Analysis
Although Czech literature is the oldest of the Slavic literatures, its long fiction appeared relatively late, in the nineteenth century. This may be the result of the twofold handicap of the Czech culture mentioned by the great Czech critic Arne Novák (1889-1939): religion and nationalism.
Religion, particularly dissenting religion, or Protestantism, mixed with the national cause, first isolated Bohemia from the European cultural context, and when, during the Counter-Reformation, it was forcibly reattached to it, the national cause suffered. The latter meant that Czech publications were discouraged, and only at the end of the eighteenth century and then gloriously in the nineteenth did a national revival take place. This revival invested literature with tremendous responsibilities: Literature represented the nation. It set out with a grand aim to prevent the nation from perishing, and it accomplished that goal. It also laid the foundations for the future independent state. This nation-building role was fulfilled primarily by poetry; fiction had a relatively less prominent part in it. Nevertheless, considering the shortness of time, Czech fiction developed remarkably quickly and in astonishing variety, perhaps as a result of the central position occupied by the Czechs in the reigning cultural and particularly literary world at the time. Czechs were aware of the German culture as well as the triumphs of the Russian novels. They read the English as well as the French masters. Most important, the Czech novel embarked on a mission that continues to this day and that could be considered the most notable of all literary endeavors: the mission of self-discovery. It is in this vein that the first Czech masterpiece of note must be approached.
Humbly titled Babička (1855; The Grandmother, 1891), this novel by Božena Němcová (1820-1862) is a portrait of her grandmother, whose gift was the power to transform the life of her grandchildren, who were doomed by modest circumstances. Hailed as the major fictional artistic legacy of the post-Romantic era, the novel succeeds in bringing to life an admirable character whose grace, charm, and wit have endeared Němcová to generations of readers.
A direct antithesis to Němcová is Karolina Světlá (1830-1899). While Němcová still represents a woman who honors tradition, occasionally transcending it in the name of love, Světlá is a feminist often compared to George Sand and George Eliot. Contemporary problems, set against a background of country settings and picturesque local customs, are typical of her fiction. Representative of this type of novel is her Vesnický román (1867; a village romance), which proved to be a generic predecessor of a group of novels by writers predominantly concerned with the village novel but who belong to a later generation, such as Karel V. Rais (1859-1926), Vilém Mrštík (1863-1912), and Josef Holeček (1853-1929). In fact, the novels of Světlá foreshadow, in a curiously incomplete and often frustrating manner, the main directions of Czech fiction in the nineteenth century: the social, the village, and the historical. An attempt has been made to place The Grandmother into the category of the social novel, but the works of Gustav Pfleger Moravskyá (1833-1875), Matej Anastasia Šimáček (1860-1913), and Josef Karel Šlejhar (1864-1914) better exemplify this type.
By far the most influential type of novel written in the nineteenth century was the historical novel. Here, the Czech Protestant cause—its defeat and what followed it—proved irresistible to nationalist-minded Czech novelists: V. Beneš Třebízsk (1849-1884), Zikmund Winter (1846-1912), and, most important, Alois Jirásek (1851-1930). Jirásek covered the whole range of Czech history, and his importance is analogous to that of Henryk Sienkiewicz in Poland. It is no exaggeration to say that Jirásek consciously blended historical material into myths designed to augment the nation building that was going on in his lifetime. That this effort was often accompanied by distortions, simplifications, and whitewashing, to say nothing of the fact that it ignored the obviously negative consequences of at least some historical Czech actions, is beyond doubt. Also beyond doubt is Jirásek’s powerful historical vision, his ability to project himself to distant times and to grasp or re-create the motivation of historical characters in a spellbinding and often emotionally moving manner. This is true of his Proti všem (1893; against everyone) and his trilogy Bratrstvo (1899-1908; the brethren), as well as of his numerous historical novels, with the exception of those treating a more recent, revivalist past, such as his tetralogy U nás (1896-1903; in our land).
