Prague has long been a magnet for aspiring writers who have arrived to the city hoping to capture the genius loci that inspired Kafka or Hrabal. One of the largest creative influxes happened in the wake of the Velvet Revolution when Prague basked in its newfound freedom observing the maxim that anything was possible. Foreign literati, artists and creatives flocked here in thousands (by 1993, 30,000 Americans were living in Prague according to a New York Times estimate). No wonder that The Prague Post publisher and eminent figure of the Prague English-speaking arts and culture scene Alan Levy dubbed it “the Left Bank of the Nineties”. Allen Ginsberg, who had previously visited Prague in 1965, and who had been a huge influence on the Czech cultural consciousness (same as the whole Beat movement), became the catalyst of this era. His importance in the development of the local literary scene is affirmed by his poem “Král Majáles” (The King of May) being chosen as the title of this very anthology.
Gradually, as the millennium drew to a close, sentiments pronouncing the “death of Prague” started to appear. “Prague is over, man. It’s Cairo now! The Tangier of the 90s”, says a typical writing on a drawing by Ken Nash (qtd in the Introduction, p. 47). The hedonistic atmosphere of the early Nineties gave way to sudden sobriety and departure of several figures of the scene. Nevertheless, literary activity - perhaps in an effort to reinforce its viability - hadn’t ceased. Journals such BLATT, the Plastic (Semtext) or the Prague Literary Review and festivals such as the The Prague International Poetry Festival (apart from BLATT, each of the aforementioned endeavours had Louis Armand on board) all started after the turn of the millennium signalling the second “renaissance” within these circles. Currently, we might even be experiencing the third resurgence of Prague’s international literary scene with journals such as GRASP and Vlak and the poetry pamphlet Rakish Angel emerging over the last 12 months.
Thanks to the nature of the international literary scene here – ephemeral and spontaneous, inadvertently shunning institutionalization and co-optation by the mainstream – its hitherto documentation had been relatively haphazard, largely reliant on the memories of those who witnessed the post-revolution creative maelstrom. After two decades of buoyant literary life in Prague, the time has come to reflect upon the personalities, journals, publishers, readings and impromptu happenings. Enter The Return of Král Majáles: Prague’s International Literary Scene Renaissance – 1990 – 2010: An Anthology edited by Louis Armand, one of the most active participants of the scene, an Australian poet, artist and head of the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory at the Philosophy Faculty (Faculty of Arts) of Prague's Charles University. His magnum opus has been recently published by Litteraria Pragensia at the Philosophy Faculty, Armand‘s workplace. “There’s always been this ethnological interest from outside in Prague but there really had been no precedent to this anthology. I think at the end of the day, considering what I believe is the worth of the writing that is being produced in Prague today, there was a sense that the heritage of the international literary community needed to be acknowledged and recorded,” says Armand.
The anthology features excerpts from the works of poets and novelists who have left their mark on the Prague literary scene throughout the last two decades, including (both English language speakers and Czech authors): Michal Ajvaz, Věra Chase, Kevin Blahut, Stephan Delbos, Travis Jeppesen, Ivan Martin Jirous, Joshua Mensch, Toby Litt, Jáchym Topol, Jaroslav Rudiš, Phil Shoenfelt, Vincent Farnsworth, Laura Conway, Petr Borkovec, Elizabeth Gross, Kateřina Rudčenková, Alan Ward Thomas, Jason Mashak (click here to read an interview that he gave to the Czech Literature Portal), and Armand himself. The work, unprecedented in its topic and volume in the Czech Republic, also includes photographs and visual ephemera: flyers, posters, etc all meticulously researched and obtained from the vaults of random personal archives. The following interview attempts to shed some light on the motivations and inspirations behind this impressive work.
The Prague Writers Festival is currently taking place (at the time of the interview – note). How would you define your editorial and organisational concept in contrast to Michael March and the Writers festival in general? You set up the Prague International Poetry Festival. Could you say something about it?
In terms of the anthology, the idea behind that is completely different from what Michael March tends to do with the Writer’s Festival. The whole purpose of the anthology is to present, trace the work of writers living in Prague, publishing in Prague, active in the literary community as opposed to bringing writers from outside and presenting them in the context of an exposition. It’s a question of presenting the work of an indigenous cultural community, which happens to be international in character.
In terms of the poetry festival, that again was a different concept. It involved over 40 poets from around the world, many of them would be described as experimentalist and in that sense they might differ from the type of writers that Michael March would be presenting. They might be successful and well-published and highly esteemed but they wouldn’t necessarily stand as figures of the mainstream. At the same time, those writers from abroad were presenting their work here in Prague alongside Prague writers so there was a genuine type of interaction and dialogue going on. We’ve continued the festival in a much smaller version since 2004, as the Prague Micro-Festival poetry series.
What was the main impetus for your anthology?
It’s hard to identify a single one. Looking back in 2010, automatically the date offers a perspective on a period of time. There was a natural moment there in seeking to sum up and put in perspective what had occurred in that period largely because the public record has been so incomplete. There was a lot of hearsay and mythology, and so on, but in terms of being able to consult a public record, works published, magazines, etc, these turned out to be quite difficult to get hold of. Partly what we thought to do was to provide a means for that perspective to materialize. The anthology came into being for those very practical reasons and as we began to look for the material – both the writing, the stories behind the writing, the people involved, the magazines – it became very clear that nowhere was there a stable record – not in the archives of the National Library, Municipal Library or anywhere. We ultimately depended on private collection that people had accidentally maintained over a period of 15 - 20 years and things turned up we had never even heard of. The anthology kept growing not simply to accommodate more writers, but also to accommodate the archival materials that we discovered as we went along and which took on a particular value simply because they were the only testimony to what had happened.
Why now? Was it because of the two decades or did you feel that this era had perhaps come to an end?
I didn’t feel that anything was coming to an end, because there had probably been many “ends,” as it were – several phases or moments or rhythms. I think that one of the reasons we decided to do it now was not so much the coincidence of the dates as that, in the last couple of years, there had been renewed activity in the international community here - people publishing, starting up reading series, magazines being restarted such as GRASP and The Prague Revue. As this was happening, there was a moment of reflection as to what has preceded this. As people again became interested, we started to become a little more self-conscious about what in fact had been going on.
Where you influenced by any anthologies?
No, because there are many types of anthologies. What did strike me once we started to do this was that no anthologies had been attempted about Prague writers by a publishing house based in Prague since Bohemian Verses in 1993. There’s Prague Tales but that was edited and published in Poland. There’s always been this ethnological interest from outside in Prague but there really had been no precedent to this anthology. I think at the end of the day, considering what I believe is the worth of the writing that is being produced in Prague today, there was a sense that the heritage of the international literary community needed to be acknowledged and recorded.
How did you put together the anthology? Did you have assistants helping you?
I was the editor and looked after most of the work. I collaborated with David Vichnar, the manager of Litteraria Pragensia, with whom I conducted some of the research. Basically I was working with people who had been editors of magazines here before, like Alan Thomas who edited Optimism; Jim Freeman who used to organise the Beef Stew readings and has a large private archive; Ken Nash who organizes the Alchemy readings; Ken Ganfield who was one of the owners of the Terminal bar, among others. It was in part a collaborative effort, at least in terms of research and uncovering material – reconnecting with writers, often with people who had been out of touch for a long time, tracking down copies of old magazines, etc. And the same goes for the photographs. I had to rely on people like Mark Baker, one of the owners of the Globe, who provided me with lots of material; John Bruce Shoemaker, who was one of the owners of the Repre club at Obecní dům; Michaela Freeman, who has been taking photographs since the early ‘90s; also Gwendolyn Albert, Greg Linington, Curt Matthew and others. I would have liked the book to have many more images, to give people the sense of the time and personalities involved.
Did you also deal with Czech writers?
Yes, basically writers who were active in the international scene, in translation of writing/performing directly in English. There were many Czech writers who I had known for a long time, others I knew indirectly through other people, like Alex Zucker, Greg Evans, David Vichnar. In a sense, even if many writers featured in the anthology hadn’t met one another directly, at the end of the day, everyone was in some way connected, to the extent that you could say there was a type of community there, or at least a continuity – at some level there’s something going on between all of the writers in the anthology, in Prague, at one time or another.
Why and how did you select the writers featured in the anthology?
When we first envisaged doing this anthology, we really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. The more we talked about this with different people, the more suggestions were made, names were put forward. The picture gained depth and complexity. I think it became clear that the purpose of the anthology was to represent a period in terms of who had been actively involved with an international community here - both as writers or as catalysts, for instance. There are some people who are represented in the anthology who are perhaps better known as translators or artists but we felt that it was important to have their work represented because of the contribution they had made. Thus it’s a literary anthology but it’s also more than that. It’s a portrait of a period. We sought to include the best of the writing we could find, work that had been published here, but not exclusively.
Does the anthology also include works that have never been published?
