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110 | cZEcHosloVaKia Jiří Mucha (1915–1991) The son of the famous painter Alfons Mucha (1860–1939), Jiří Mucha had been associated with the Czechoslovak government in exile during World War II. He was taken into custody not long after the Communist coup of 1948 on charges of being a spy for the West. He was sentenced to six years in prison in 1951 but was released in 1953 in the amnesty for political prisoners that followed the death of Stalin and the Czech president Klement Gottwald. His major narrative about his imprisonment first appeared in English in 1967 as Living and Partly Living. The book appears to have been translated directly from a manuscript in Czech that has never appeared in print. Permeated with Mucha’s broad literary culture and urbanity, the memoir is a detailed, yearlong, month-by-month diary of his life in various labor camps beginning in July and ending in June; the year itself, however, is unspecified. Of particular interest in the book is the account of how Mucha was able to write while working far belowground in dark mines where his only source of light was his miner’s hat, with pencils and small notebooks supplied him by fellow inmates who later were able to smuggle out what he had written. The following excerpts are from Living and Partly Living (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 7–8, 15, 17–18, 35, 66–67, 102–3, 109–10, 153–54, 220–24, and have been translated from Czech by Ewald Osers. from Living and Partly Living JULY Eighteen hundred feet belowground, in total darkness lit only by the solitary flickering light of a miner’s lamp, I sit down on a log covered with coal dust to write this diary. I carry my light around with me. I drive a nail into the moldering wooden shuttering and hang my lamp on it. And in this uncertain glow I try to put down on paper the thoughts which, like bats roused from dark corners, flit past me, brush me with their wings and are gone. And in this darkness which has fallen all about me there glows like a lamp the tiny flame of faith in man—flickering, tremulous. The question is: Will it survive? I shall know tomorrow. . . . Behind me lie months of solitary confinement. Complete isolation from the world, a period when I relived my whole life step by step, and, what is more, my own death. Everything. From the moment when the deceased is carried from his home, laid out in a cold bare morgue, to the moment when the coffin lid is nailed down on him and he is buried in the ground. With the differ- cZEcHosloVaKia | 111 ence that, in spite of my rigor and my closed eyes, I was taking in what went on around me. Indistinctly, and mostly just by ear. But I was taking it in, especially when after endless weeks I had learned to distinguish between the different rumblings and rustling that went on around my coffin. Even in the graveyard clay there is life. Moles dig their little passages in pursuit of food, worms wriggle and tunnel in the soil, the roots of plants force their way between grains of sand. Hours and days do not exist. The only giant clock face is the solar system. The Earth moves nearer to the Sun and the oil grows warm; the Earth moves away and the ground turns hard with frost. Nothing else. A grave in the zodiac. One day I was sentenced to leave my grave. That, no doubt, is how the organization works which is responsible for the transmigration of souls. A commission —three figures in black gowns—in permanent session ever since the Creation, suddenly remembers: We’ve still got so and so to deal with. What shall we do with him? How long has he been in his grave? A year. Who has got the list of his sins? I could probably lay my hands on it but it would take a while. Can’t waste time over it. Can we assume that he pulled the wings off insects? Of any mortal man it can be assumed that at one time or another he pulled off an insect’s wing. Good enough. Six years purgatory. That’s how I found myself here, as part of a coal mine. It was a release from my twelve months’ crushing inactivity cabined in my cell. I was among human...

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