Besides a lot of useless knowledge, my university provided above all knowledge that I had to reject later on in my life because it was fundamentally untrue.
While most of the linguistic subjects were taught by professors and genuine philologists, most of the literature lectures and seminars were led by young assistants who had written nothing more than perhaps a brochure or newspaper article. All that was left of modern Czech literature for our lecturer was the realistic social branch and of course Communist authors. Interpretations concentrated on the content and their political assessments. Nobody really attempted literary analysis, and as a result second- and third-rate authors became prominent, whereas many of those whose works were superior were not even mentioned — they were considered Catholics, ruralists, legionnaires, decadents, or formalists.
In the class that treated progressive traditions in world literature, which was the only class on world literature, a young party journalist read to us the text of his own pamphlet, Troubadours of Hatred. It was the only lecture concerning contemporary literature that had come into being to the west of our borders.
During the rise of Fascism and World War II, the intellectual had two choices, two sides between which to decide — the nation or betrayal, his own people or Fascism. The decision taken by Gide was tantamount to relegating himself to the trash heap.
. .
Where are today’s descendants of
Buddenbrooks,
Forsyth, Thibault? Today they are no longer creating a “world in and of itself.” Today they stand as pawns in the game of the only predatory power: American imperialism.
. .
American imperialism seeks to conquer the world. Their plans contain military, diplomatic, financial, cultural, and political elements. What will their cultural equivalent be? What elements of culture, and especially literature, correspond to their appetite for world domination?
In his lectures he belittled Camus, Sartre, Wilde, and Steinbeck. The name of Sartre has become a symbol of decay and moral degeneration, a synonym for decadence, a prototype of the morass into which bourgeois pseudoculture has sunk. There were no limits to the abuse he heaped on the aforementioned books and the simplifying interpretations meant to prove the decadence of the greatest contemporary non-Communist authors. Sartre’s Troubled Sleep is poison, death, which agitates, which stretches out its claws for living people.. . Yes, let us ask what sort of people does a literature of degeneracy envisage? Take for instance Steinbeck’s final series of California novels. What kind of human being is he reckoning upon when in Wayward Bus he introduces a repulsive series of human creatures. . Faulkner’s Light in August is organized training for murder, hatred, and a willingness to hire anyone for a criminal cause. . The unprincipled adventurer, sentenced in 1924 to three years of hard labor for a burglary in Cambodia, André Malraux, wants to be both a Goebbels and Rosenberg to today’s de Gaulle, his idol and leader. . The novel For Whom the Bell Tollsis the ideal work to further the foreign political goals of the United States. . Another mockery of the war in Spain was, according to our lecturer, Adventures of a Young Man by Dos Passos (whose works I admired); also, Eugene O’Neill revealed his degeneracy in his play The Iceman Cometh. Albert Camus was one of the apostles of decadence and morass; Simone de Beauvoir advocated the idea of cannibalism, as did Robert Merle. And literary critics and historians? The bourgeoisie sham-scholars, publicist nabobs, theorizing buzzards howl in unison like a pack of hyenas wrapped up in professorial garb.
His way of thinking, and primarily speaking, appalled me, and even though I was still willing to consider the claim that art in non-Socialist countries was undergoing a decline, the abuses he showered on these authors was repulsive; I knew some of them, and what I had read seemed marvelous. From our assistant Parolek, who lectured on Russian literature, I learned how good literature comes into existence: The politics of the party is critical both for culture and for literature. They actively participate in resolving questions concerning the battle for peace and the construction of the material and technical basis of communism. The politics of the party emerges from the scientific analysis of the international situation as well. It directs* the development of Soviet society as well as Soviet culture on the basis of a scientific understanding of the sole proper direction. Writers should follow instructions that lead them in the proper direction. The author himself need not search. Other, more competent people searched for him. Soviet authors (and ours, as well) were supposed to write about four points:
* Bold lettering indicates Klíma’s emphasis.
1. Depict the epoch-making victory of the USSR and demonstrate its profound significance in all its aspects.
2. Show the heroism of the Soviet people in their Socialist, constructive activity in factories and in the fields of their collective farms.
3. Battle for peace against reactionaries abroad. Go on the offensive against bourgeois culture. Support the fight for peace by democratic forces abroad.
4. Uncover palpable attributes of future Soviet communism directly in Soviet reality, primarily in the Soviet man.
Fortunately there was at least one person among my colleagues who knew something about world literature. Josef Vohryzek, like me, should have died in a concentration camp, but his parents had managed to send him to Sweden at the last minute. There he survived the war living with some kind people. In a factory he learned to work with metal and after the war he returned to Czechoslovakia, where he searched in vain for his parents and relatives. He remained a blue-collar worker, but in the factory where he worked he was chosen for workers’ training. When he finished, he ended up in our department. He knew Scandinavian literature. He’d also read many translated works in Swedish, which had never been published in Czechoslovakia. After one of Comrade Bouček’s lectures, he heatedly announced that everything that fellow had claimed was nonsense. You can’t judge a literary work according to a political yardstick. The extensive list of condemnable authors, whom the assistant had tried to discredit, we should take rather as a recommendation. It was precisely their works that should be read because they belonged to the best of world literature.
I managed to get hold of a translation of Camus’s The Stranger as well as Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Both novels mesmerized me.
One day in a tram I ran into my former English teacher, Marek. He asked me what I was studying and how I was doing. When I mentioned the content of the lectures on foreign literature, he said it didn’t surprise him. Then he added, “You know, Klíma, whoever wants to break a free spirit always attacks education. That’s why the Germans closed the universities, and that’s why today they are reviling great souls and confusing concepts and values. The goal is to undermine education in its very foundation. He who truly wants to know must return ad fontem.** I don’t have to translate this for you. You did well in Latin.”
** To the spring, the source.
*
I had been in the department barely two months when, after a lecture on the history of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, a girl whom I’d never noticed before approached me. She began by apologizing for taking up my time, but she knew that I’d been accepted to study literature even though I had a high school diploma (I had no idea how she had found this out). She had tried to enter the department, as well, but without success. They allowed her to study Czech only in connection with Russian.