The period of realism announced in the work of K. Čapek-Chod (1860-1927) can be understood either as a transitional period leading up to the three most important interwar novelists, Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923), Karel Čapek (1890-1938), and Vladislav Vančura (1891-1942), or as the beginning of an as yet unconcluded period of realism of many different varieties. Hašek’s Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světove války (1921-1923; The Good Soldier: Švejk, 1930; also known as The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War, 1973; better known as The Good Soldier Švejk) is a masterpiece of the satiric novel, while Čapek’s trilogy comprising Hordubal (1933; English translation, 1934), Povětroň (1934; Meteor, 1935), and Obyčejný život (1934; An Ordinary Life, 1936) offers a fine example of the philosophical novel. Vančura’s experimentation was stylistic and, of the three, is least accessible to a foreign reader; these three authors taken together represent a firm foundation for the flourishing of the novel after World War II. Somewhat isolated seems Jaroslav Durych (1886-1962), a brilliant novelist who is an antipode to Jirásek in his own historical novels concerned with the same Hussite period, to which Durych takes a contrasting, Catholic approach.
The novel, as well as all Czech literature, suffered after the Communist takeover in 1948, when a large-scale Sovietization of cultural life was enforced, together with the absurd requirements of Socialist Realism: to write in a way that would not anger the authorities. The tragic 1950’s ended in gradual liberalization and the appearance of three great novelists: Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997), Josef Škvorecký (born 1924), and Milan Kundera (born 1929). Hrabal was a narrative genius with an unerring eye for the surreal and the grotesque in everyday life. In his fiction, accidents, violence, sex, and drinking are mixed with sentimentalism and the moving pathos of unexpected lyric passages. Even though after initial prohibition Hrabal was allowed to publish, he was forced to make many compromises with state censors, as is evident in those works that have been published abroad.
Škvorecký and Kundera, in that order, were forced to emigrate after the liberalization of the 1960’s abruptly ended in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. This exile was a mixed blessing; whatever the discomforts of the authors, the world gained two great novelists. Kundera’s Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli (1979; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980; in Czech as Kniha smíchu a zapomnění, 1981) and, even more, his L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être (1984; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984; in Czech as Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, 1985), as well as his many essays published in leading literary magazines in the West, made him the leading spokesman for the endangered entity of Central Europe, whose roots and sympathies lie in the West. Kundera’s prose carries the influence of Hašek, Čapek, and Vančura into a synthesis always grounded in a philosophical theme approached with irony and sometimes even misanthropy. (In 2008, a controversy erupted when Kundera, who took up residency in France in 1975, was accused in a Czech newspaper of having been a secret police informer in 1950. Eleven well-known writers, including Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie, issued a public announcement of support for Kundera.)
Škvorecký’s Zbabělci (1958; The Cowards, 1970) is a masterpiece of dramatic action seen through the eyes of an adolescent interested in girls and jazz. Much more ambitious, but less successful, is his Příběh inženýra lidských duší, 1977 (The Engineer of Human Souls: An Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life, Women, Fate, Dreams, the Working Class, Secret Agents, Love, and Death, 1984), in which the narrator, like Škovrecký himself, an émigré Czech professor at a university in Toronto, Canada, deals with personal and political problems with the help of his experiences under the Nazi and then the Communist regimes in Bohemia. His well-received Obyčejné životy (2004; Ordinary Lives, 2008) recounts the life of his recurring narrator, Danny Smiricky, and the ideological waves he faces over fifty years of Czech history. Škvorecký’s work, although informed by a powerful intellect, is less elaborate than the work of Hrabal or Kundera. A quiet sense of rationality and moderation radiates from Škvorecký’s writing, which is infused with a gentle humor.
One of the most popular Czech writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is Michal Viewegh (born 1962), author of humorous novels about contemporary relationships. His Báječná léta pod psa (1992; the blissful years of lousy living), Výchova dívek v Čechách (1994; Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia, 1997), and Román pro ženy (2001; woman’s novel) were all made into feature films. He published Román pro muže (man’s novel) in 2008. Czech author Michal Ajvaz (born 1949) has published several works of Magical Realism, and Pavel Řezníček (born 1942) works in the surrealist style. The works of Ajvaz and Řezníček have not yet been translated into English.