Triumph of the Plastic People
Bruce Sterling
When the return-of-the-repressed came, and the Communist regime cracked and fell apart, these mad Czech hippies acquired a cultural authority and credibility like no mad hippies have had ever before, anywhere, any time.
September 17. I'm sitting right now at a big wooden desk in a Ruská Street apartment house in Prague, typing on a PowerBook 180. In the only country in the world where the president is a revolutionary literary intellectual, there's an arcane Kafkaesque pleasure in typing immaterial electronic words into this silicon box. Literatura, words-in-a-row, still means something here in Prague. A lot of odd guff is talked about this town, but when they said that Prague was literary, they were living in truth. This is probably the most utterly literary city on the planet.
My hosts here on Ruská Street are a publisher, Martin Klíma, and his wife, the Czech fantasy novelist Vilma Kadlecková. Martin publishes novels because he feels that this is the sort of thing one ought to do, and to make money, he publishes boxed sets of Western role-playing games, which sell very well. Vilma writes fantasy novels - she's been weaving complex fantasies since she was a little girl - and to make money, she works as an editor of Harlequin romances, which have struck gold in the nothing-if-not-romantic female Czech population and are selling like crazy.
The desk I'm working on right now, in my hosts' cavernous, high-ceilinged office, has a big container of little hard floppies, an even bigger container of big wobbly floppies, a bouquet of yellow flowers in a vase, two short-story collections - one in Czech, one in English - a voltage converter, a QuickTake camera, an émigré magazine, a thick, English-language monthly calendar of Prague cultural events, some Czech rock tapes, a joystick, a printer, a pack of Dunhills, and a rotary phone.
They're all sweet and harmless little objects, except for the cigarettes, which are bad for me, and the rotary phone here at my elbow, which is truly a device from hell. This phone is an ancient Siemens pulse unit. Out the back of the set comes a yard of round-as-a-noodle, gray Czech phone wiring, which ends suddenly in a splay of four bare wires: white, brown, green, and yellow. The green and yellow wires end in severed copper stumps, while the white and brown wires enter a small plastic doohickey. From the other side of this makeshift gizmo comes a flat American phone wire, with four little internal wires of its own. This time, the black and yellow wires are dead stumps, and the red and green wires are the unhappy survivors. This butchered American phone wire runs 6 inches and ends in a modem, and I don't mean a modem with a label or a shell. I mean a bare piece of green circuit board with some Malaysian and Filipino bit-eating caterpillars and a naked little tin speaker. Yet another American-style pinch-clip phone cord exits from this inert modem and trails into a Czech domestic phone outlet, which is an alien doorknob-like object big enough to brain someone with. And out of the bottom of this ceramic phone outlet comes a truly ancient length of round, pre-Communist-era phone cord, running down the wall, along the baseboard, and behind a towering glass-fronted bookcase of Czech literary classics, to god-only-knows what eldritch, electromechanical, Nazi-era, phone-switch destination.
My host Martin Klíma, who was a physics major and student firebrand during the Velvet Revolution of 1989, has an Internet address and a 486. He's got WordPerfect and Paradox and Corel Draw. By Prague standards, Martin is one wired dude. His wife, Vilma, writes her fantasy novels on a Leading Edge PC in the bedroom. It sits on top of her amazing steampunk sewing machine, which used to be a pedal-pushed manual unit back in the Pleistocene, and was refitted with an electric motor by Martin's grandfather. Martin and Vilma have one phone line. In the West they'd probably have 10.
On the subject of modems and phone lines, Martin and his '89er friends still talk about "the Japanese guy." Back in '89, Czech students were trying to coordinate the uprising across the nation, and the technical students, including Martin, were running the telecom angle. They used a 300-baud device with the size, shape, and heat of a kitchen toaster. The Czech secret police were far too stupid and primitive to keep up with digital telecommunications, so the student-radical modem network was relatively secure from bugging and taps. Fidonet BBSes were springing up surreptitiously on campuses whenever an activist could sneak a modem past the border guards. Modems were, of course, illegal. Most of the Czech cops, however, had no idea what modems were.
The police were engaged in the hopeless task of beating the population into submission with billy clubs, without the backup of Soviet heavy armor. Martin's independent student movement was smarting from street-beatings and sensed that '89 was '68 upside down. They had a list of seven demands. They were pretty radical demands: three of them were never met. Everyone knew the situation was about to blow. But getting the word out was very difficult.
