The non-accidental West
Balkan historiography needs a structural reorganization, reformed soul, as the metaphysical poet said, but, alas, that reform is not achieved through privatization. There is no tender for the reform of ideas. All tenders have been looted and only unsold tenders for ideas remain.
The new time after the radical regime changes (where they really happened in IE) does not ask for historiography, we have it over our heads, our bellies are full of historiography, and every little bit it forces us into the circle of our own hyperproduction. The new test demands something more: historiosophy!
The dissident writer in IE no longer wanted to be an "accidentally Western man" (accidentally occidental man). He wanted to be the one for whom the charm of the public scene and democracy as a universe of statistics is not enough. To fight and discover new horizons. The new IE man needs a breakthrough.
"He saw his mission more in defending man from the repression of one system than in devising another, better system" (see Vaclav Havel: An Anatomy of Reticence, Cross Currents, 1986, details 1 - 23).
The dissident writer from IE understood the area of his birth and his destiny as Western and spoke in the language of the Western spirit, without perhaps being fully aware of it. To be clear, I do not consider IE's cultural affiliation to the Western orbit as something indisputable. On the contrary, it is questionable from some points of view, but I have no doubt that an Eastern European writer can speak the language of Western sensibility today. Not what can, but must.
The fact that the dissidents thought in the categories of Western ambitions and attitudes brought a certain result: winning freedom of thought, and more than that, freedom of life in the countries of the Eastern bloc, and even something more: bringing IE closer to Western culture.
There are those of us who consider the latter a no less significant step forward.
No apologies
Short and clear: what the dissident said in the era of the dictatorship in IE was said with the dialectic of the Western mind, exact, textual, sincere, clear and forceful without forgiveness. The spirit is a strange beast as it plows a furrow on the soil of history. Then no one can do anything to him.
The East of Europe felt the need for criticism, that classic, not to say Western, but, more precisely, Greco-Roman need and urge. The quest for Greco-Roman chemistry. The choice fell on the lips of writers and philosophers. The homeland of the critical spirit - critical in the only possible sense: the spirit that brings criticism (just as the writer is the spirit that lives and dies with writing) - is called the West.
Western thought was the first and, so far the only one, even half a century ago, in the wake of the dissident movement in IE, to reject the services of straight-line (positivist) history, the accumulation of concepts without cover, the epic mare that is being ridden here as anyone dreamed. Demystified local myths. Created the prerequisites for the restoration of the Renaissance (polyhistorical) script.
"She brings a subconscious to it," he says John Bolton, "as far as New Historicism is inspired by other sciences - anthropology, history, cultural history and other disciplines" (see J. Bolton: New Historicism, 2007, 9).
I am well aware of this situation, because in recent years I have submitted a transfer of blame from a column from the opposite direction: how many of them, idle hounds of the municipal-informant breed, patriotic lezilbovics, publicly harass me with the undertone of "Byzantine nationalist", and why?
Only because in an interview for Monitor I said, quoted a Russian Byzantologist Sergej Averintsev: "I am a Byzantine nationalist and a Mediterranean fundamentalist", meaning to say what I said - no nationalist, but a cosmopolitan. In one empire (Byzantium) there is no, there can be no nationalism. I am not a fundamentalist, there is no, there can be no fundamentalism in the Mediterranean. There is cosmopolitanism.
I remind you of a joke from Njeguje and Cetinje: the neo-communists had free education - but for nothing, for nothing!
Step forward
It is one thing to be an artist of conception, and quite another to be an artist of a situation. You have as many situation artists as you like. An artist of conception, especially a writer of conception and observation, is a rare beast.
My book "Aesop's Slave", although it has as its immediate cause the chase after the Thirteenth of July Prize, talks about the not insignificant difference between such a shameful situation when hundreds of lezibelovics and ready-mades jump for your neck, on the one hand, and creative conceptions born in solitude and self-defense (dissident movement) from the other.
"One good feature was noticeable among the Western dissidents," he says VI Novodvorska, a dissident, with a Jewish father and a Russian noble mother: "they were intelligent, patient, they didn't ask for a sacrifice from anyone (they only sacrificed themselves) and they knew how to forgive" (see details I. Novodvorska: Poets and Emperors, Moscow, 2009).
Scene as code Dostoyevsky: the unimaginative peasant receives the burden of his "idea", what a coup!
You can imagine a conformist, who is oriented towards personal impulses, against this truly Dostoyevsky image of a dissident, and you will get, finally, a pliable, insecure "broker of the situation", recognizable by his native manners and ethnographic nervousness. All my opponents have in common that they are ethnographically nervous. Ethnography corrodes and consumes those who are full of it - complexed, short-sighted in the cosmopolitan sense.
Stone of ideas
Dissidence was a private odyssey. The honor of writing in the hell of fear and repression. The privilege of solitude.
The dissidents were no traitors. Their path, from romantic rapture to profession, was long, but above all honorable. Can anyone name a more honorable literary movement in recent history than the dissident one, I hear? They were patriots who distanced themselves from groups operating from anti-Russian, anti-Polish, anti-Romanian and other anti-national positions in IE. They were driven by the wind that blows in the progress of their homeland and dedicated their lives to it. Something as serious as a project to reform ideas is not born in the soul of an ethnically neurotic couple.
