A Little Country's Little Alphabet of Modern Man's Biggest Problems

·A Little Country's Little Alphabet of Modern Man's Biggest Problems Selected by Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz The following quotations,I gathered mainly from the works of contemporary Czech and Slovakplaywrights - many ofthe titles published in the underground series "Padlock Edition" ("Edice Petlice") - provide an aphoristic guide to some of the major concerns of people living under a totalitarian regime. The reader's combined amusement and disquiet are likely to increase with his realization that these concerns are by no means alien to those living III "democratic" societies throughout the contemporary world. ON MAN IN HIS SOCIAL CONTEXT Me - a hero? They didn't even take me into the army.... You know - I have always been afraid of something ... at first ofcompetition, then ofthe tax office or infectious hepatitis ... then marriage and then old age.... It has always been my dream to sit down in an easy chair, stretch out my legs, and say to myself: now I'm not scared of anything! ... The hapless "hero" in Peter Karvas's "comedy" The Great Wig This, Comrade Mala, I call blinkers-thinking. The very first law of dialectics tells us clearly that everything is connected with everything else, and there are many such similar laws. The fact that here we are dealing with only a dog does not mean that awareness of the laws of class structure is not applicable. The chief lady clerk of the office issuing dog licences in Pavel Kohout's one-act play Permit Everyone in a totalitarian system is an employee ... an employee conceived not only as a sociological type (as would have been true of Zola), but as a human possibility, an attitude, an outlook on the world! Milan Kundera on certain employment situations 134 MARKETA GOETZ-STANKIEWICZ ON GOVERNMENT You have taught us what the First Secretary of the Mongolian party said about sheep-raising, but you have kept it a secret that the first president ofour country was a philosopher. Kohout in an interview The Maharaja of Dhaudhikumuru told me: in my grandfather's time - if someone sneezed aloud at table, he was quartered and thrown to the palace tigers; in my father's time - he was merely executed; while I can't do anything but expel him from the court. Where will it end? A conservative historian in Ivan Klima's play The Castle To govern means that you don't have to account for anything, right? It's no good getting into a discussion about who is right every five minutes. There must be people who are always right and those who are never right! Then there'll be order. A political adviser to the Governor in Karvas's The Great Wig ON IDENTITY Do you ever have such nonsensical thoughts? Say, during the night - things come to my mind that I would never ever think of in the daytime. Has that happened to you, too? - For example, I ask myself who I actually am. Whether I am ... a past grandson ... or a future grandfather. And then I can't get to sleep. A thoughtful character in Alena Vostni'splay Eeny, meeny, miney, mo What is the difference between my being really severe and my pretending to be severe? The only difference is my lack of truthfulness. But that is secret! You can't see it! It is therefore a difference that can't be seen, can't be perceived. But is an invisible difference still a difference? A sceptical school principal in Kundera's one-act play The Blunder Sometimes it seems that in concentrated hard, really hard, I would be able to be what I really wanted to be. An intelligent young man in Josef Topol's play Cat on the Rails ON LANGUAGE A (a "normal" person) You mean you are afraid of words? When everybody uses them? When nobody is afraid of them? B (a simpleton) Aren't you afraid ofthem either? (pause) When you talk, you mostly lie. That's why you're not afraid of words. Small talk in Topol's play The End of the Carnival A Little Alphabet of Modem Problems 135 "... such a sweeping statement would have to be substantiated!" "Nothing easier...