And then, without any warning or fanfare, some quiet Japanese guy arrived at the university with a valise full of brand-new and unmarked 2400-baud Taiwanese modems. The astounded Czech physics and engineering students never did quite get this gentleman's name. He just deposited the modems with them free of charge, smiled cryptically, and walked off diagonally into the winter smog of Prague, presumably in the direction of the covert-operations wing of the Japanese embassy. They never saw him again.
There doesn't seem to be much doubt that this Japanese guy existed. I've talked to four different sources who claim to have seen him in the flesh. The students immediately used these red-hot 2400-baud scorcher modems to circulate manifestos, declarations of solidarity, rumors, and riot news. Unrest grew steadily. By late November, Václav Havel and the older-generation dissident intelligentsia were playing a big role in the demonstrations. Then the general populace took to the streets, and without Red Army backing, the puppet regime collapsed like a rotten marshmallow. By mid-December, the Civic Forum was in power.
Those were glorious days indeed. But all that was five years ago. Now Martin is a professional publisher, an ex-student pal of his is a member of parliament, Václav Havel is president, and this country, liberated by a miraculous mummery coalition of playwrights, actors, rockers, students, and hippies, is doing its level best to transmute itself into the functional equivalent of Luxembourg. This may have been the Temporary Autonomous Zone for about a year and a half, from 1989 to 1991. Right now, it is the Hopefully Permanent Capitalist Scaffolding Zone.
The Prime Minister, Václav Klaus, who is calling all the shots in this country, is a right-wing economist who openly admires the godlike genius of Baroness Margaret Thatcher. Unlike the British Tories, however, Klaus and his party are doing a pretty good job economically. Unemployment is below 4 percent nationally - in Prague, it's below 1 percent. Inflation, which was inevitable considering Czech socialist subsidies had no tangible connection to reality, is contained at less than 10 percent. The Czech koruna is becoming a real currency and could probably be made fully convertible tomorrow, if not for the fact that the canny Klaus thinks that might hurt exports.
And Prague has become one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. The people of Prague have dislodged their Red Army overlords, but they are now under occupation by an army of tourists. About 80 million of them a year. The Nation of Tourists comes here, and it spends money. Slowly, tourists and their money are changing everything about this place.
A lot of visitors fall in love with this city, for a variety of excellent reasons, and they try to live here. Some of them find a foothold in the crush and succeed in moving to Prague. A lot of them - a whole lot, somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 people - are Americans. It's a rare and noteworthy happenstance - maybe the last example was Paris in the '20s - when thousands of Americans, most of them of the same generation, show up en masse, with some sense of common purpose, in one single (hospitable, if bewildered) foreign city.
The émigré community in this city is real, a genuine little island of bohemia in Bohemia. Prague supports three English-language émigré newspapers, The Prague Post (an actual weekly newspaper), Prognosis (the hipper, cultural, voice-of-the-happening-people rag), and the gray and tedious Central European Business Weekly, which is read by the capitalist gnomes.
There are quite a few American business people here, but they don't set the tone. The tone is set by graphic artists and wannabe musicians and common-or-garden slackers off to drink great cheap beer on Dad's money. There is an absolute load of poets. You can't turn around without tripping over a poet. There don't seem to be many novelists here, but when it comes to poets and short-story writers (the two most noncommercial species in the global literary enterprise), they are here in Prague in massive numbers, barking in utter joy like big-eyed Greenpeace seals on some ice floe beyond reach of the furriers' bludgeons.
Prague is very much like Paris in the '20s, but it's also very much unlike Paris in the '20s. One main reason is that there is no André Breton here. People do sit and write - stop by The Globe, the crowded émigré bookstore on Janovského 14 in north Prague, and you'll see a full third of the cappuccino-sipping black-clad Praguelodyte customers scribbling busily in their notebooks. There are many American wannabe writers here - even better, they actually manage to publish sometimes - but there is not a Prague literary movement, no Prague literary-isms. No magisterial literary theorists hold forth here as Breton or Louis Aragon or Gertrude Stein did in Paris. There isn't a Prague technique, or a Prague approach, or a Prague literary philosophy that will set a doubting world afire. There are people here sincerely trying to find a voice, but as yet there is no voice. There may well be a new Hemingway here (as The Prague Post once declared there must be). But if Prague writers want to do a kind of writing that is really as new and powerful as Hemingway's was in Hemingway's time, then they will have to teach themselves.
