operative and then at the Propaganda Section of the SNKLHU [State Literature, Music and Art Publishers], was imprisoned from 1952 to 1953, and did not go back to work when he was released. Other “maladjusted individuals” in similar straitened circumstances during the first half of the 1950s included Josef Škvorecký, Vratislav Effenberger, Vladimír Vokolek, Ladislav Dvořák, and Jan Zábrana, while repudiated Czech literary grandmasters such as Vladimír Holan, Jakub Deml, Bohuslav Reynek and a large number of other authors were totally isolated with no hope of publication. Subsistence issues of a similar kind also affected all the members of the group whose work was brought together in the Půlnoc samizdat series.

The initiators, creators and most prolific authors of the series, Ivo Vodseďálek (1931–2017) and in particular Egon Bondy, actual name Zbyněk Fišer (1930–2007), were in a certain sense the “renegades” from Teige’s and Effenberger’s surrealist group. Bondy made his samizdat debut, for the first time with his Jewish pseudonym, in what was still an entirely surrealist anthology Židovská jména [Jewish Names], which came out in early 1949 with Vratislav Effenberger, Karel Hynek, Oldřich Wenzl, Jan Zuska, Zdeněk Wagner, Jana Krejcarová and others[5] all represented under other Jewish pseudonyms. To a large extent, in spite of their manifesto for a radical schism with the poetics of surrealism, as documented particularly in the programme collections Ich und es: totální realismus [Ich und es: Total Realism][6] (Egon Bondy, samizdat 1951)[7] and Trapná poesie[8] [Embarrassing Poetry] (I. Vodseďálek, samizdat 1951). It is also possible to include their work from the early 1950s, like that of Hrabal at the same time and much of Skupina 42 (Kolář, Blatný and Kainar) among the work of those who repeatedly insisted on matching themselves with the surrealist legacy. In the case of Bondy and Vodseďálek, there remained the poetics of the objet trouvé, the idea of dreams being equal to life (and of course life being equal to dreams!), admiration for the poetics of horror and the roman noir, the requirement for “purety”, “nakedness”, the linkage of the unlinkable, the drasticity of testimony aiming to épater le bourgeois [shock the bourgeois], the stylization of “childish naiveté”, the inability to hierarchize values, and in particular dogmatic “leftishness”, faith in the socialist revolution (albeit of a Trotskyist anti-Stalinist kind) and resistance to “religious obscurantism”. Some of these traits are more evident in Bondy, others in Vodseďálek, and still others in Krejcarová, but all of them can be pointed out in the Půlnoc series texts as a whole. What was radical, however, was the retreat from metaphor and imagery in poetic language, the drastic “purification” and “de-aestheticization”. Key works from the Půlnoc series, some of which were to be of crucial importance to the aesthetic orientation of the 1970s artistic underground include Bondy’s poem Jeskyně divů aneb Prager Leben (Pražský život) [Cave of Wonders or Prager Leben; Prague Life] (1951), the poetics of which are notably similar to those of Hrabal’s Bambino di Praga, which was written around the same time, even though Bondy and Hrabal did not know of each other at that time and met first only by the end of 1951. In other respects, it hints at Bondy’s future development as an implacable critic, a regular firebrand and a dogmatic “wielder of the truth”. Also of importance is the collection Für Bondys unbekannte Geliebte aneb Nepřeberné bohatství [For Bondy’s Unknown Love or Inexhaustible Wealth] (1951), which to some extent restores the direct connection to the poetics used by surrealists at that time (e.g., applying Dalí’s paranoid-critical method and Hynek’s “graphic poetry” principle), as well as Velká kniha [Great Book] (1952), which was to be highly popular in the underground, particularly with its groundbreaking section Ožralá Praha [Hammered Prague], its barbaric-style antipoetisms, its nursery rhyme pseudo-primitivisms and of course its “naive realist” testimonies of the absurdities of the era, which form a striking counterpoint, e.g., to Kolář’s contemporary “eye-witness” poetics. The long poem Zbytky eposu [Remnants of an Epic] (1955), is outstanding for several of its highly de-tabooing passages, which show inadvertent parallels between Bondy’s early poetical works and several elements in those of writers of American Beat generation, as well as being a splendid display of surrealist poetics linking the unlinkable and ultimately testimony of Bondy’s return to some sources of Czech literary modernism (Erben, Mácha, and Havlíček Borovský).

In his Půlnoc texts, Ivo Vodseďálek is far more consistent in adhering to the poetics of “embarrassment”, disrupting the traditional punchline and of course the imagery of the poetical text (e.g., in the collection Cesta na Rivieru [Trip to the Riviera], 1951, Smrt vtipu [Death of the Joke], 1951, Pilot a oráč [Pilot and Ploughman], 1951, Americké básně [American Poems], 1953) poetics, which in a reevaluation of the surrealist objet trouvé and in contrast to Bondy’s poetic work anticipates all the pathos-free poetics of American pop-art and hyperrealism. He also, on the other hand, revives the beauty of surrealist spectrality and chimerality in novel contexts (in the collection Krajina a mravnost [Landscape and Morality], 1953, the prose work Kalvarie [Calvary], 1954), while generally in a number of his texts he uncovers the appeal of “Soviet mythology” (e.g., in the collection Kvetoucí Ukrajina [Blooming Ukraine], 1950, 1953), while admitting to his defencelessness in the face of the myth accepted by the masses and the futility of any resistance, which he nevertheless does offer, even though he is aware of the absurdity of such conduct, thus again presciently anticipating the ideas of some of his underground successors. (However, Vodseďálek’s work was unknown to the underground circle surrounding the Plastic People.)

In hindsight, it is quite tempting to see this grouping as a more or less monolithic school of poetry, if not actually as some kind of latent resistance cell, even though circumstances around the late forties and early fifties, i.e., the political reality of the times and the personal situations of the majority of members of that group, who were mostly around twenty years of age, largely rules out anything of that nature. Zand[9] calls them a “poetic circle” in an attempt to indicate the low degree of homogeneity within the group. The fact is that both initiators of the Půlnoc series – Bondy and Vodseďálek – were classmates at the Ječná Street grammar school in Prague, and they were brought together mainly by their interest in modern art in general and surrealism in particular, as well as ultimately to attempt a joint debut, which unfortunately took place during the period immediately following February 1948. These two artists, whose early works (i.e., at least until 1952) still bore many of the signs of juvenilia (e.g., experimenting and seeking out new forms, attempting a wide variety of genres, much “finding oneself” as it were, and almost desperate attempts to come up with something novel, independent and non-epigonic), had the good fortune to find a couple of congenial writers and artists among their contemporaries (poet and collagist Pavel Svoboda, 1930–2014, Jana Krejcarová-Fischlová-Černá-Ladmanová, 1928–1981, sculptor and poet Karel Žák, 1929–2015, and later book graphic artist and photographer Jaromír Valoušek, 1928–1993, in the early 1950s chemistry student and for a short time Vodseďálek’s wife Dana “Dagmara” Prchlíková, 1931–2006, at that time the “suprasexdadaists” Adolf Born, 1930–2016, and Oldřich Jelínek, *1930, later psychologist Miloš Černý, 1931–2018, poet Emil Hokeš, 1931–2000 and perhaps a couple of others), who showed appreciation for their creative ambitions and who at least to some extent responded to them by showing them their own works. Another who was close to this group, or at least to some of its members, during the first half of the 1950s (typically, not all the aforementioned personally knew all those named below!) was a quite unknown secondary graphic art school graduate, Vladimír Boudník (1924–1968)[10] whom Zbyněk Fišer got to know as early as in 1948, as well as Mikuláš Medek (1926–1974), Emila Medková (1928–1985), Jaroslav Dočekal (1926–1975), Karel Hynek (1925–1953), Zbyněk Sekal (1923–1998) and Jan “Hanes” Reegen (1922–1952)[11] to name at least those whose familiarity with underground publishing activities at Půlnoc can be verified in some way.[12] (The Medeks and Hynek formed a connection for some time at least between Bondy’s and Vodseďálek’s circle and Effernberger’s surrealist group, to whom it seems otherwise Bondy had a rather ambivalent relationship). The late avant-gardist JUDr. Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997), who was quite isolated in the late 1940s and early 1950s, did not get to know Bondy until the end of 1951 (according to the latter’s information), although the dating and content of Boudník’s short story Noc [Night] – 10th October 1951 – indicate that they actually got to know each other somewhat earlier. Bondy recalls that (probably as early as 1951, but quite likely in 1952, evidently from 1951 or 1952) he met not only Boudník at Hrabal’s, but also Karel Marysko.[13]

Surprisingly, however, the authors of the “Midnight Circle” did not have any demonstrable contacts with some of the other prominent artists and writers who at least for some time and in some respects “went underground”, and who were in frequent contact during the 1950s with Hrabal and particularly with Jan Zábrana or Jiří Kolář (whose work they knew at least to some extent according to various testimonies), and Kolář’s artistic and human double Josef Hiršal, who stated himself that he got to know Bondy’s translations of Morgenstern at Hrabal’s maybe in 1952, but perhaps as late as 1955, i.e., at a time when contacts between Bondy and Hrabal were again very limited.[14] Out of all the Půlnoc authors, Jana Krejcarová was the one who always led the most sociable life, and she evidently had the most contacts with people outside the isolated circles of post-avantgardists, even though she evidently gained a reputation as the rather extravagant, albeit charmingly eloquent and forthright daughter of Milena Jesenská and Jaromír Krejcar, not as an underground writer, which is indirectly indicated by her alleged apprehension and indignation following the samizdat “publication” without her consent of her prose work Clarissa in 1951.[15] A more remote awareness of the Půlnoc authors’ activities can be attributed to several more quite prominent writers who found themselves to be in more or less similar straitened circumstances in the early 1950s, e.g., Oldřich Wenzl, Zbyněk Havlíček, Ludvík Kundera (as testified for example, by correspondence between Kundera and Zdeněk Wagner[16]), Vratislav Effenberger, Jaroslav Rotbauer[17], Jan Bouše, and Libor Fára. Until their premature deaths, Záviš Kalandra and Karel Teige were also allegedly in contact with Bondy at least, although hard evidence is thin on the ground, and for the most part we can only rely on the memories and indirect testimonies.[18] Clearly, as soon as the Půlnoc series was established, i.e., late 1950/early 1951, its creators kept their activities hidden for obvious reasons, even from some of their former friends from whom they had in any case gradually become artistically estranged one way or another.

Since the Půlnoc series was primarily the offspring of its two initiators, then again in retrospect it is possible to gain the somewhat erroneous impression that its primary contents were mainly meant to be Bondy’s and Vodseďálek’s “totally realistic”, “embarrassing”, “anti-poetic”, “de-tabooing”, “neo-Dadaist”, often specifically political, or “witness” reactions to some surrealist practices, which as has become evident with the passage of time, already had its precedent in the somewhat similar reactions of some members of Group 42 and the Ra Group (in any case Bondy undoubtedly found an affinity with Hrabal and Boudník due to this similarity). What is more likely is that this (partly illustrated) typescript series was originally meant to serve more as a platform for creative dialogue with parallel unofficial artistic trends, and even more probably as a platform for attempts to continue this dialogue even under the extraordinary and absurd conditions of the day. Evidence of these efforts is confirmed by the “guest” appearances made by Hrabal, Boudník, Born and Jelínek. In 1950, it was still undoubtedly unclear where the artistic paths of these two – Bondy and Vodseďálek – were taking them and which of the other Půlnoc authors would produce works of lasting value that might compete with them one way or another, and in particular, in which political and social circumstances the work of all those involved might develop further. Back in 1950, everything was bogged down by doubts and uncertainties that were surely much greater than those which twenty years later dogged Bondy and Vodseďálek’s “underground” successors, who were thrust into a situation that was otherwise quite similar. The fact that the creators of the series saw the early 1950s as some kind of stopgap situation whose duration could only be guessed at is confirmed by Vodseďálek’s statement[19] that the usual Půlnoc edition, represented generally by four typed copies (1 + 3), was primarily intended to conserve the texts that had been written, i.e., to preserve them until they could be published, which of course was ultimately to be four decades later, and the question arises whether just an intimation of this fact would not have entirely undermined the creativity of writers who were around twenty years of age. The similarities between the early 1950s and the early 1970s were considerable for debuting artists and writers, e.g., the loss of the option to publish freely and the imposition of political repression; however, the early 1970s had its precedent in the early 1950s, so then it was possible to look back and seek examples.

Hence, while in retrospect it is evident (from an art history or literary history standpoint) that the most prominent “core” authors in the “Půlnoc circle” were Bondy and Vodseďálek, while Hrabal and Boudník remained on its “periphery”, this did not yet necessarily appear to be the case around the early 1950s. There is no doubt that much was expected from Jana Krejcarová, whose literary work has only come down to us in fragments, though the reputation of her output is enhanced by the legend of her life.[20]

What might the objective of the Půlnoc series creators have been? Probably first and foremost to continue to address other non-conformists and modernists (hence in 1950 this could only take place “underground”) and to enter into debate with them. They undoubtedly wished to create a fitting and a true reflection of the times in which they lived, and not to succumb to the enormous pressure of mass psychosis and the general mythologization of reality, but rather to unmask the imposed myths with particular mockery, and thus somehow to actually “disarm” them. They also wanted to maintain the continuity of modern art and modern literature (to be specific, at the time this meant the continuity of artistic work, which was still understood as avant-garde, i.e., inventive, pioneering, and innovative). They might have also wanted a confrontation in which they could stand up for their particular articulated artistic credo and their own distinctive standpoint, but these efforts only succeeded to a limited degree: echoes of Bondy’s work (but almost to no extent that of Vodseďálek) can be found in some works by Hrabal, to some extent Boudník, as well as to a limited extent for example in Medek, Hynek, and Marysko. Only Bondy’s poetic work, and of course his later prose and philosophical work, exercised a profound influence on the younger generations of underground authors some twenty years later, even though this was all rather spontaneous and had little to do with the Půlnoc authors’ original aspirations. Hence Bondy’s and Vodseďálek’s attempt of some kind in the early 1950s to make their texts at least part of a substitute literary scene can be said for the most part to have been unsuccessful, as such a “practice” only emerged to a very limited extent even within the Půlnoc series itself; today it is clear that some of their publication activities between 1950 and 1955 were primarily rather individual matters of a “piratical” nature which the other Půlnoc authors did not necessarily know about (as was already the case for the compilation of the Židovská jména collection around 1948/1949; not all of these authors were informed about being involved in this “business”). Hence fear of prosecution clearly played a greater role here than the organizers cared to admit.

In the given circumstances, they could rule out any idea of accomplishing Bondy’s subsequent objective, as testified by Vodseďálek[21], of making the Půlnoc authors into an artistic group which (doubtless on the model of the various surrealist groups!) would be highly homogeneous and would strive (as in the case, at least for some time, of André Breton’s group) not only to achieve a “revolutionary change in human consciousness”, but also for a material “revolutionary change throughout the world”. However, it is also evident that the mere declaration and articulation of such an immodest ambition could have been conceived by Bondy in the early 1950s as an inspiring and stimulating necessity. In any case, a number of other “immodest” aims and ambitions showed up in his subsequent life and work.

