One of the things I like about living in a non-English speaking country is having to rely on secondhand bookshops if I want to buy a book. The choice of books available in secondhand bookshops - especially when you are looking for ones in English in a non-English speaking country - is so much more surprising than that available in a proper bookshop, supplied by publishers who are always busy spruiking that season's carefully selected, rather limited, range.
In secondhand bookshops, the selection is usually just an unlikely muddle. No sales team has sieved their company's current titles down to a few dozen, all of which, together with their authors, they have then gone on to shove down the public's throats through every means possible - newspaper review sections, radio and television arts segments, lifestyle puff pieces, you name it. All of this, of course, renders their wares stale by the time you see them in reality. After such extensive folderol, the volumes finally arrive in actual bookshops so over-exposed that they exude a faint air of grubbiness, in spite of their crisp pages and pristine wrappers.
While most second hand books are genuinely faintly grubby, what I love is the randomness of what is available to buy. Tito's Genocidal Atrocities in the Vojvodina leans up against a battered copy of Angelique and the King; an early Maigret, (with an introduction in Russian!), stands side by side with Beekeeping for Beginners and How to Cook with Corn.
None of which are books I want, (well possibly the Maigret). But never mind, there are always others. For instance, this week I bought a collection called New Writing 5, compiled in 1996 by the Australian poet Peter Porter and a novelist I hadn't heard of called Christopher Hope.
And in that collection, to at last arrive at the real point of this blogpost, I have just found an essay by Miroslav Holub about the state of Czech literature in the early 1990s, following the fall of European Communism. I am intrigued by the dilemmas faced by populations who suffered Communism and now have to adjust to a life after it. Therefore I read the piece with interest. I found it so beautifully written and so amusing - (the translator, Ewald Osers, deserves much praise) - that I decided to reproduce it here, in case it might give pleasure to others. Despite the accessibility of so much information via the Internet, I've noticed that things that were published before the net was as pervasive as it now is are often virtually inaccessible once they go out of print - and this piece seems to be a case in point. I couldn't find it elsewhere, on a quick search and, as I think it is worth preserving, (and might even provide something useful to a researcher), I thought I would reproduce it here, so that it will be available to anyone else who might be interested:
Could Be a Lot Worse - Czech Literature in the Nineties
Translated from the Czech by Ewald Osers
The best indicator of the state of culture under European conditions is literature. The best indicator of the state of literature, more accurately of the relation between authors and reader interest, is the publication and purchase of books. There is a general impression in the Czech Republic that 'a lot' of books are being published, that it was not only the loodgates of free opinion that opened, but, rather more so, those of commercial interest, and that the people are being dulled rather than enlightened by the unleashed flood of printed paper.
That impression, I believe, is more or less correct.
The problem is that we are dealing with impressions rather than solid facts, since solid facts went out with the Russian-style autocracy, where solid facts were provided by solid controls.
The chaotic market-place of Czech literature today contains four thousand registered publishing firms (compared with thirty publishing houses licensed by the communist state in the 1980s). Of that total some 250 to 300 exhibit some activity beyond mere registration; about fifty are surviving economically without resorting to trash, which in its Czech form is even worse as a result of being translated by certain semi~literate people with only nodding acquaintance with the English and Czech languages.
Each week some 200 books are published, with fiction accounting for over 40 per cent. A bookseller refusing to stock trash receives each week about a hundred titles, i.e. forty to fifty fiction titles, including some ten slim volumes of poetry, among which the percentage of titles published 'at the author s expense' is growing significantly. Best-sellers of he Umberto Eco or Milan Kundera type are published in print runs of over 40,000; poetry is published in fewer than 1,000 copies, even though, in my experience, it is possible to sell 2,000 copies of a volume of poetry within four months. (Under the communists this number of copies by not-too-dissident authors would have sold within four hours.)
I don't think that, in a nation of ten million, this is a disastrous situation, even though, according to one estimate, a good 15 per cent are socially and culturally deprived- which, by comparison with other European countries, is entirely within the norm.
According to a survey by sociologists from the Charles University in Prague, 86.4 per cent of the 1,200 respondents described themselves as regular readers and 44 per cent stated that they had more than 1,000 books in their homes. As for genre, the readers of non-fiction are on the increase, while fiction generally takes second place, and poetry is of interest only to an insignificant number of respondents, most of them with personal poetic aspirations.
If the owners of these domestic libraries and regular readers were by definition good people, then - despite rampant commercialisation - we'd be a nation of angels. But no such correlation exists. We only have readers and non-readers, and the only positive sociological parameter of a reader is that while he is reading he isn't doing anything worse.