What there is, however, is Václav Havel. And that is a great advantage. Václav Havel, the president of the Czech Republic, is a resolutely noncommercial writer. Havel writes three kinds of things: speeches (lots of those lately), moral and philosophical essays (very worthy but a few of 'em go a pretty long way, frankly), and absurdist theater. Havel is not the greatest playwright of the 20th century, but you know, in all honesty, and not just because Havel is sleeping peacefully, a few kilometers away in the Hradcany Castle at the moment that I'm typing this, the guy's plays are not half-bad. I just read them all in translation - it wasn't hard, for there aren't that many - and I enjoyed the heck out of them. All of his plays are clever, some are deep, they are always interestingly structured, and almost all are hilarious. He's without question the funniest head of state in the world.
There will be a meeting of the International PEN Club in Prague next month, and it will be half-again as large as most meetings of this august, world literary body. Havel has issued personal invitations to such luminaries as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Umberto Eco, Harold Pinter, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa (who narrowly missed capturing the Peruvian presidency), Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer. You can bet a shiny handful of Czech korunas that all these worthies will strain every sinew to show up in Prague at the polite behest of Saint Václav. If there's any power left in Literature, as a force to move and change the world, Václav Havel is uniquely fitted to mobilize it. A lot of writers come here, not because Havel can teach them how to write, but because Václav Havel is a symbol of what words-in-a-row can do.
That is a very romantic achievement in an almost painfully romantic city, which is trying with increasing restlessness to become rather less romantic. People here like Václav Havel personally. They can scarcely help that. He's a man genuinely guided by principle who is not impossibly self-important and stuffy, an incredible achievement in the 1990s. People know this.
Nevertheless, Václav Havel embarrasses people sometimes. Not every president in the world will hold a formal audience with Pink Floyd, but Havel did just that last week. Havel thought John Lennon was politically important, and was proud to be a personal friend of Frank Zappa. Havel also redesigned the night lighting for Hradcany Castle because he used to be a stage-lighting hand in Prague's little alternative theaters. The Hradcany Castle looks terrific now, tastefully lit in low-key, magic-realist verdigris and salmon pink, but most other presidents don't even know what verdigris and salmon pink are.
Having Havel as president used to be unbelievably thrilling and exotic, but nowadays, as the Czechs knuckle down to the business of renovating their capital and systematically fleecing tourists, Havel seems just a little bit, well, weird.
Havel used the poetry of decency and morality to take power from a numb and corrupted regime, but his formulations have become political catch phrases now. It's "ethical" this and "ethical" that, "moral" the dog and "moral" the cat - and in the meantime, the Czech government is starting to act pretty much like normal governments act, in the usual Realpolitik money-and-interest-group fashion. Havel could kick the desiccated guts out of the Communist mummy, but there is scarcely a moralist alive who survives the nerve-shattering grip of postmodern capitalism. Nowadays Havel does a lot of ceremonial ribbon cuttings at bridges, and the country is in the can-do grip of the increasingly determined and autocratic Václav Klaus. If Havel is a world-class dreamer, Klaus is a heavy-duty hustler. And most Czechs today - most Czechs any day - would far rather be hustlers than dreamers. Havel speaks and they are deeply moved, and then Klaus says "frog" and they jump.
Havel, despite his worldwide renown, was not the only Czech dissident. Considering the hideous price one had to pay to be a dissident in this country, the former Czechoslovakia had them in abundance. In particular, one dissident group, known as the Plastic People of the Universe, was (or is) probably the heaviest, down-and-dirtiest, most successful rock-and-roll revolutionary force in the world.
When the Plastic People were busted by state security Gestapo in 1976, indignation at this gratuitous breaking-of-butterflies-on-the-wheel led directly to the formation of Charter 77, the dissident group that eventually became Civic Forum, and then, briefly, the revolutionary government of this country. Without the influence of the Plastic People, the flowering of American alternative culture here today would have been impossible.
Those who followed the astonishing career of the Plastic People - "We carried the police around with us like flies," said Plastic Person Vratislav Brabenec - could only conclude that they were either amazingly brave or crazy. In point of fact, as I have recently learned from interviewing local hipster Czechs who ought to know, the Plastic People were both those things. Those courageous Czech hippie revolutionaries were really brave, really Czech, really hippies, really revolutionaries, and really bonkers.
