Ethics at the Crossroads: The Czech "Dissident Writer" as Dramatic Character

Ethics at the Crossroads: The Czech "Dissident Writer" as Dramatic Character MARKETA GOETZ-STANKIEWICZ In a survey of contemporary national literatures it seems only sensible to speak of a "Czech literature," as well as of "Czech drama." After all, Czech writers have lately been making their marks with increasing clarity on the international literary scene. Milan Kundera's novel The Book ofLaughter and Forgetting has reached the best-seller list in the United States; Vaclav Havel's and Pavel Kohout's plays are performed in many countries and languages; Josef Skvorecky has received the prestigious Neustadt Prize; Ludvik Vaculik publishes essays in the New York Review; Ivan Klima's plays are performed in Canada; liti Grusa's prose attracts international praise. If we consider the biographies of the writers, however, we find that speaking of a "Czech literature," though true in one way, misleads in another. One can identify three Czech literatures,I each bearing the impact of the circumstances under which it was written; yet each also transcends these circumstances and fuses with the other two in a union which may become more obvious to future readers than it is to myopic contemporaries. First, official literature is written with government approval in Czechoslovakia, available there in bookstores and traceable in library catalogues. These works, whatever their value, maintain the official image of a thriving national literature within the country itself.2 Second, there is a literature produced by writers in exile - a formidable group by now, including four of those named above. I need not stress that these authors, although no longer subject to censorship and harassment as they were at home, nevertheless work under conditions taxing and difficult in various ways: they have lost their cultural and linguistic contexts, and large cultural or economic restrictions - from the necessity for translation to the vacillating free-enterprise publishing market - drastically limit their new freedom to write what they want. Third, literature continues to be produced by writers still living in Czechoslovakia under extremely trying circumstances, in an apartheid situation not easy for the Western reader to The Czech "Dissident Writer" in Drama II3 imagine when he sees the laconic note "forbidden to publish in his own country" which usually appears in translated editions of their works. In Czechoslovakia these works circulate in typescript in several underground editions; abroad they reach publication in the original Czech through exile publishers, such as the well-known 68 Publishers in Toronto. Readers familiar with this situation will forgive me, I hope, for this preamble, necessary to introduce the background for the conception of the six short plays about the Czech writer Ferdinand Vanek. This group of plays, written by three authors, reflects the three facets of Czech literature outlined above. Three of the plays - Audience (1975), Vernissage (1975) and Protest (1978) - were written by Vaclav Havel before he began to serve his four-and-a-half-year prison sentence for human rights activities. Two othersPermit (1979) and Morast (1981) - come from Pavel Kohout, who settled in Vienna after he was refused re-entry into Czechoslovakia. Pavel Landovsky, the author of Arrest (1981), is an eminent Czech actor turned playwright who also now lives in Vienna. In a singular episode on the contemporary theatrical scene, these three playwrights have adopted the same fictional character and placed him in various dramatic situations.3 In 1975 Havel began to feel his isolation from the stage more acutely. Since 1969 he had not seen any ofhis plays on stage except for one performance ofhis new version of Gay's The Beggar's Opera. As a writer, he felt he had to "lean on something he knew, on his concrete personal background"; "only by means of this authenticity"4 could he witness more objectively the times and place in which he lived. At this point Havel created the figure of Ferdinand Vanek, the playwright in the political doghouse: the author who, not allowed to publish, turned labourer to make a living and then lost any promise of holding a job. Havel wrote two one-act plays about Vanek in quick succession, intending them for private performance to entertain his friends who lived in similar circumstances. It did not occur...