The reactions at the time of the Půlnoc authors’ artistic fellow travellers were, generally speaking, insofar as they can be followed at all, rather restrained.[22] We might well include those of Boudník, who indeed maintained an aesthetic distance from Bondy and Vodseďálek – more in the graphic arts than in literature – but less with regard to “world view”: his explosionism did not in the least lag behind Bondy’s maximalist postulates in its radicalism and his artistic work and lifestyle were viewed even by those artistically close to him with some distrust if not disdain. The most prominent fellow-traveller of the Půlnoc authors was undoubtedly Bohumil Hrabal, who was also the only one to always have a full understanding of, and high appreciation for, Bondy’s work. However, he was certainly not one of them, as his age, education and life experience alone inspired respect and kept him at a certain distance. It is doubtless little exaggeration to conclude that artists like Medek, Fára, Havlíček, Wenzl, Effenberger (and ultimately, Born and Jelínek too, who were still Applied Arts College students in the early 1950s) were above all apprehensive about Bondy’s political explicitness and so rather sought to distance themselves from the Půlnoc “core”. This might also have been caused by nothing more than a simple distaste for Bondy’s and Krejcarová’s (not to mention Boudník’s) extravagant, eccentric behaviour and minimum social adjustment, which could appear quite dangerous in the early 1950s.[23] Bondy’s ostentatious leftish and “revolutionary” tendencies[24] could also have been off-putting, while for many Bondy and Vodseďálek’s “desertion” of “high” art was incomprehensible. The question remains whether the primary objections and aversions involved in their disassociation with them were of a purely personal nature (and this applies not just to Bondy, but above all to Krejcarová, whose “spontaneous animalism” simply frightened many of her contemporaries and friends, as a number of testimonies bear witness), or mainly aesthetic, artistic or relating to their world-view. Here, we are compelled to remain in the realm of speculation, as we cannot ascertain to what extent the later testimonies of the participants are influenced by their view of that period through the prism of later events. In any case, the Půlnoc group had fallen apart by 1955 anyway[25] and communications between its former participants were irregular and occasional in the following years, as they all went their separate ways.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Půlnoc series and the literary works published in it have become a tale, a pseudo-fiction and a legend, which was occasionally perpetuated, no doubt deliberately and consciously, by Bohumil Hrabal in his works published during the 1960s, but whose original creator was undoubtedly Egon Bondy: let us recall his cycle Legendy [Legends] from the collection Für Bondys unbekannte Geliebte[26]. Several contemporaries testify to his numerous statements from the 1960s in “as the poet Bondy spake” mode. (Bondy’s “split” into “I” and “he”, which is well-represented as an autostylization throughout his lifelong work, was repossessed in masterly fashion by Hrabal in his Něžný barbar, 1973[27], which is actually a kind of legend of a legend.)

As regards the State Security’s (StB) familiarity with Bondy’s and Vodseďálek’s activities, the only material that is so far publicly available at the Interior Ministry archive (now ABS) relates mostly to the 1948–1949 period, i.e., before the Půlnoc series was launched. There is an undated testimony from Milan Herda, imprisoned in the 1950s, evidently from the period between 1952 and 1954[28], which indicates two things: although the testifier attempted to rather trivialize the artistic (and indeed the political) activities of Bondy (always called Fišer in the report), Vodseďálek and Krejcarová (Fischlová), to portray them as grandiose mystifications, or as ordinary economic crime (especially in comparison with the “seriousness” of the activities of Karel Teige, to whom the entire testimony relates), although he provides facts which could definitely have been of some use to State Security. (For example, he mentions the plan – fulfilled later, in 1950, – to smuggle Czech glass to Vienna.) Hence it can be assumed that if the State Security had wanted, they could have monitored the Půlnoc organizers activities from an early stage.[29]

Public reactions to the activities of one of the first and most original underground artistic groupings were general practically zero until the late 1960s: the Půlnoc works from the 1950s were not published and the activities of the initiators were only a “legend”. (One exception is Boudník’s artistic work, but that is only rather indirectly related to the Půlnoc authors’ literary activities, running in parallel to them.)

So again, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that if Bondy’s poetic work had not been discovered in the late 1960s by director Radim Vašinka,[30] literary critic Jan Lopatka, and in the early 1970s art historian Ivan Martin Jirous, the Půlnoc underground would only have lived on as Bondyian and Hrabalian legend until 1989, if not to this day. It is only the fact that the early 1970s underground artists enthusiastically seized upon Bondy’s poetry and began to put it to music and so to spread it among a public that was of a very different character, education, and social origin that allows the underground Půlnoc circle to be understood in retrospect as a kind of prelude to the greatly differentiated underground activities of the 1970s and 1980s. Without this capitalization, the Půlnoc circle would have remained a mere episode in the history of the Czech unofficial cultural scene, as was unfortunately the case with so many small groups and individuals, e.g., the “Libeň psychics” and the various regional activities. The public (albeit narrow and limited) only started to be aware of the importance of the Půlnoc authors’ artistic and literary activities, in fact only those of Egon Bondy and perhaps also of Jana Krejcarová, in the late sixties and the early seventies. It was only many years later as the importance of the role played by this little group in the creation of the later Czech underground movement became evident.

Excerpt from the e-book