The éminence grise of the Plastic People was, or is, a Czech revolutionary philosopher-poet who called himself "Egon Bondy" (Zbynek Fiser). Egon can be imagined as a kind of Eastern European cross between Kropotkin and Allen Ginsberg, a turbo-Beat Marxist free-love anarchist rant poet. Egon is still alive, 64 years old. He's been so upset by the capitalist turn of events in the Czech Republic that he has emigrated to Slovakia. Egon owns one pair of pants - Czech-made jeans - one dirty jacket, and one battered pair of shoes. Egon has worn this ensemble for years, a declaration of Christ-like ultra-leftist solidarity with the suffering and shirtless of the earth. Here's what Egon had to say about the Velvet Revolution of 1989:
The new generation is sober in orientation:
the last 40 years don't exist and before us
is a clear and tough future
quite unconnected with anything
It will be - as is already suspected - short
It won't be long before it starts tossing madly
like a tin can on a cat's tail
tied to the shambles of a world divided
between the winners who lost and are
running around searching for their missing victory
and the ones who in the end will foot the bill
This angry prophecy would be less disturbing if Egon hadn't been proved right earlier, against all the odds. Many people question Egon Bondy's sanity, but I've yet to meet a single one anywhere who questions his integrity.
The Plastic People's formal leader was one "Magor," or Ivan Jirous. Magor is also a poet who, unlike Egon, could rock and roll. Magor is a living legend and probably the perfect model of a Czech hippie-dissident-tribal-shaman-poet-heavy dude. But magor means "madman" in Czech, and his handle was no accident. Magor suffered for years from uncontrollable mood swings, provoking fistfights, drinking binges, and raving in the street. He's a powerful lyricist, a pretty good musician, and a courageous man to whom his country owes a great debt, but he's not what you'd call commander-in-chief material. Magor has been through drugs, booze, rock, jail, police beatings, show trials, the maximum-security prison in Valdice, mysticism, madness, a revolution, and lots and lots and lots of poetry. Magor is kind of kicking back somewhere in the Bohemian countryside these days, and he probably deserves the rest.
Plastic-being Vratislav Brabenec was arrested in 1976; this proved an international embarrassment, so in later years the cops simply pounced on him repeatedly and beat him up in the streets. Brabenec fled the country in 1982 and is now a Greenpeace activist in British Columbia, where he seems to be doing pretty well for himself, although he had to miss a lot of the local fun.
There were others: Svatopluk Kavásek, Pavel Jazícek, many other astoundingly courageous people, a few of them fairly well known to those in the West who followed this sort of thing. In their own country, they were all desperately obscure. An American bohemian-intelligentsia type like Allen Ginsberg was probably 10,000 times better known in America than Magor was ever known in the former Czechoslovakia. To call the Plastic People rock stars is a misnomer, for they were legally denied any right to play music. When the Plastics played, they rocked out privately on homemade speakers and instruments in front of an audience of maybe 50 people who attended in fear for their lives. The Czech regime hated and feared the Czech counterculture with truly hysterical bitterness.
Official reviews of the Plastics' music were less than kind. Here's the government organ Rudé Právo discussing the Plastics (September 25, 1976): "Our society will not tolerate any forms of hooliganism or public disorder, and quite naturally, will resist any moral filth and efforts to infect our youth with that which every decent man condemns and which harms the spiritual health of the young generation." By "quite naturally," the authorities meant beatings, bannings, constant police surveillance, and prison.
And when the return-of-the-repressed came, and the regime cracked and fell apart, these mad hippies acquired a cultural authority and credibility like no mad hippies have had ever before, anywhere, any time.
When Václav Havel showed up to address big crowds during the Velvet Revolution, most of his listeners, even in his own home city of Prague, had only a vague idea who he was. Czech underground publications, manually typed, and smuggled hand-to-hand, had such tiny circulations that modern émigré small-press efforts like Yazzyk and Trafika are booming enterprises by contrast. Living in Prague offers a way to take small-press publication seriously. It offers living proof that artists and writers can make a real difference, with no money, no backing, next-to-no audience, and savage and heavily armed official disapproval.
And besides, it's very pretty here, and it's cheap.
I'm now back at the desk again, two days later. I went to visit a place publicly declared to be "one of the most dangerous places in Prague" by the Prague police. It's the outdoor market by the subway station in Námestí Republiky (Republic Square). I expected a maelstrom of prostitution, violence, and corruption; what I got was about 30 hippies at little wooden tables trying to sell lipstick, love beads, and women's underwear. The street market closes down at five o'clock sharp, and after that lovers go there to sit on the tables and kiss.
