Subculture
I admit that I am filled with respect for a society that lives with the text and seeks its truth there, in textuality. You don't recognize great nations by their bloodshed and wars, nor by their meadows and streams, nor by their towers and cities, but by their text. The truth of the text is also close to the senses - not only the spirit - the text is the plant of language with which, in the heart, you are born and die. When you enter a country, you actually enter its text and countertext.
Culture & Counter-culture!
I am close to the American meaning of the term "Counter-culture": not only is it an oppositional cultural production, but also one that participates equally, is not in favor of censorship, and is legitimate in the full sense of the word to the extent that some authors refer to it in totality as American discourse (cf. Manuel Luis Martinez, Countering the Counterculture: Reading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomas Rivera, Wisconsin, USA, 2003, 4.)
The literary-centric epoch of Russian and Central European, that is, Polish, Czech and Hungarian Dissent in the sixties, seventies and eighties was a subculture sub speciae generis. It was an embryonic form of civil society. Only in our country, and only here, is it thought that democracy is achieved through repression. No, not by chance. Democracy moves along the path blazed by the text. Only in our country a handful of publicists and bloggers, recruited in the communist nursery, can declare themselves to be a repressive police apparatus and behave in their editorial posts in the media founded by the state as a cop behaves in a repressive regime: hit the gang!
No, not by chance. On the contrary. Democracy in its infancy was a textual creation.
Typewrite
In the era of Dissent, when my literary odyssey also begins, a dirty writing instrument, a hundred years old, a galvanized lady full of some black grease, with a moving roller greased with carbon, with an oval mesh of keys in the shape of a hollowed fist, a washed-out skull from some skull, an ostentatious neighbor, a noisy lover, an old lady with a feather in her hat - she was, therefore, capable of giving birth, developing and disseminating an entire literature!
Greased, black device with buttons!
An instrument inseparable from dissident literature, as the fiddle is in its own way inseparable from oral creativity - that was her, Mrs. typewriter.
Typewrite culture with its modest means of reproduction: bad wood paper, two or three indigos, carbon copies, a three-by-four room, the flickering light of a table lamp, yellow as urine, a box of Czech Petra on the table (then this cheap cigarette was smoked en masse, all was massive, literature the most) - "it was the only spiritual freedom", says Zdena Tomin, spokesperson for Harta 77, "the only forum for independence and alternative thinking", about the textual nature of the typewriter.
To serve with so much proliferation, despite censorship, with a poor apparatus, one hundred-headed dragon, which in the reader's sense is called a people or a nation (the readership of the dissidents was millions of citizens!), to organize itself as a center for the birth and spread of new ideas, in the environment of total regime control, under the absolute rule of censorship...?
Definitely, hats off!
The papers and magazines, which I received during the first decade of my life in Prague, or came to them in some other way, as they circulated among foreigners, where, of course, I had the most friends, fill an entire library built on an ordinary typewriter and on Gestetner. I still have many of them: Vokno; Solidarity; Teologick zborník; Dialogues; Cesty Myšleni; Square; Comments; Horizon; The other side; Host; Edice Popelnice; Parallel acts of philosophy; Edice Jungiana; Zebra; Contact; Central Europe; Theological texts. The hand of every writer, in that crazy season, the palm, the bellies of the fingers with the tips of the nails, was black as coal.
I received two issues of the monthly Teologické texty from Bohumil Hrabal. He was delighted that his role model, the tragic and controversial Czech theological poet and priest Jakub Deml, was being published there.
"Jakub Deml is my top, take it, read it, tolle et lege!" - and the old writer stuffed magazines into my arms, and I stuffed them into my insatiable backpack - informers were everywhere, literally at every step, there was a lot of rummaging as natural as breathing, eating, traveling. My life was filled with so many other documents, clippings from foreign press, translations of Polish and Russian dissidents, some under the name Izbor iz citlačka samoposluge, Orientace, with texts from the Catholic samizdat.
Crypto-literature
The deeper level of subculture was creativity that escaped supervision (censorship), something very attractive, drinkable to the spirit, some strange crypto-literary drink: creativity of resistance, rebellion, organized like a cabinet revolution.
Crypto-literature is essentially coded, marked by a self-immanent sign system of special circumstances and techniques (in no other way does it differ from the classics). It can be divided into two spheres, the first with the gentle name of samizdat, self-publishing, literary cottage industry. The second - tamizdat, what was published "over there", abroad.
The semiological guerrilla, as Umberto Eco christened it, did not have an easy task in the space from the Arctic to the Black Sea. Whenever and wherever I spoke about dissidence, for these three decades, I had in mind a space that expands, an idea that develops dispersively, a thought that inflates somewhat spherically, in circles. Dissident textuality was a storm in the sails of the IE region so that it became what it is: a factor of world literature, more precisely to become (from the point of view of the time) what it is today, an influential opinion in every world literary calculation.
A Moscow poet in the late fifties described his work with the word Samsebjaizdat, which was no innovation, because there was already a state publishing house, Gosizdat. The appropriate expression for something like "self-publisher" was also spread, and this Russian word, miraculously, found its way into the German language: Selbstverlag.