The ideas are not ethnographic or folklore, the ideas are humanistic.
It was a heavy blow for the man, excommunication, because someone with the experience of creativity in crisis circumstances, between two grindstones, knows what it means not to disappear, not to disappear (even when the ground seems to be sinking under the feet), but, on the contrary, to disappear deeper and deeper into destiny, to feel that the stone of the history of ideas is constantly pulling you, and that no one will remove it from your neck.
The writers and fighters we are talking about here were physically at one end and mentally at the other end of the already divided Europe. They belonged to the center of a truly global movement with an ideological vortex in the West, and they drew their countries to Western culture, without renouncing, by any means, the uniqueness and warmth of their native bosom. He who cuts furrows on the ground of history is busy, he has no time, especially not for ethnographic neurosis and for inventing history, language and the church. A true artist cannot be so easily dragged down by the history of contemporary stupidity.
It is important to step forward. The lunge is the real food, the rest is the chewing. Dissidents were fed even when they were starving.
An anecdote about cucumbers
Vaclav Havel I met - if that's the right word - in the late autumn of 1983. in the Vinograd Theater, where I pushed the scenes and scrubbed the stage. He kept me company František Nejedly, a friend from the first year of studying Greek at Charles University, and we were informed that before the curtain fell on the play "Richard the Third", which he played Miloš Kopecky, while the applause of the ensemble is still breaking out - and Kopecka was applauded for ten minutes - we sneak down the first flight of stairs to the Club and shake a beer.
I must first admit one thing: I have never seen an actress like Miloš Kopecky in my life. I watched later how one was being held on the boards of Taganjka Innokentij Smoktunovski, I watched Fabijan Šovagović, Ljuba Tadic, I saw him play Al Pacino, Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice", in front of 10.000 spectators, in the Grand Park in Manhattan - they are all great highlights, it is not easy to be as great as those people, but that schismatic reflex of Miloš Kopecki never returned to my chest. (Senior Yugoslav viewers remember him for the TV series "Hospital at the End of the City", others, again, for the film "The Good Soldier Švejk", with Rudolf Hrušinsky, but that monster was the strongest on the boards: a bit of an actor, and more of a devil, to my soul).
We huddled in the smoky Dušegupka, which, of course, was already full as a pomegranate, because the Vinogradski Club was considered the most poisonous nest of dissidents in the early eighties. František was looking for two free chairs, with a routine question of whether they were free, addressed to the two older guys, isolated at that table as if they were infected, because no one was allowed to sit down. They wore green "Vietnamese" and smoked "Petra" without a filter, the most disgusting cigarette in the world. One quipped ironically:
"There is as much room as you want, good guys!" - it was the playwright Vaclav Havel, and next to him was Jiří Dienstbier, a comrade from communist prisons, later the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia and, finally, the UN rapporteur for human rights in the former SFRY. So the two of us, perched over two pints of beer, heard fragments of their chatter:
"What are you doing at the dacha, in Lani, Vašek" - every Vaclav in the Czech Republic is beaten by Vašek - "since those your pimps and eaters use you like a pig on weekends?"
"You won't believe it, Jirko" - every Jirži in the Czech Republic is nicknamed Jirka - "I scrub up vomit and shit until early dawn, and the hardest thing for me is the broken jars of cucumbers, when I sweep away the heart, bitten schvargles and salami grits. If I were to ask myself in this country, all cucumbers would be packed in five kilo cans, so you throw the can in the trash and you're at peace, but I'm not so lucky, I'm sweeping up broken jars and bitten brine, cursing fate for being weak with friends .“
"You are a living martyr, Vasek?"
"I am, Jirko, God is my witness!"
Mr. Havel, a man of rare decency and modesty, I later saw several times, from afar or up close, on the streets of Prague, while communism was collapsing, although neither that evening nor later, I exchanged nothing with him except a look, if I do not count that remark: "There's room, good guys," he said to František Nejedlo and me, because we mustered the courage to sit down at his table surrounded by informants.
Another opportunity arose many years later, in the spring of 2010, during the season of the UN session in New York - the Czech ambassador, otherwise Havel's comrade, Martin Palouš (his father was the spokesman for Karta in '77, and I knew Martin from the dissident years, and I used his illegal dramatization of "Don Quixote", from the era when writers published under other names, for my doctorate on Cervantes), calls and says:
"I'm giving an official dinner in Havel's honor, you're invited!", but it also backfired - the celebrant fell ill. Martin told me the next day that things were going badly.
That the series of dumb looks at me and my family, with him, look at the irony, be complete, my wife and younger son Marko they attended a reception in Prague, which she gave Madeleine Albright in Havel's honor. (Older son, Vuk, married from a Prague artistic family Cisarzovski, prominent painters and musicians, familiar for decades with the brothers Havel, Vaclav i Ivan, with whom she founded Karta in '77, since he was away, he forwarded the invitation to his mother and brother).
And that, in the end, failed through grief and trouble, they told me, because the playwright, dissident and statesman, struck down by an illness, looked more like an apparition than a living person at the reception. He died less than a year later.
Bonus video:
