A few notes on Samizdat and art

“A great many people can peck at a typewriter and, fortunately, no one can stop them.  But for that reason, even in samizdat, there will always be countless bad books or poem for every important book.”  Vaclav Havel, Six Asides about Culture

Last week one of my classes went on a field trip to one of Central Europe’s largest samizdat libraries, Libri Prohibiti. The director, Jiří Gruntorád, described how many of the formerly prohibited and banned books and periodicals exist in copies numbering less than ten, and many are the only edition. He was, in many ways, a stereotype of an obsessive librarian: gruff, insular and quite protective of the ironically forbidden room containing floor-to-ceiling shelves of books and magazines. The library is open to the public, though and he brought out a rich variety of materials for us to leaf through. Black and white cultural magazines, printed on über-thin carbon paper, with featured articles on a famed New York artist who you may have heard of, Andrew Warhola (born to Slovak parents), and literary publications with hand-printed woodcut illustrations.  Longer novels were printed so small as to fit in a shirt pocket, and, ingeniously, with a rounded plastic magnifying glass that could be taken from the book’s spine. Even though the book, a sci-fi novel by  “Egon Bondy,” seems to be somewhat apolitical, it had a page of instructions in the front about what to do if one was caught reading it and questioned for having it (“confess only that you found it in your mailbox or slipped under your rug” – it was not a crime to own samizdat, only to distribute it).  Of note, the library also had more than 20 copies of 1984 (with 3 different Czech translations) as well as multiple copies of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Among the essays in Open Letters is a series of “asides” in which the dissident playwright-turned-president Vaclav Havel wonders about the label ‘dissident’ itself.  He explains that cultural life in Czechoslovakia has not deteriorated but instead “there are theaters crammed full of people grateful or every nuance of meaning, frantically applauding every knowing smile from the stage ... young people traveling across the country to attend a concert that may not take place at all” and plenty of samizdat publishing. He disagrees with another theoretician who, in another samizdat journal, divides culture into a ‘trinitarian’ vision of official art, adapted to the ruing ideology, against the dissident art of ‘rebellious bohemians’, which is as staunchly anti-political as that of the establishment and lastly ‘true, modern art’ which transcends ideology and politics. Havel’s response to this strict delineation is more fluid. He ignores the third group and mixes the first two, saying “I never take any pleasure in seeing someone from the ‘first’ culture fall into the ‘second’; rather, I am always happy whenever I encounter anything in the ‘first’ culture that I would have tended to expect in the ‘second.’”

One surprising artist who he may have been referencing is the surrealist animator Jan Švankmajer – educated in the state’s academies and worked openly. When we saw some of his short films in a class, we spoke about how ironically, under the Communist system, where artists had stipends and did not have to worry about salability, most Czech filmmakers were much bolder than they have been in recent, post-Communist years. Švankmajer’s dark and politically enigmatic works take advantage of this time period, ripe with Havel’s “nuance[s] of meaning” all referring either to a Marxist critique of capitalism, or perhaps more deviously to the breakdown of a system of Communist brotherly cooperation.  Be sure to watch to the end – the previous two parts are equally unusual.

“The degree to which politics is present or absent has no connection with the power of artistic truth.  If anything matters, it is, quite logically, the only degree to which an artist is wiling, for external reasons, to compromise the truth.” – Havel, Six Asides