Crime statistics show that the modern Czech Republic is about half as dangerous as Germany, which is to say about half as dangerous as warm dishwater. That's not to say that you can't find trouble in Prague. There are pickpockets, bag thieves, corrupt taxi drivers, hookers, occasional drunk-rollers, short-change artists, and a lot of drugs. But if you arrive here and you're a young American man, then, statistically speaking, you and your fellow Americans are by far the most dangerous people you are ever likely to meet here. Czechs will be rather impressed by your strapping good health and may even be slightly afraid of you. You'll be big and rich and loud and from a country that won the Cold War.
And no matter what a pampered, Yankee, swaggering lout you are, they'll never resent you as much as they resent the Germans.
September 19. I'm now typing at a wooden table, artfully painted in vivid red and black, at the Libri Prohibiti Library downtown, a library of forbidden books.
This modest enterprise is the central historical storehouse of Czech samizdat, or illegal self-publication. Chief librarian and founder Jirí Gruntorad runs this mind-boggling archive, which contains 4,400 underground books, plus some 6,000 previously forbidden publications in Czech by Czech refugees and émigrés.
People were once imprisoned for owning the very books in this place. People pored over these books in secrecy with feverish intensity. People typed these books, letter by letter, on manual typewriters (some of the typewriters are here), bound them in primitive wooden presses (they have the presses on exhibit too), and cut them on monster iron paper cutters that look like instruments of the Spanish Inquisition. This place is a Communist censor's nightmare, and all the better for that.
There are legendary publications here, formerly despised contraband transmuted into treasured cultural monuments. There are complete runs here from Václav Havel's pre-liberation "press," the Edice Expedice. There are complete editions of the forbidden poetry of Egon Bondy. There are homemade books produced with such loving care that they look just like real books, and there are also moldering, little green and yellow pamphlets that are acts of utter desperation and fading carbon paper. There are matchbox-sized forbidden books with antlike print that come with a half-round magnifying prism stuffed into the spine so you can read them line by line by line.
The two-story walk-up into the library is dusty and gloomy, with graffiti and cracked glass. But inside, the library is determinedly cheerful, all opened window shades and bright primary colors. Old posters for Charter 77 and Amnesty International share the walls with posters for modern Czech counterculture rags like Revolver Revue and Vokno. Gruntorad, who spent four years in prison during the regime for his book-smuggling activities, looks like a medieval Slavic saint. Mrs. Gruntoradová, who also runs the place, is a direct and level-headed woman of such vivid and obvious integrity and humanity that I would unhesitatingly trust her with my car keys, my door keys, and the care of my only child, even though we share no common language.
In this storehouse of words-in-a-row, so pungently redolent of terrible fear and incredible resolve, young Czech volunteers type on spanking-new computers, and run off pages on big shiny photocopiers, and answer phone calls, and chatter in Czech, and laugh aloud. It's a quiet place, but it's a happy place and almost, in its own odd way, a holy place. I sit here typing on my portable computer and I feel, with great immediacy, that samizdat is a spiritual ancestor of everything truly important in my life.
Samizdat is what a counterculture looks like when the forces of repression compress it as hard as a diamond. Samizdat is a spiritual ancestor of fanzines, bulletin board systems, fidonet, the Internet, the World Wide Web, shareware, free personal cryptography. And the world outside these windows, the whole world now, is what a world looks like when samizdat is winning.
A bearded young man from the staff just brought me hot coffee and asked me to sign the library's guest book. Václav's looping signature is right here on page 1. I just inscribed information wants to be free and signed it with my Internet address.
There may not be such a thing as a Prague voice, but there is such a thing as a Prague look. It doesn't show quite so much on the men, who basically dress like Michael Stipe clones only with cigarettes and backpacks. But there are young women all over Prague, especially the downtown, old-city areas - bookstores, art galleries, coffeehouses, and bars - who are instantly recognizable as core scenesterettes and muses-in-training. Praguelodettes, one might call them. Let's take the Prague look head-to-toe.
The hair is straight, shoulder-length, blunt-cut, severely parted in the middle: your basic Ingenue Heroine of an Epic Russian Novel do. In the ears - pierced of course - silver filigree earrings. Then comes a big, baggy sweater, often loose at the neck to reveal the straps of a halter top, hanging right down to the wrists and stretching to about mid-thigh. Under the tuniclike sweater is a big flowing skirt, a hippie drawstring job in black and white print pattern, very thin fabric usually, but pleated or wrinkled, and ankle-length. Under the patterned skirt, black leather shin-high boots with silver lace-ups. Maybe black flats or big, funky Doc Martens. The effect is a cross between Anna Karenina and Greenwich Village 1912.
Accessories: a big, brightly patterned scarf or shawl, street-vendor silver necklaces with amulets, bracelets made of horn or wood, a black woolen beret, stone and ceramic finger rings, cigarettes, a neat little denim backpack. Maybe a hair-wrap, a technique that braids a single long strand of hair into a tight sleeve of thin colored yarn. (If you're up for it, hipster kids will hair-wrap you right on the sidewalk, for a few korunas.)
For the popular Goth Chick variant, black nail polish, scary big pewter biker rings, extra ear piercings, thin gold nose ring, dead-black hair dye. For the arty bluestocking look, wire-rimmed but oddly oblong glasses, hair pulled back in a decorative ceramic or bronze/copper barrette. For that night out on the town: killer mascara, scarlet lipstick, and a longer and thinner skirt with two or even three big slashes up to mid-thigh. In the context of this Sicilian Widow get-up, those skirt-slashes are amazingly provocative, living proof that in things erotic, less is often more.
There is also, interestingly, an older-woman Yuppie Praguelodette look, with a baggy cashmere sweater, black silk skirt, nicer and less scuffed shoes, styled hair, nail polish, and hose. Accessories: a plastic shopping bag, a sturdy-but-stylish leather purse, a cellular phone.
It's a good bet that if you see a woman striding the cobbled streets of Prague who looks unbelievably picturesque and authentic - more Eastern European than the Pope, with her chin held high, ethereal Slavic cheekbones, looking very spiritual and maybe just the least little bit smug - she's a Yankee. A YAP: Young American in Prague. Real Czech woman are also known to dress in high Praguelodette drag because Czech fashion designers are very hip and can do counterculture inside and out, but the classic accessories for a young Czech woman in early to mid-20s are a wedding ring, a baby carriage, and maybe a toddler.
Eva Hauserová is a Czech feminist and environmental activist. She was also, before the revolution, one of the country's better-known and more influential science-fiction writers. Before 1989, science fiction wasn't understood by the authorities any better than modems were, and therefore a lot of Czech science-fiction stories were allegorical parodies describing the utter anguish of the Czech population. Eva specialized in this.
As Eva once put it, "In totalitarian times, science fiction enabled us to speak about society much more openly and critically than the literary mainstream; it is an outstanding medium for political metaphor." She wrote gruesomely fantastic stories, often with grisly biological themes, for she was trained (like many Czechs) as a biochemist. She wrote stories and novels, did her own samizdat science-fiction fanzine, and later worked as an editor for the leading Czech science-fiction magazine, Ikarie.
Czechs are fond of fantastic writing. Kafka's work is metaphorical and fantastic, Karel Capek and his brother Josef gave the world the word "robot," even Havel's plays have artificial intelligences and absurd invented languages with comic "scientific" properties. Marxists sometimes classed science fiction as a "degraded literature," pokleslá literatura, but in practice, fantastic writing was taken quite as seriously as any other sort.
Yet with the liberation of her society, Eva fell mute. Or rather, she began to campaign openly and vigorously for things she'd only hinted of in her fiction, such as environmentalism (somewhat odd and radical) and feminism (very odd indeed in a Czech context and quite the uphill struggle politically). Now she edits books on feminism, coordinates Czech women's groups, and writes tracts for an environmental magazine.
To make money, Eva translates Harlequin romances. Eva has an enviable grasp of the stereotypes involved in Western romance fiction, and can whack out a translation on her PC clone in about a week. It pays far better than subversive science fiction ever did, and she'd be rolling in the korunas if she wasn't renovating her house, as everyone in Prague seems to be doing. "When I want to say that Klaus is stupid and his ideas are stupid I can say it directly!" she told me cheerily. After the revolution, she published one quite cheerful science-fiction story, and then felt completely relieved of the need to write any more science fiction.
The small, intense world of Czech publishing has been turned upside down by the revolution. The former dissidents belong to a vanished epoch and are getting old enough to discover that they have a favorite easy chair. The Communist Writers' Union time-servers have stopped writing laudatory pseudo-novels about Marxism and have switched to writing advertising copy, the modern functional equivalent of their old gigs. Other fiction writers have gone into politics or private enterprise or turned to journalism. As for Czech science fiction, it's swamped by 40 years of American science fiction, previously forbidden and now smothering the Czech scene in a sticky avalanche of space opera and Tolkienesque fantasy. Some Czech writers are finding that their sales soar when they write under English-sounding pseudonyms.
Eva Hauserová is a very bright woman and she obviously has a point. Feminism has scarcely made a dent here, and large tracts of Bohemia are strip-mined or seared by acid rain. Czech life expectancy is still dropping. Prague is nasty in the winter, when fogs and temperature inversions turn it into a toxic soup of diesel fumes. The country's primary exports are cement and steel, neither very good for your lungs. Václav Klaus openly loathes environmentalists, and has often declared that Greens are Reds in sheeps' clothing who want to re-regulate the economy. There's a lot of work here for an activist of Eva's description, but here she is, a gifted Czech writer who is translating Harlequin romances. Something isn't right.
Doug Hajek has published Eva in his émigré literary magazine, Yazzyk.
I met Hajek in a happening little downtown bar-and-gallery called Velryba (the Whale). We had lunch: a slab of fried cheese, fried potatoes, and a little dab of shredded cabbage with a slice of cucumber and tomato. And big, tall beers. Typical Czech lunch.
Yazzyk was founded in 1992 by Hajek, fellow Canadian Laura Busheikin, and Californian Tony Ozuna. "We didn't want to say that we had Havel or Skvorecky or Kundera," Hajek declared, forking up his scanty greens with a will. "We want to publish new Czech writers, people the West has never heard of!" To date, there have been three issues of Yazzyk, which has a print run of 2,000. It's the best-known émigré magazine here, with the exception of Trafika, which prides itself on internationalism and publishes writers from all over the world.
Yazzyk, by contrast, printed Egon Bondy, Eva Hauserová, Jana Krejcarová, Michal Ajvaz, et even more obscure alia, plus some of Prague's North American talent. The magazine had hoped to break even, though it never has, quite. While busily cooking up issue four, Hajek teaches English and manages a design and publishing company called Aha, one of the first capitalist companies formally and legally registered in the Czech Republic. Hajek is a 27-year-old globetrotter who has been on the road for 10 years: Italy, Japan, Argentina. Now he lives in Prague and has no plans to leave.
Yazzyk may not be the best little literary magazine on the planet, but it's the best one to deal directly with this corner of it. I highly recommend the Michal Ajvaz piece in issue three - "Hey! This guy Ajvaz is good!" In the hard-hitting "Erotica, Sexuality and Gender" issue there's a hot-and-heavy love letter from the late Jana Krejcarová to Egon Bondy, circa 1962, which is such an astonishing yowl of raw feminine passion, cut with disquisitions on philosophy, that it makes one's respect for Bondy soar.
Yazzyk is published in a fairly spacious (by Prague standards) office in Blahoslavova Street, northwest Prague. The place is infested with PCs, laser printers, scanners, and a fax (one lousy phone line, unfortunately). Piloting the mouse in the back room is Aha business associate, Yazzyk art director, and Hajek main squeeze Veronika Bromová, 27. Veronika designs Yazzyk, posters, magazines, photo exhibits, CD covers, Prague tourist guidebooks, rock-band promotions, newsletters, and anything else that shows up and can be fed into her new 486.
Despite his surname, Hajek isn't Czech. Most of his ancestors are Ukrainian, and he picked up Czech by showing up in Prague and soaking it up on the spot. Doug is a very smart guy.
There are probably a lot of guys in North America who dream wistfully of kicking over the traces, flying to Prague, starting a way-arty magazine that publishes cultural exotica and with-it, happening people of your own generation, while, not incidentally, starting up a flourishing personal corporation and taking up with an exotically beautiful and artistically gifted girlfriend. But Doug Hajek has actually done this stuff. It's not hype. Hajek never talks hype. He's very practical; he just does the work. And it's real. It's real like this desk is real.
Snapshots. I spent a couple of hospitable nights on the office couch of émigré Robert Horvitz (antenna@well.sf.ca.us), who is a media consultant for the Soros Foundation. Bob is a former graphic artist turned network expert who works to develop radio stations in Eastern Europe and frequently vanishes to sites in the former Yugoslavia with a valise full of modems. His Serbian wife, Biljana, is about to have their first child. Bob knows very well what he's doing here in Prague. Bob looks to me like a happy man.
Doug Arellanes is a graphic artist and network expert who designs computer interface graphics for Econnect, a nonprofit environmental foundation. Doug Arellanes is one of the "Santa Barbara mafia," a group of 30 or so Gen-X types from the University of California, Santa Barbara, who started Prognosis and work in journalism and graphics. In classic Prague serendipitous fashion, Arellanes walked into a bookstore where I was signing copies of the Czech edition of my science-fiction novel and said, "What in hell are you doing here?"
Later we had a beer at the Velryba and decamped to a cavernous cellar restaurant, where I feasted on a monster joint of roast pork. Graphics are happening here: there's Post, now there's Raut, and some of the finest typographers and book designers in the world. Arellanes just got his deft designer mitts on a PowerPC Mac, and someday he hopes to fulfill the ultimate YAP dream: Western work at a Western salary via the Internet from his rent-fixed Prague domicile, which costs him 20 bucks a month. His dream looks eminently possible to me. What else is TCP/IP for?
Jaroslav Olsa works for the Czech foreign ministry. He also publishes science fiction, and his idea of a good time is getting Czech science-fiction stories published in English in India. Jaroslav used to consider it a wonderful forbidden thrill when he was able to cross the border into Poland. Since the revolution, he's been to Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, South Africa, Kenya, Indonesia, and is planning a trip to Fiji.
Jaroslav took me to the Marolda Panorama in Prague. Panoramas were the 19th century's precognitive answer to virtual reality, a 360-degree painted backdrop embedded in physical stage-setting.
Prague's Marolda Panorama was painted and set-designed in the 1890s, and a friendly payoff to the sympathetic custodian got us in after hours, entirely alone. The panorama shows the defeat of Europe's first Protestant Reformation - here, worse luck to the Czechs, in the Czech lands. It's a battle scene, where Hussite Czechs struggle, heads uplifted, against a tide of angry foreign Catholics. They lost, of course. The Czechs always lose. They haven't won a war since 1620, and they lost that one, too. But they never give up.
There are pikes and spiked maces and charging cavalry and Hussite war wagons, the western world's first mobile armor. There's blood and swords and toppling standards, and creepy, wood-mounted, primitive hand-cannon. Panoramas are a dead medium now, but 100 years ago, panoramas were enormously popular. It's very virtual inside that panorama, it's just as if you were there; but the horizons aren't real and, you're actually inside the bitter nationalist visions of some clever artist's head. The sense of wonder and eldritch nostalgia is only accented by the clumsy retouching of the aging canvas.
Prague isn't all beautiful; out on the edges of town there are desolate concrete sídliste, prefab workers' barracks that will probably warp the lives of another generation. But the city center deserves its fame: Prague is one of the few European cities to avoid the 20th century's tide of annihilation. The splendid Jugendstil Art Nouveau architecture from before the first world war is so lovely it makes one conclude, almost with a sense of despair, that everything else built in this century is profoundly wrong. Maybe Prague really is Second Chance City. That's far from proven, but at least there's a chance to prove it.
Yet this is a very '90s city. Even its artistic problems are '90s artistic problems: the struggle of a bewildered and put-upon generation to speak authentically in an era whose central directive is to reduce all art and all life to an infinitely replicable commodity, to turn Kafka into a T-shirt and Havel into a carny attraction, to shrink-wrap cultures as pasteurized package-tour exotica, to make art a bogus knickknack and heritage the hottest-selling market segment of the Museum Economy.
To talk about that artistically without becoming part of it is a tough problem. But problems like that are a luxury. Without problems, art can't exist. No people, no problems, as Stalin used to say.
There'd be no problems here if this city today were what it might so easily have become, a smoldering slag-heap, littered with the radioactive second-stage casings of American nuclear missiles. I'm old enough to feel glad that I don't have that on my conscience. I'm not a YAP, I'm not young, and I'm just passing through here. But how marvelous to be an American and walk like a young god through a city that your parents were grimly prepared to annihilate. How wonderful to be an American writer in Prague, to have a perfect chance to yammer out most any damned thing that enters your head, in a city where people of genius once paid for free expression with their lives and their health and their futures and their happiness. And lost every battle, but won the war. How truly splendid that all is.
And the Czechs are even getting rich. And the beer is every bit as good as they say. And I even have a computer here.
God, I love the '90s.
Lovers of Literatura:
Jirí Gruntorad founded the Libri Prohibiti Library, which contains thousands of underground books and previously forbid-den publications.
Eva Hauserová was one of the country's more influential science-fiction writers before the revolution. To make money, Eva translates Harlequin romances, whacking out translations on her PC clone in about a week.
Doug Hajek publishes the émigré literary magazine Yazzyk. It may not be the best literary magazine on the planet, but it's the best one to deal with this corner of it.
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