The situation of our literature is generally complicated by the fact that - quite apart from the chaotic market - the catalytic link author-author-reader-author, i.e. the phenomenon of the literary periodical in the strict sense has disappeared. It is not just that the old literary reviews have folded up or that there is a shortage of money.Some cultural periodicals receive more or less substantial subsidies from the state or private sponsors. But the editorial offices of cultural journals and more especially of literary ones, suffer from the syndrome of theory-diarrhoea. Literature, prose (mostly memoirs) and poetry (mostly avant-garde), occupies only some 12 per cent of the contents of literary journals. The rest are political, philosophical, historical and meta-literary reflections, a small proportion of them reviews and a large proportion abstract 'thoughts' which, by their sheer quantity, ensure that no reader can find the time to think. This is partly due to the Czech urge to catch up with the 'post-modernist' West and partly to the uncertainty of where precisely the lower threshold of 'literature' lies in a liberated atmosphere (i.e. one that has gone wild).
Except for plays, literature has totally vanished from television (under communist rule it was featured, often with disastrous flops but sometimes successfully), and on radio it has been pushed into the late-night schedules, when only insomniacs or alcoholics are listening.
The lack of communication through journals results in an isolation of creative individuals. In human terms, writers tend to know each other from the pub rather than from their work. This means that no one really knows what the state of Czech literature is or what its trends have been in the past five years since the factor of opposition to those in power disappeared. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the clear majority of editors and critics have adopted the bold plan of comparing and judging four streams of pre-November-1989 literature - the official regime literature, the literature of the grey (i.e. tolerated) zone, the literature of political dissent, and exile literature. Even though most editors made the task easier for themselves by simply eliminating all former official literature, the situation in the three remaining spheres is unclear. It is not only a case of different contexts and personal attitudes, but mainly one of generation gaps between people who experienced at least the Soviet occupation of 1968 and its censorship and those who only knew the decay of the communist system and its censorship. The journals have brought to the readers a large number of previously unknown authors, whose principal merit was the fact that they were unknown or suppressed under the communist regime. It turned out that some of them were unknown not because of the logic of the communist censor, but because their work was no good. Moreover, some authors from the beginning of the century are being dug up, authors who had fallen into oblivion even in their own time. Thus the context is becoming even more complex - we are faced with a mixture of several generations, several styles and a colourful assortment of old junk.
On the one hand we are learning what was silenced or suppressed. On the other we have a climate that exercises a formative pressure. New authors - and especially poets panting for air - notice carefully what is being published and what is in vogue, and, as far as their nature permits, are guided by it, to ensure they are themselves published and their apparel is up to date. Individual types of authors, as they first appeared towards the end of the 1960s, now turn into processions, individual mutants into types. This process, a kind of literary 'polymerase chain reaction', takes place in the stages author-editor-author-an army of debutants-editor. This PCR functions chiefly thanks to the restricted publication opportunities mentioned above. Thus when in one and the same issue of a literary journal we encounter a single poet and two prose writers, we are sometimes faced not with artistic necessity but with anxious imitation.
If you publish more and more post-decadent pranks spiced with new possibilities of scatology and liberated by sexual technologies and deviations, you will, by a positive feedback, create a new literary generation of the voluntarily damned fraternismg with antiquarian demons and copulating on graves, in more serious cases with graves. If you publish several authentic Young Werthers, you'll be supplying artificial nutriment to a poetry of disillusionment, exclusivity and painful Take-what-you-can, including drugs (if only because it's something 'from the West'). It is just like the 1960s, when, after a memorable visit by Allen Ginsberg, young men here concluded that you had to be a homosexual and later began to crowd the waiting-rooms of psychiatric clinics with complaints that they wanted to do it but they didn't like it. If here and there you publish a Marian litany as a novelty, you'll be creating something like an awed rhymed Christian-confessional poetry over which will sough the Czech lyrical spirit defined by Seifert. If you embark on an increasingly frequent publication of French poetry, from which the Czech mainstream clearly retreated after 1945, you'll get a flowering of the poetry of silence, abstraction and hermetic spirituality. If you publish something as contagious for a post-modern anarchistic intellectual as Boris Vian (seven books since 1989) you'll get a clone of well-intentioned literary bums.
At the same time the publishing policy of the existing literary media and of the more serious publishing houses also produces the phenomenon of a higher standard of discourse and a higher intellectual level -provided that amidst the gentle howling of the writers, like frustrated puppies, there is room for these. So long as we know what to say and how to say it, we present it in a form that had no parallel in the old days.
Those frustrated canine beasts of prey moreover regard themselves as independent intellectuals in the meaning of Timothy Garton Ash - a concept defended at the International PEN Congress in Prague and frequently published (e.g. in the New York Review of Books, January 1995) mainly because Ash's opponent was the Czech prime minister Vaclav Klaus. An independent intellectual, of course, is independent of premiers and their political moves, because he is dependent on his fundamental opposition to premiers and political or economic moves, even indispensable ones. An independent intellectual believes that the human intellect exists to seek the truth independently, even though it is equally probable that it may exist for the justification of his own emotional urges and ties,
The fact that over the past five years the Czech economy (thanks also to Klaus's has achieved considerably more than Czech literature, including poetry, is a source of further frustration and other negative emotions to any literary worker loyal to his craft - provided, of course, he admits this to himself and isn't living in some mouldering literary nest from where the transition from totalitarianism to an open society must seem a bitter awakening from the dream of one's own importance.
But intellect itself is a word to argue over and reason, for modish philosophers and certain natural literary talents, is a source of deviation from 'natural' man and the 'natural' world. That's why it's wise to bracket out reason altogether. From the bold statement of the philosopher Vaclav Belohradsky, 'The intoxicating flight of philosophy has gone on for more than two thousand years. The time has come for us to feel like morons' many natural talents have taken on board only the second sentence. And so they have become the champions of their own and of observed oddity. The authenticity of psychiatric or sociologlcal deviation is higher than the authenticity of axiomatic thought; the authenticity of verbal vomiting is, in principle, more valuable than the foundation stones of secondary school education.
Ranged against the debased taste of 'popular' strata, stimulated by the offer of bloodthirsty, erotic and sentimental literature, are the new-style transcendentalists who are offering blood, sex and spirituality in a dozen other, if possibly less readily comprehensible, ways. This is an interesting antithesis, but unfortunately not a very constructive one.
The basic statement of Czech literature during the five years of freedom and human dignity is strikingly egocentric. Any indication of a 'we' has disappeared, as have any indications of solidarity with the ordinary person (who is evidently a willing victim of slightly dotty advertisements and publicity), and even any indication of communication. The nest syndrome is holding sway, along with the droppings from the nest. While the mainstream of so-called East European poetry under the communist regime was characterised by a hidden energy, by inventiveness, by a synchronisation with the human movements of the entire national community and, indeed, by a certain optimism, we now face the flabby spirit of permanent disillusionment of one's ego, a disillusionment which ultimately doesn't give a damn in what way we were disappointed by sex and in what way by Klaus - so long as we were disappointed by someone. The basic attitude of those slight (let's call them) poems in prose which the new authors are producing on the conveyor belt is the attitude of a corpse cowering in its grave, of an embryo in the womb, of a convict on his bed or in some other confined space where surrealist transubstantiations take place, an invasion by spiritual jurassic monsters and the degradation of Enlightment values, among whic the Hofrat Goethe appears especially obsolescent.
It is as if the suddenly opened space were suspiciously large and empty, as if we were afraid of the draught for which we collectively thirsted for fifty years. We close our shutters to prevent our domestic demons from catching cold and the delicate gear wheels of our magic realism from being damaged - that magic realism which unites the categories of poetry and prose to such an extent that the difference between them is, as it were, washed away and we get some hybrid forms between an absurdist story and a poem in prose. These products are sometimes interesting in the original, but in translation, as a rule, fall into the category of the deja vu. Larger forms of prose also fall apart into facets and micro-snapshots, into a personal mythology which conceals the personal ideas, horizon and goal to such a degree that Kundera's novel-essay differs from the Czech meta-novel rather like cosmology from insect collecting.
There's nothing against insect collecting in literature, at least so long as the insects are interesting, touching, or even a new species. But if this collecting acquires the character of the mainstream, in which a novel is the work of a hand drawing a hand which is itself being drawn, in which Borges and Marques are peeping out of every other sleeve, a mainstream in which Bukowski (peeping out of a trouser leg) is about the most concrete stereotype, then unconventional and épatant authencity become paper poisoning, where all are the same to the extent that they are divertingly diverse.
In the context of literary criticism, which suffers from the faint syndrome of the new opportunism, the overall state of literature is best defined by the young director Filip René: You can't make a generation film in a period which - unlike the 1960s - has no style.
All I can say by way of an excuse is that if you thrash about in turbulent water for fifty years, now and again calling for help, you won't produce many style-creating ideas. And if in the 1960s you discern a style of calling for help, then this is no use to you anyway in the 1990s when it appears as literary decline.
It is too early to judge the state of our literature; the water is stirred up from the very bottom and it carries a multitude of pollutants, mud snails and water fleas. But slowly it is calming down.
However, I would already venture to discern the outlines of a new literary constitution - irony, self-irony, mild sorrow on your face, deep laughter in your heart, as Jaroslav Seifert put it. Even the Czech meta-novel, even Czech neo-decadent poetry, even orthodox Czech post-modernism all bear the traits of inner humour and of a sceptical smile. Even in the fragmentation of experience and in the self-centred attitude of a poem it is sometimes possible to discover a grain of the Czech salt of understatement and wit.
Even if liberated Czech literature were to create something like a new concept of man, it would still contain something like: 'So sorry, but it could be a lot worse
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