Russian samizdat in the climate of literary bans quickly grew into a mass publishing house, kolizdat, Mr. 1958, after Pasternak's decision to publish Doctor Zhivago abroad. After the death of Khrushchev, there was no longer a favorable wind for samizdat in the homeland, so the publishing house tamizdat was born - there, outside, beyond the borders of the USSR (cf. Yulisu Telesin: Inside 'Samizdat', Encounter, 1973). Meerson-Aksenov explored the spirit samizdata, says the dissident Venedikt Yerofeyev, starting with Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuri Danijel (pseudonym: Abraham Tertz, Nicholas Arzhak), Maksimov, Akhmatova, Josif Brodsky, Bulat Okudzhava and others. This author testifies that those wonderful editions of top literary works were always signed and even with the author's address:
"With a magnificent internal freedom, perfectly independent, not only of the government but of various groups ... with persistent pointing out the limits of the acceptability of the press in the West itself" (see Meerson-Aksenov and Shargin: Russian 'Samizdat', 57-58 ff. .)
The writer Georgij Vladimov says in 1967. that self-publishing is the mainstream of creative freedom - or rather, he publicly throws down the gauntlet in the face of the Union of Soviet Writers. There are not two kinds of free art, even in such a vast country, he says, only one kind is free-thinking, the other is under the boot and censorship. In the American exile, Sinjavski calls real Russian literature the second literature, and FM Feldbrugge already christens the movement with its right name in its early stages: dissent, opposition.
Various magazine publications within the movement, according to Feldburgge, 1965. there are about 50, the next year it doubled, and finally, in 1968, that double number would double again, until 1972, when we know the specific number of 362 Ilita, in the decade 1965-74, a total of about 2.000 literary titles. The complete archive of the Russian Samizdat is located at Radio Liberty, in Munich (again the irreplaceable role of radio in IE literature). It is a pure classic today. Samizdat literature was not read in solitude. It was read in a circle of several readers-listeners, which in terms of dissemination means millions of readers. If we take into account the strength of Russian (and the strength of IE literature) in that era, measured by what all literature is primarily measured by: authors, authorship, the seal of a personal letter in a time of horror and the paradox of existence, we may not be able to escape the impression that dissident literature (IE as a whole) was the leading world literature of its time.
Is this biased feeling deceiving me?!
Emigration
Countries with developed dissidence, Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as Russia, were left in the XNUMXs without a significant part of their citizens, namely the most productive, educated and courageous people. This axed the communists to the point that they reached for the favorite weapon of all tyrannies, namely the secret services.
Waiters, barbers, janitors, taxi drivers, secretaries, teachers (just carefully follow children in tyrannies, you will hear all kinds of things about their parents, and you will not avoid the conclusion that children are the biggest victims of all tyrannies), unemployed, postmen, pensioners, workers in dry cleaners, craftsmen - those were the ear canals.
You are covered from everywhere like a beast in a cage. Even if, for example, you sold furniture or jewelry from the house, valuables or art, you were a potential émigré and the confiscation of your passport followed with surveillance and persecution.
In the novel Zrela Herta, which bears this flavor, directly inspired by those years, I wrote how my professor of ancient Greek at Charles University, Jan Pečirka, took a coat with a few drops of frozen blood (cannulated from the old gentleman's nose to his lapel) to the dry cleaners, so the police knocked on his door and took his passport. Cleaning coats in the middle of summer was devilishly suspicious, it smelled of emigration!
Emigration is too big a topic to be discussed here in a leap and briefly, obliquely, with the vagueness that accompanies big gestures in small things, as well as small gestures in big ones, and I will spare this émigré, at least for now, the risk of superficiality. I will limit it to one single word: despair.
Yes, despair, in that word, honored with a Hamletian undertone, resides a serious condition. None of us will deny that the intellectual dimension of this concept is inferior to the sensory one. It's not. On the contrary, it is more difficult to know it (I am talking about despair and beyond) than to feel it. Despair is a heavier burden intellectually than emotionally. I met Vojtech in Paris. The Czechs call every Vojtech Vojta, so I called him that, and he called me Gog, not without some overtones of the biblical story of Gog and Magog. We had both crossed the Czech-German border near Heb in June 1983, but not at the same time, and found ourselves in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, in the apartment of our mutual French friend Marie Christine Dalstein.
The border near Heb, in western Czechoslovakia, was then the most guarded state border in the world (it separated NATO and the Warsaw Pact). I crossed legally, with an ancient Yugoslav passport in hand, and he swam across the Elbe in the middle of the night. The border guards shot, but did not hit him. He chose the moment, a rainy and foggy night, swam across the murky Elbe and dipped onto German soil. He was a guy from the city of Hradec Kralove in the east of the Czech Republic. He had such unusually long fingers that I still vividly remember his hands, especially the delta of blue veins on the narrow back of his hand, full and heavy like a young willow branch. Many years later I heard that he shot himself with a revolver in another apartment in Paris. I knew that apartment too. I spent the night in it two or three times. I described Vojta in the early novel Zrel Herta, largely dedicated to emigration in the era of totalitarianism, under the name Milan:
"He, a coward, fought, swam..."
The word despair has a special meaning for me, and I think that it, along with the word hesitation, is able to complete Hamlet's aura. When I hear the echo of church bells, I often think of the word universalism. I know why: All mankind is of one Author!
So says John Donne, the English metaphysical poet, Shakespeare's contemporary. That's why!
Bonus video:
