Veronika Tuckerová: Dissidents like Havel felt their prison experiences were scripted by Kafka
Veronika Tuckerová has been teaching Czech Studies at Harvard University for the past decade. But she has also done extensive research into the Prague German-language author Franz Kafka. Indeed, the academic is currently preparing a book entitled Reading Kafka in Prague: The Reception of Franz Kafka in Czechoslovakia, which mainly looks at changing perceptions of the writer in the communist period, when his works were for the most part banned. I spoke to Veronika Tuckerová at our Prague studios.
“What led me originally to Kafka is simply being from Prague and reading some of his works, which I had access to, even though he was not published in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when I was growing up.
“But we had some of his books in translation in my parents’ library and I read a number of his works.
“Of course at that time Kafka was very meaningful to my generation, as someone from Prague and as someone who was banned and someone who captured what we felt was our everyday lives.
“So we were reading the books with friends and to each other and exchanging the works.
“And then when I studied for a Comparative Literature degree in New York I wanted to mentally be back in Prague in some way – and I ended up working on Kafka, even though I think if I was in Prague I would always read Kafka but not necessarily do research, because the perspective changed for me, radically.
“What led me to Kafka is being from Prague and reading some of his works, which I had access to, even though he was not published in the ‘70s and ‘80s.”
“In Prague I thought it’s such a cliché, everyone knows him, everyone has read him, there can’t be anything new to find out.
“And I was very surprised later on that there was actually so much still to find out about the way he was read in Communist Czechoslovakia.”
When did Czech readers first get access to the works of Kafka?
“There were some works that came out during his lifetime, but of course in German. So there had to be mediators, for people who didn’t read German necessarily.
“In Prague I thought it’s such a cliché, everyone knows him, there can’t be anything new to find out.”
“But, for example, already in 1920 his story The Stalker was published by the very famous and important Czech journalist Milena Jesenská, the addressee of Kafka’s letters.
“And then in the late 1920s there were a few stories here and there. But interestingly enough, or paradoxically, his big novels were only published much later: The Castle came out in Czech in 1935 and The Trial as late as in 1958.”
The Trial was actually translated years before that, right? So why did it take so long for The Trial to actually come out in Czech?
“The translator Paul, or Pavel, Eisner translated the novel towards the end of the war, when he himself was in hiding.
“He tried to publish the novel… actually he had argued since the late 1920s for the publication in Czech.
“It never came about and then there was this short window from 1946 to 1948. There was a plan to publish the collected works of Kafka in Czech, but it didn’t happen because of the Communist takeover in 1948 – and that whole project fell apart.
“Kafka’s big novels were only published much later: The Castle came out in Czech in 1935 and The Trial as late as in 1958.”
“Again there was a small window of opportunity after the thaw in 1956 [after the death of Stalin] and there was two years when this was possible – 1956 to 1958 – and then there was yet again, politically, more of an intense situation.
“So that was the little window that he had.”
One name that stands out in the book is Eduard Goldstücker, who was a fascinating character in his own right. What role did he play in perceptions of Kafka in Czechoslovakia?
“Eduard Goldstücker came from Slovakia. He studied German in Prague at the university, and in 1963 he was among several young scholars who decided that they would study why Kafka was so problematic for the communist orthodoxy.
“He even says it in his memoir, which he published in 1989 in Germany, that he wanted to explore why the officials dismissed him so much and would not allow Kafka to be published.
“So he called forth a famous conference that took place in 1963, in the little castle in Liblice, which belonged to the Academy of Sciences.
“It was interesting because it was a conference about Kafka for a selected group of Marxist scholars from Czechoslovakia and from abroad.
“This was at a time when Kafka’s books were not available in Czech. Even the scholars and the researchers who presented had to scramble to find the books.
“And the conference was really not about the author as we imagine it today, but some of the papers were about, Is Kafka relevant for our society in the early 1960s? Is he only symptomatic of bourgeois capitalist alienation, or is the kind of alienation that he portrays also present in our society?
“The event was monitored by the secret police and by all the state agencies, and the presenters and organisers were worried that it would be stopped at any time.
“In 1963 Eduard Goldstücker was among several young scholars who decided that they would study why Kafka was so problematic for the communist orthodoxy.”
“But it wasn’t, and after that week of conferencing Kafka started being published in Czech, after that long kind of gap.”
How did Goldstücker view Kafka?
“Goldstücker is of course a very interesting character, because he himself was tried and sentenced in the early 1950s in association with the very infamous Slánský trial. He was sentenced, as a former diplomat, to life in prison, but he was released.
“So I was thinking how someone who had such close experience with the communist repressive system, and who was convicted for crimes that were completely fabricated, read Kafka’s The Trial and other works. Was there any kind of sense of identification and how that worked exactly?”
You say that Goldstücker didn’t identify his own personal reality with Kafka, but some in the Czech dissent did – they did see a parallel between Kafka and themselves.
“Absolutely. And I think Goldstücker was just too scholarly too admit to it in his public work – such identification would just seem not scientific enough.
“But he was concerned with his own sense of guilt for the rest of his life [he had been coerced into acting as a witness for the prosecution in the Slánský trial]. And I think it really goes to the core of the novel as well.”
You also write that Ivan Klíma said about In the Penal Colony that no literature had affected him so deeply. Was it the case also that some in the dissent saw Kafka as a kind of prophet of totalitarianism, that he had foreseen the totalitarian society?
“So Goldstücker himself… or there were other people who kind of made that connection, but I would say it was more about the everydayness during the communist era – kind of recognising the situations that were described in Kafka’s fiction as the lived experience that they themselves went through on an everyday basis.
“When you mention Ivan Klíma, I think he was referring specifically to his experience in the Terezín ghetto and making that kind of connection to Kafka’s works and In the Penal Colony.
“And of course we have the 1980s figures such as Václav Havel, Jiřina Šiklová and Milan Šimečka, who were imprisoned for their dissident activities – and they all describe the prison experience as being scripted by Kafka.”
Another fascinating fact in your book is when you say that Bohumil Hrabal created the [Czech language] word “kafkárna”, which means a kind of Kafkaesque, absurd situation.
“There are several theories about how that word came about, so it’s not a conclusive argument.
“He named one of his stories Kafkárna, but some other people also say that the word already existed in Group 42, a group of artists and writers established in 1942, and that Hrabal was so close to them he used it.”
One thing that I was vaguely aware of before reading your book but your book makes it very clear: Václav Havel seems to have had a very deep affinity with Kafka. He even said, Somehow I understood him better than others did.
“That’s precisely so. He first wrote about his attitude in such an explicit way in one of his letters from Ruzyně prison to his wife, Olga.
“There he writes that he is reading Max Brod’s memoir while in prison and why it is that he never cared much for theoretical interpretations, that he never wanted to read any of that – and the reason is that he understands Kafka better than anyone else [laughs] who could mediate it for him.
“Then he repeats this again, almost verbatim, but also elaborates on it in 1990, when he was given an honorary degree in Jerusalem. And there he even says, If Kafka didn’t write his work, and I was a better writer, I would have written it even better.
“This really displays of course irony and sarcasm on Havel’s side, but there is I think a very thin kind of line, because he so much lived and absorbed Kafka’s work.
“Of course we can’t take it completely seriously; it wasn’t that he really thought that he would be so capable. But I think it’s really about the intimacy.
“And he wasn’t the only one who at that time really… you know, the famous underground superstar Egon Bondy walks around Prague in a samizdat film from 1983; he comes to the bust or relief of Kafka on his birth house and he says, It’s a pity that the one for whom this bust was made is not here with us today, because that’s when he would finally feel at home here with us.”
Also Ivan Martin Jirous, AKA Magor or Madman, the poet, made a lot of references to Kafka.
“There is a wonderful piece of memoir by [dissident] Ivanka Lefevure, where she describes how her friends from the underground would sit and Jirous would read from Kafka’s works to this group of people.
“They would all be listening in silence and Jirous would actualize, or concretize, that reading and refer to the Soviet-led occupation in 1968.
“Jirous also much earlier, in the early 1960s, transcribed on a typewriter some of the unavailable texts as very early samizdat and was distributing them among his friends.”
Today, how do you think Kafka is perceived here in Czechia?
“When I came here in June I was very surprised; I didn’t expect there would be such, as a friend named it, ‘Kafka-mania’, that he would be so much remembered…”
That was for the centenary?
“Yes, for the centenary since his death. And of course it’s a good thing, because many of the events that were organised were very meaningful – some of the exhibitions, some of the conferences, workshops and so forth.
“But it’s a fairly superficial impression that I have, because I don’t live here, so I wouldn’t really want to judge how much he is read.
“What is disappointing is that his works are not available in Czech in good editions, so that’s certainly something that I feel should have been done for the centenary, or at least soon.
“But for example I heard from a high school teacher who mentioned that her students – and this was in Ostrava, in Silesia – are absolutely bedazzled by Kafka.
“What is disappointing is that Kafka’s works are not available in Czech in good editions.”
“They read him, they love his letters, they so much identify with this kind of indecisiveness and life through writing rather than through living it – and she made that connection with the young generation, who are living more on social media more than in reality, and they sort of connect it to that.”
The book Reading Kafka in Prague: The Reception of Franz Kafka in Czechoslovakia should be published in 2025 on the Bloomsbury Academic imprint.
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