We also included previously unpublished work. One of the pieces that I’m very happy to have here, is a section from Myla Goldberg’s novel, Cirkus, that was written here in 1993-94 and hasn’t been published. I was lucky that Alan Ward Thomas had kept a copy of the manuscript. After some consideration, she agreed to publish the section of the novel. I think it helps to address a longstanding issue that some commentators come back to, that – especially in the early Nineties – there was an absence of good work being produced in Prague. This is an opinion that has been too-often repeated, without substantiation.
The section of Goldberg’s unpublished novel included in the anthology, alongside the excerpt from Tom McCarthy’s recently published novel, Men in Space (which was written in Prague in 1993), the short stories of Julie Chibbaro, and the work of many others, demonstrates that this wasn’t the case. Commentators and critics outside Prague often mistook some of, for example, the fugitive works that were appearing at open mic poetry readings, as a constituting the whole of what was being done here, and satisfied themselves with making sweeping judgements on that basis alone. It was important for us to address this issue and to bring together in a single volume some of the work that had been produced particularly in the early Nineties.
In terms of publishing, the international community in Prague had to start from scratch to build a local English-language publishing culture – the alternative was to be obliged to address one’s writing to editors and publishers abroad, which ultimately defeats the whole idea of a local culture and simply delegates authority back to publishers and editors in Britain and the U.S. (largely), reinforcing the old Cold War hegemonies, so to speak. It was particularly important in our view that the efforts of those who pioneered and developed an English-language print culture in Prague should also be recognised in the anthology, which contains a large illustrated bibliography for that purpose.
The perpetual search for the genius writer was something that pervaded the Nineties...
It was crazy. No literary community on earth was subjected to the type of scrutiny and self- consciousness as the Prague scene - especially in the US where the whole Prague phenomenon was blown completely out of proportion. It was particularly an American thing, this fascination in the media such as the New York Times, Vogue magazine, etc... They were preoccupied with the search for the next Hemingway. And that’s the old paradox. If you’re looking for a Hemingway, you’re not going to find him because you’re looking for an idea. The other thing that writers here had to compete with was the type of literary tourism where well-established foreign writers were writing opinion pieces for the TLS or the London Review of Books. Those magazines weren’t particularly interested in fostering or discovering new writing by unknown writers who were living in Prague. The critical assessment of the work here – based entirely on assumptions and hearsay – simply led to a complete misunderstanding of what was happening in Prague.
The book is quite visual. Was it your intention?
I would have like it to be more visual. The real difficulty in terms of images was getting hold of the actual physical copies of photographs and getting them scanned. A lot of these images were copies that have been made. People either didn’t have originals or they have been left in boxes somewhere inaccessible. Some of the photo quality wasn’t that great, which was limiting. Even though we had a lot of photographs, not all of them were usable. One of the things that happened because of this anthology is that a lot of people have began to look through their drawers, taking an interest again in the past because they’re realising it has value and historical importance. And I’m hoping that in the future, there’s going to be more projects like this. I am very much looking forward to somebody producing a more general cultural history of the period after ‘89.
Do you think that quality literary critique has been missing here?
I wouldn’t say so that it’s missing any more here than elsewhere. I mean certainly in terms of theory there is a long heritage in Prague. As you know I work at Charles University, at a department where structuralism was born.
Or is it perhaps the lack of constructive criticism that would facilitate and encourage the arts?
I think that’s possibly true to the extent that not enough people, particularly young people and students who are coming through the educational system, are encouraged to make a contribution or engage in a dialogue. There is a problem with pedagogical culture, the way in which the educational system works. We want to encourage critical writing as well as creative writing. At the university where I work, there is a shifting emphasis towards research, students being required to publish. I think that the closedness of some of educational institution has perhaps not helped in fostering quite as dynamic and critical culture as this city might otherwise have had.
In what way is your anthology distributed – is it sold in Czech bookshops? Can it be bought abroad?
In Prague, it’s distributed through Karolinum and online through Kosmos. We also have our own website at www.litterariapragensia.com. In the United States, Litteraria books are distributed through Syracuse University Press and independent bookstores.
PRAGUE’s ENGLISH SPEAKING LITERARY SCENE
Is the expat literary scene in the Czech Republic unified?
There’s no singular literary scene amongst what people call the expatriate community anymore than in the so-called “Czech” literary community. People are from very different backgrounds, ideological and aesthetic concerns and agendas, different personalities.
One of the difficulties in talking about a scene in terms of a coherent movement has been partly the absence of publishing outlets which might service or facilitate that sort of identification. If you look around the world and also in the Czech literary media, there are different types of journals and publishing houses catering to different sorts of aesthetic concerns and agendas and writers are attracted to that and they group around that. There’s the Prague Surrealist Group, which continues. It’s a little more disparate with the international or the expatriate community – perhaps with the exception of the writers associated with Café Irreal or Rakish Angel. In the late Nineties, there were strongly defined different groups with agendas and programmes. There’s perhaps more cooperation within the English speaking community today but that could be due to circumstances.
I have the feeling that the beatnik spirit, the romanticized idea of post-89 Prague as an arty Paris, is still around within the American literary community here in Prague. Is contemporary English writing in Prague still trying to emulate this Nineties spirit?
I’m not sure that writers are trying to do anything in terms of reliving or engaging in some sort of nostalgia for a mythical past which none of us would have experienced because we weren’t around in the 1920s. I believe that the comparison is useful to the extent that Prague has had and continues to have a great number of possibilities associated with it, a great number of freedoms available to writers, a different tempo and sense of what’s possible in writing and, let’s say, a non-professionalized attitude towards literature. In Britain and the US the writing of poetry and fiction has become highly professionalized and commercialized, and the absence of that here I think facilitates a type of experimentalism, not necessarily always with literary forms, but with literary life – which you were referring to with regard to “Bohemianism.” Also pertaining to literary publishing – there are no rules, so people can try these things out, start magazines in ways that people used to in 1970s New York, or start publishing houses. That’s all still going on – it’s one of the benefits of a scene that periodically renews itself, within a larger Central European situation that also continues to change and evolve (and this applies to Czech writers as well, of course). There is a growing conviction that – even as literary cultures in Britain, America and Australia tend to reinforce national boundaries – that writers outside English speaking countries need to be recognised as also making an important contribution to English literary heritage as whole.
Do you think that expat writers have been excluded from the mainstream Czech literary scene?
I don’t believe in a mainstream Czech literary scene. You can look to publishers like Maťa who have published books of non-Czech writers both in Czech and English (Phil Shoenfelt, Ruth Weiss) or G+G who’ve done the same (with Paul Polansky, for example). There’s always been this multicultural aspect to Czech writing; there had to be because lot of the people who constituted the literary scene here after the revolution either had been abroad or had contacts abroad. It’s always a question of how literary history is written and who it’s written by.
Do Czech and English speaking authors in Prague and the Czech Republic cooperate?
There are these expectations that you often find projected onto the international scene in Prague, which you don’t find projected onto any other scene. You find writers all around the world who are not particularly cooperative with one another regardless of what language they speak. In terms of cooperation here, there’s some very good examples of where there has been cooperation. Writers like Laura Conway, Kateřina Piňosová, Phil Shoenfelt, Jenne Magno and Vincent Farnsworth have cooperated very closely. There’ve been translation projects: poets like Chris Crawford and Stephan Delbos have been involved in translating Czech poetry or the poet Věra Chase who’s translated English language poetry into Czech. There is cooperation, there could be more, but that’s the nature of writing. Writers are not necessarily collaborators with one another, nor are they necessarily translators.
Was it better in the past or is it gradually improving?
I think that people are becoming more conscious of each other, partly because of the internet, partly because with 21 years after the revolution there’s more of a perspective, there’s more of a consciousness in Europe and the Anglo-American world of Czech literature or Czechoslovak literature and vice-versa, particularly with the younger generation. Hrabal was interested in T.S. Eliot, while younger writers today are interested, for example, in Robert Grenier, Alice Notley or Australian poets like Pam Brown. We’ll perhaps see more cooperation in the future because people are working more with each other, they are more familiar with one another, it’s a completely different demographic. If you look at the population of Prague it’s completely different than what it was before 1989, that’s simply a matter of fact and that at some point has to be reflected in the literary culture.
What was the contribution of international or expat literature to Czech literature scene?
I think this question remains to be answered. There’s yet to be a critical appraisal of the period, of the scene as a whole, of all the writers involved, of the work that was published during that time. It’s something that I look forward to seeing. David Vichnar has begun that task partly with a volume of essays on Prague poets – including Petr Borkovec, Kateřina Rudčenková, Laura Conway, Vincent Farnsworth – which is due to be published by Charles University later this year. Active critical reception is something that remains to be done – in both English and Czech. As for neglect, there are of course Czech writers who have been neglected as well. One of my favourite examples is the work of Lukáš Tomin, who chose to write in English and whose work simply hasn’t been received either in Czech or English. This raises questions as to why this has been the case, what this has to say about the state of criticism. Does it have anything to say whatsoever about the state of the writing or the character of the writing? I think that just as the literary communities involved in both languages have been delineating themselves and forming themselves, the same goes for critical reception. Twenty years is a long time, but as they say Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Is there a personality that stands out over these twenty years? Someone who epitomizes the Prague Nineties scene, someone who helped to foster it?
As I said before, there has never really been one single scene. In terms of publishing, Howard Seidenberg from Twisted Spoon Press has been an important figure, while Lukáš Tomin was perhaps the enfant terrible of the early scene. There are people who weren’t writers, like Scott Rogers; entrepreneurs who really drove a lot of what happened early on through the Globe, through Trafika and Modra Musa press. Writers like Gwen Albert who was in Prague during the Velvet Revolution and worked for the Civic Forum, has been heavily involved in human rights and contributed a great deal of moral authority to the literary scene here or Vincent Farnsworth, a musician (of Blaq Mummy fame) and Phil Shoenfelt (Fatal Shore) who’re both major personalities in Prague.
Who are the writers to watch, who deserve recognition right now?
The writers who I’m impressed with at the moment include Holly Tavel who has only been in Prague a for year – but is writing some fantastic prose work. There are other writers who have been active here for a long time, but have been out of sight, such as Thor Garcia, another short fiction writer and novelist, who is producing highly original, idiosyncratic work.
I think what we have at the moment is a type of delay. A phenomenon that is very much like the one that defined the Czech and Slovak literary scene after 1989, where you have writers who have been in Prague writing in English for 10-15 years, whose work has really gone under the radar and is being discovered almost for the first time alongside much younger, newer writers. Trying to distinguish what is new in fact has become more difficult than it would even ordinarily be, what with the general absence of a public record, of a collective cultural memory, and so forth. In terms of chronology, of more recent arrivals to Prague, there are writers such as Stephan Delbos who has been particularly active as a poet or Joshua Mensch who’s been in Prague for a while and is being increasingly published. I think that in terms of presence, there are more published writers in Prague now than at any time before (published abroad or online). It’s something that distinguishes the situation now from the situation in the Nineties; even though there were more English-language journals and magazines in Prague then.
Has the internet facilitated this?
Yes, but not exclusively. I think that as attitudes have changed, particularly since the hype of Nineties has receded, some publishers and editors have begun to respond to the quality of the work and not the name “Prague.” And the writers who come here now are primarily committed to being writers.
LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA
Could you speak about Litteraria Pragensia?
LP as a book series began in 2002 with the publication of the collected writings of Petr Škrabánek, who was a Czech emigré surgeon living in Dublin and who wrote extensively on the later work of James Joyce, particularly Finnegans Wake. Subsequently we’ve published a range of scholarly books dealing with topics ranging from philosophy, semiotics, literature and literary history, to cultural theory and new media. Recently we’ve began publishing original works, TV plays, journalism, poetry and this year we expect to start publishing fiction as well. The name derives from the journal Litteraria Pragensia which was founded in 1990 by Martin Procházka at the Academy of Science before it moved to the Philosophy Faculty. It is a cultural studies journal published in English that is broadly international in its orientation. Litteraria has grown from primarily being an academic press to being a press concerned with the literary culture of Prague. As far as I know, we are the second English language press in Prague. Over eight years, we have published thirty titles.
Could you speak about the Centre for Critical and Culture Theory at the Philosophy Faculty that you have been involved with?
The Centre for Critical and Culture Theory is responsible for the MA programme in Intercultural Studies. It’s a Masters degree programme in English; we don’t have a distinct PhD programme. We do, however, have doctorate students studying with us in our topic areas: literary theory, visual culture, performance and poetics. There’s a whole range of teaching, but the centre is primarily graduate and there’s no undergraduate programme.
Do you think that the younger generation is more focused on visual and audiovisual rather than the textual?
Somehow literature continues to attract people’s interest. In terms of new media, it’s not something that features much in the teaching of literature at the Philosophy Faculty; although it’s clearly an area that interests us and constitutes one of our research foci – particularly digital poetics, hypertext and hypermedia. We do have students coming from outside, from aesthetics, drama or film, to study a particular subject with us. I think that the success of our programme has stemmed from the fact that students want a different approach to literary and cultural studies. They want something that broadens the context in which literature happens, because literature doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s not particularly helpful to study literature in that way. I think that a lot of students wanted and desired a different approach to their degree structure and that’s what Intercultural Studies does. It broadens the field in which literature is studied, encompassing visual arts, performance and theory.
Your enthusiasm and activities in various media are amazing. Where do you find the energy for all these things and what is your objective?
The simple answer to that is that I like to do things. One of the reasons that I stay in Prague is that I see a lot of possibility, potential and opportunity to make things happen. Things are realisable and that for me is the most important thing about being an artist – to make things happen.
audio excerpt of the interview.
Lucia Udvardyová (www.luciaudvardyova.com) for Czech Literature Portal
Photo Michal Mecner