The Will to Chance: Necessity and Arbitrariness in the Czech Avant-Garde

Epilogue

EPILOGUE IN MEMORIAM PAUL ELUARD Lay in his grave for the dead man the words he spoke so as to live. Cushion his head among them, let him feel the tongues of longing, the tongs. Lay on the lids of the dead man the word he denied to that one who said Tholl to him, the word his heart's blood skipped past on when a hand as bare as his own strung up into trees of the future the one who said Thou to him. Lay this word on his lids: perhaps in his still-blue eye a second, stranger blue will enter, and the one who said ThOll to him will dream with him: We. The Poet and the Hangman IN MEMORIAM PAUL ELUARD Lege dem Toten die Worte ins Grab, die er sprach, urn zu leben. Bette sein Haupt zwischen siet laft ihn fiihlen die Zungen deT Sehnsucht, die Zangen. Leg aufdie Lider des Toten das Wort, dus er jenem verweigert, deT du zu ihm sagte, das Wort, an dem das Blut seines Herzens vorbeisprang, als eine Hand, so nackt wie die seine, jenen, der du zu ihm sagte, in die Biiume der Zukunft knupfte. Leg ihm dies Wort aufdie Lider: vielleicht tritt in sein Aug, das noch blau ist, eine zweite, fremdere Bliiue, und jener, der du zu ihm sagte, In the early summer of 1950, Albert Einstein made urgent calls to Czechoslovak President Klement Gottwald.2 He asked that his excellency pardon four prisoners-three men, one woman-accused of "terrorism" and sentenced to death after a months-long trial. Mr. Einstein's calls were in vain. On 27 June 1950, the four were hanged. Among them, the most famous enemy of the people and the one whose condemnation was most protested internationally, was the accomplished lawyer and leader of the National Socialist Party/ Milada Honikova (of whom more will be said below). The Law worked expeditiously. The spirit of the show trials swept 1 Translated by John Felstiner in The American Poetry Review 29: 6 (November-December 2000), as accessed at hup:!lwww.aprweb.orgiissues/novOOlcelan.html. 2 In addition to Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, and Eleanor Roosevelt all attempted to dissuade Gottwald from leveling the death sentence on the four. 3 The Czechoslovak National Socialist Party bore no relationship, ideological or otherwise , with the Nazi Party and was founded over two decades earlier (1898). '94 THE WILL TO CHANCE over the angry, injured nation. The intensive publicity and propaganda that accompanied these trials incited the public to near fanaticism. Demands were made to impose the most painful punishment upon the condemned, and letters and petitions signed by groups of workers insisted on their enemies' swift execution. Gottwald was determined to make an example of these four. The following selection from Milada Horakova's treason trial shows the hygienic objectives of the "show": Here, facing the working people, on the bench of the accused are those who followed the shameful road of the bourgeoisie, of the criminals who joined against the people of this republic in order to thrust a dagger into their back. The traitors of the republic sit here fully unmasked.... We advise the traitors at home and abroad: keep your hands off the republic.... I calIon the working people to be ever watchful. May they learn from this case ... to recognize the enemy, those ... who prepare the new war, the servants of the aggressors . The people of our republic are not only building paradise on earth; they also will defend this paradise against the forces of the old, mean world, a world which is condemned to destruction.4 More poignant even for the sense of the treacherous climate of the times and the issue of the unchecked epic vision might be the tale of the poet ZaviS Kalandra, whose philosophy and tenacity paralleled Teige's, but Teige luckily, and truly by luck alone, escaped his unhappy fate. Along with many others, the literary and social historian and sometime surrealist Kalandra experienced the "progressive 'scientific torture'" that reached Prague from Moscow and in June 1950 was executed as a "Trotskyist marauder, mutineer, spy and arch-traitor" in the notorious Pankrac prison. Vitezslav Nezval, his previous comrade and friend but now a scared and collaborating poet-laureate, contributed a poem in the party's main literary organ, Rude pravo, condemning Kalandra and others, in no uncertain terms. Andre Breton, who embraced Kalandra as a fellow surrealist and had a great deal of...