The Contemporary Czech Essay
Among the literary genres, the essay is sometimes termed the royal form; it occupies a place between the subjective and reality, where fiction and specialist literature meet. It might be a highly ‘aestheticized’ intellectual game, or else a work of confession interspersed with aphorisms, irony and self-deprecation.
The modern and postmodern eras have pushed this form – at least in its purest form – to the margins. The further contemporary essay-writing distances itself from the classical conception of the essay as a highly demanding art form, the more frequently does it couch in essay form – indeed, as a modern-day variant on the essay – texts of a scientific, literary-historical, art-historical, philosophical or philosophizing nature, even though the character of such texts lends itself better to specialist studies and articles, and sometimes comes in dangerous proximity to forms more readily associated with journalism (eg., the review, the column, the commentary). In Czech and world literature today there are very few writers who direct the bulk of their efforts into the essay form, and who regard the essay as their principal means of literary expression. The classical representatives of the essay in the period after Montaigne – such as Carlyle, Voltaire, Diderot, Nietzsche, the more modern Baudelaire, Eliot, Camus, Arendt and Derrida, and in Czech Šalda, Březina, Karásek of Lvovice and Rádl – have no obvious descendants or successors today. It is as if the rigorous intellectual challenge the essay form presents provokes fear in writers; this is almost certainly why many of today’s writers either avoid the form altogether or else write essays merely as a complement to their main body of work. An example of the latter case is Milan Kundera, who attempts in his essay cycle The Art of the Novel to find a formulation for the general poetics of the novel and what he sees as its current state of ruin; in this very work the author gets bogged down in his personal problems as he describes his own experiences and struggles with the novel form. Nor is Kundera able to resist the pull of a private commentary in his latest volume of essays inspired by the composer Leoš Janáček. Although the Janáček essays contain all the important indicators of thorough contemplation, and the freedom in their form facilitates self-expression, originality and freshness of thought, for musicologists and authorities on Janáček’s work they are unsatisfactory, lacking in scholarship and subjective; conversely the lay reader finds this work difficult to comprehend and somewhat obscure.
Writers of fiction, philosophers, religious thinkers, political scientists, historians and historiographers often lay claim to the terms “essay”, “discussion” and “reflections” for works which might contain elements of fiction, be partly autobiographical or in effect memoirs (eg., Jan Čep’s Sister of Anxiety, which is termed an “autobiographical essay” and the “story” texts of František Listopad); alternatively, self-styled “essays” might be “studies” or works of an academic type (eg., Václav Bělohradský’s Personality Crisis in Secular Eschatology, Vladimír Macura’s Happy Age, Daniela Hodrová’s Novel of Devotion, Břetislav Horyna’s Idea of Europe, Patrik Ouředník’s European).
As we turn our attention to the state of the Czech essay as this obtains today within the context of Czech literature and culture in general, we ascertain immediately two groups in which it is a common form. The first of these groups concerns for the most part the work of older writers who are more or less conscious of the legacy of the Czech essay, a legacy which is indebted to practitioners such as Šalda (author of The Battle for Tomorrow and Synthetism in Modern Art) and Otokar Březina, author of “poetic essays”, written in a form which in later life he preferred to that of lyric poetry (see The Music of the Source, Hidden Histories).
The second group of writers whose influence reaches into much present-day work is that of the literary historians and literary scholars, pre-eminent among whom are Miloš Marten, Arne Novák, Otokar Fischer, Romance scholar Václav Černý, Karel Teig, Karel Hugo Hilar (for the theatre), Albert Vyskočil and Timoteus Vodička. The influence of the Prague School of Structuralists (whose leading lights included Mukařovský, Jakobson, Vodička and Červenka), the feats of the avant-garde, poetism, surrealism, philosophical and historiographical positivism and Karel Čapek and Emanuel Rádl’s pragmatism (see Čapek’s In Praise of Newspapers, Rádl’s Sense of Our History and Consolation in Philosophy) persisted to the end of the twentieth century. A signature work for the “aestheticized” essay which is heavily laced with fiction was that of the Baudelaire-inspired decadent and poet Artur Breiský (see The Triumph of Evil, his essays on dandyism) and also the prose of Josef Čapek’s Limping Pilgrim, which operates on the frontier between magical story and philosophical essay. Of similar pioneering importance, this time for the essay addressing the visual arts and art history, was Jindřich Chalupecký, guru of the writers’ and artists’ group Skupina 42 (and author of The World in Which We Live and The Sense of Modern Art); Chalupecký’s influence can be felt today in the work of Josef Kroutvor, Jaromír Zemina and the younger Jaromír Zemánek. For the contemporary essay on philosophy, religion, history, political science and more general reflections on culture, the salient influences are the Nietzschean philosopher Ladislav Klíma, the phenomenalist Jan Patočka (Heretical Essays on Historiography), and the post-Marxist philosopher and reformer Karel Kosík (Markéta Samsová’s Century, The Young Man and Death). In this connection it is also important to mention Brno philosopher and mystic Josef Šafařík, whose works include the posthumous Journey to the Last.
