Off to Prague soon, but how much do I know about Czech culture

The list

A week tomorrow I’m off to Prague, where there may be time for a Dresden daytrip too. How much do I know of Prague and Czech culture? Not a massive amount, turns out. And are they not the sole stable and politically fortunately boring post-communist country in the region? Unlike Slovakia, they seem to be doing their best to stay out of international headlines.

• Milan Kundera. I can’t say I was ever a Milan Kundera fan, but then again I’ve only read a couple of things by him. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (eons ago, in English) led me to believe that he is a sex romp writer, someone more akin to I don’t know Henry Miller, Benny Hill, the cheesiest of Philip Roth, than other famous Ossie dissident emigrés like Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn. What I’ve probably returned to the most is what Richard Rorty obsessively returned to in his work, namely Kundera’s The Art of the Novel, and the “democratic spirit of the novel” and its potential in the development of moral imagination. I periodically have a thought, “Perhaps I should try The Joke, or The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", but I never do anything about it. When Kunder died and eulogies started pouring in, I found this Christopher Caldwell piece closest to the truth of the matter: “The misunderstood author cared more about skirt-chasing than power politics.”

• Bohumil Hrabal. We don’t get along swimmingly, alas. Parul Sehgal and James Wood celebrate him, but any potential joy from his fiction got extinguished for me in the course of the first fifty pages of I Served the King of England, a picaresque novel about a 15-year-old and quite dim busboy/waiter moving from hotel to hotel in Czechoslovakia leading up to World War Two. It certainly has its silly and sweet-surreal moments and its off-tangent anecdotes are good fun, but I couldn’t get past the rampant sexism. And I mean, rampant. In the first few pages the boy is already in a brothel, paying for a BJ. Other (rare) female walk-ons that we will soon encounter are only as real as their buttocks, behinds, and boobs (the 3B rating is high).

  Feminism is the idea that women too are people (with an inner life) and this appears to have been a challenge for many a twentieth-century novelist. Even under communism, which I find extraordinary. You radically, some would say brutally change a society, introduce mass literacy and mandatory public schooling, force-introduce industrialization to largely rural societies, found universal and free healthcare, get women out into the workforce, establish publicly subsidized daycare, and yet produce male novelists that continue to create female characters straight out of the folklore’s central casting, if they bother with female characters at all? I Served the King of England was published originally as a samizdat during Hrabal’s blacklisted years—therefore written for a friendly clandestine audience perhaps, the way a blog would be read today perhaps, maybe the sexism is thrown in there to entertain friends? I am trying to understand. There’s a book to be written about sexism in literature and film in communist countries, dissident and officially approved both.

• Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball (1967), which he directed while still in Czechoslovakia is effectively the men of the New Left mocking the men of the old left and informing them that their women are hotter. Officially, now, the film is read as a parody of the Communist Party and its hapless and very old leaders who can’t even organize a beauty pageant (not enough pretty ladies among them) and a lottery (prizes get stollen). We are the ones having access to good women, bros. And our time is coming. The cri de coeur of the New Left and the soixant-huitards everywhere.

• Cartoons! And here’s one with a girl, of all creatures: Fig the Maxidog. Gotta love the wee-girl-massive-St.-Bernard duo.

  The stop-motion Pat and Mat, about two mad but inventive DYI-ers. The older the episodes, the better.

• Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) for any number of things, but most of all:

  • Stabat Mater, especially this version with the piano only. I think I’ve listened to this recording 50+ times.

  • Cello Concerto in B minor

  • Slavonic Dances

  • Rusalka. There are several really good productions committed to DVD or touring the world. I hear McVicar’s at the COC last year was really good. Not sure if I should mention the Martin Kušej one from Munich in which the water nymph lives in contemporary Austria, kept locked in a cellar by her father. You’ve read those news reports.

• Leoš Janáček’s operas. I watched Frank Castorf’s From the House of the Dead in Munich (photo below from 2018); it’s fine but I already can’t remember much about it.

  

  The Makropulos Affair and Kat’a Kabanova only on DVD, and Jenufa have yet to see. I like a lot of other vocal Janacek, e.g. the Glagolitic Mass.

• Period performance movement has successfully revived two eighteenth-century figures, Josef Mysliveček (1737-1781), a friend of the Mozart pater and son, and a Bach contemporary Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745). This latter is something of a recording phenomenon. His Miserere ZWV 57, if you come across it, not to be missed. Tafelmusik has recorded and performed Zelenka a lot.

• There are more Czech composers circulating in the standard rep today (Smetana, Martinu, Kapralova) though they are rare in Toronto concert halls.

• (I see the Czech National Theatre is re-mounting Dvorak’s last and still obscure opera Armida, based on Tasso’s 1581 mytho-poetic take on the First Crusade, Gerusalemme liberata, while I’m there. Hmmmm…)

• I really enjoyed Tapestry’s 2022 production of R.U.R. (music Nicole Lizee) based on Karel Čapek’s 1920’s science-fiction play Rossum’s Universal Robots. They ought to revive it the soonest.

• Various bits and quotables by Vaclav Havel, but d’you know, I haven’t seen a single one of his plays. Which ones will stand the test of time? Is anyone in the angloworld putting them on stage?

• Anyone read Daniela Hodrová? I am getting her Prague trilogy.

• Well of course Franz Kafka. However, isn’t he part of German(-speaking) culture rather than Czech? The diaries (so bleak and bizarre) and The Trial I’ve read. I didn’t manage to get through the unfinished and posthumously published against his wishes The Castle.

• Though I did see Jiří Menzel’s (based on Hrabal) Closely Observed Trains which I could take or leave, there’s not a single thing by Věra Chytilová, the New Wave co-conspirator, in my memory vault. I see the TPL has Daisies so putting a hold on it.

• Škoda! It was our family car and the car in which I learned to drive. Škoda Auto was founded in 1925, became state-owned in 1948, survived the economic transition after the fall of communism and is now owned by the Volkswagen Group.

And here I draw a blank. That is it for my Czech list.