To return to an earlier statement, the Czech essay has today retreated to the background, or else it has allowed itself to come under the patronage of other specialist forms; the younger generation either neglects to use it altogether or seeks to “expand” it by allowing essay-like passages to pervade its prose, poetry and drama. Among the rising generation of writers aged between twenty and forty – as we find it in the Anthology of New Czech Literature: 1995–2004 – essayists are almost entirely absent. It is as though postmodern relativism doubted the validity and competence of the essay’s refined manner of communication.
Of those men of letters today whose critical reflections and articles have – to a greater or lesser extent – the character of an essay, from the older generation we might name Aleš Haman, Milan Jungmann, Jiří Opelík, Zdeněk Kozmín and Jiří Pechar, from the middle generation Jiří Cieslar and the film historian and reviewer Edgar Dutka, and from the younger generation the poet and critic Jan Štolba and Jaromír F. Typlt. Of practitioners of the poetic essay which goes beyond questions of philosophical doctrine, of particular interest is writer-in-exile František Listopad (whose works include Tristan from Town to Town and Chinatown with Rosa). Also present in the Czech essay-writing tradition is a Kafkaesque introspection and a fascination with myth, the heart of which is to be found in the notion of “Magical Prague” – some years ago this tendency was rediscovered in an essay by Italian writer and poet Angelo Maria Ripelino. After Eduard Goldstucker, essays on Kafka were written by Libuše Moníková (who lived in Germany and died recently), Josef Čermák, translator of Kafka’s work Vladimír Kafka and the German scholar Jiří Stromšík. Of equal importance is the impressive competence of those translators into Czech and authorities on world literature who complement their translations with learned postscripts and studies which have much in common with the essay form. In the sphere of Spanish, Italian and French literature, pre-eminent among these is Václav Černý, followed by Vladimír Mikeš (translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy), poet and Romance scholar Jan Vladislav, Romance scholar Jiří Pelán, Stromšík, English scholars Radoslav Nenadál and Antonín Přidal, and Martin Hilský, author of a number of erudite essays on Shakespeare.
As concerns the contemporary essay on religious or spiritual themes, which might also embrace more general historical or cultural matters and demonstrate an interest in ecology or psychology (whether Jungian or more mystical), we should mention Tomáš Halík (What Does Not Shake is Not Strong, Speaking to Zacheus), philosopher Erazim Kohák (Small Declarations of Love), Zdeněk Kratochvíl (The Fount of Knowledge of the Forgotten Sciences of the Greek Christians), and, of the school of Durych and Deml, Věroslav Mertl (The Stations of the Cross, Reflections on Wordly Matters, Peaceful Gardens). Of the younger generation, worthy of particular notice is Martin C. Putna, whose works include We the Last Christians. Ivan Odillo Štampach takes as his starting point a radical poetic-spiritual essay by Březina in his They Suspected Floods of Light. Rudolf Starý, astrologist and Jungian and author of Difficulties with Deeper Psychology, is a lone figure whose essays are collected in the volumes Medusa in the New Stone Age and Cheiron, the Medicine of Asclepius and Jungian Psychology. Similarly individual is the work of a pair of writers closely connected with the culture and society of France, Václav Jamek and Lubomír Martínek. Today’s Czech Republic also provides a ready readership for essays on ecology- related or general-scientific themes; writers of note in these fields are Stanislav Komárek (One Hundred Essays on Nature and Society) and Václav Cílek (Landscapes Within and Without). Those essayists whose work is devoted to film past and present are led by Cieslar, Dutka and Petr Král, a poet and expert on the silent/slapstick era whose works include Slapstick or Cream-cake Morality.
The essay form in the field of music and musicology is rather less common, though it, too, has its outstanding practitioners: we should mention the Brno musicologists Alois Piňos, Rudolf Pečman and Miloš Štědron and the Prague composer/director Petr Kofroň (whose works include Thirteen Analyses). Karel Srp, Anna Fárová, Josef Kroutvor, Jiří Vojtěchovský and Jaroslav Anděl use the essay form to write about photography. As for essays which address themes of politics and culturology, the practitioner who is best known internationally is certainly Václav Havel; others active in this area include political scientist and historian Petr Pithart, Partik Ouředník and Svatopluk Karásek. Writer-in-exile Rio Preisner, the author of many books and essays on themes of political science, is another doyen of the Czech literary scene. Where the forms of prose and the essay meet, we find the work of Věra Linhartová (who lives in France) and Michal Ajvaz (see The Grammar of Words, The Glow of Letters, The Secrets of the Book).
Jan Suk
