'Havel na Hrad' - Thirty Years On

Souvenir Series #12

Thirty years ago, on the 17^th November 1989, a series of political protests began in Czechoslovakia which culminated in the peaceful passing of totalitarian one-party state power from the Communist Party, who had ruled the country for 41 years, to an open democratic, multi-party system. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe had begun earlier that year with the rise of solidarity movements in Poland and Hungary, but really got going with the highly symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9^th. Watching these events unfolding as they were reported each evening on BBC TV News broadcasts in the UK, it seemed like a miracle was occurring. After so many years living with the threat of the Cold War, and having seen only very recently the brutal authoritarian state suppression of the student led democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square just a few months before in the tragic summer of 1989, the magnitude of these events felt huge. The Eastern Bloc seemed to suddenly fall apart like a house of cards. The opening up of East Germany (GDR), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and just two years later the actual collapse of the USSR itself truly signalled that the world was entering a genuinely new era, one which seemed to be characterised with unbounded hope and forward-looking optimism. I was entering my early teens at this time. I had always been fascinated and frightened in equal measure when watching the Soviet military parades on the TV News bulletins. The ranks of goose-stepping soldiers marching past the Kremlin followed by huge mobile rocket launchers laden with ominous-looking ballistic missiles motoring past the grey faced grandees of the Soviet Communist Party leaders seemed such a contrast to our own rather quaint and faintly ridiculous-looking Trooping of the Colour ceremony every year!

Sometime around Christmas that year at a family gathering I eagerly quizzed a relative who had been travelling in Europe at the time of these remarkable events. He’d managed to get to Berlin and then he’d travelled on to Prague in time to witness the Velvet Revolution as it happened. On 29^th December the former dissident playwright, Václav Havel, was elected as free Czechoslovakia’s new President. This was something which really fascinated me – how could a playwright become a President? – My relative was handing out chips of concrete smashed from the Berlin Wall to everyone as historic souvenirs when he ducked out of the room. Returning a moment later he placed a crumpled roll of papers into my hands telling me I could keep them. Intrigued I unrolled the large sheets to find they were a set of posters, each bearing the smiling face of the dissident playwright with bold red letters proclaiming “Havel na Hrad” – “Havel to the Castle.” The Hrad being Prague Castle, the official office of the President.

I knew even then that these were important, tangible pieces of history. Only a few years later I too travelled to Europe and the former Eastern Bloc. I went on two student exchanges to the newly reunified Germany – first staying with a West German family in Hannover, and then secondly staying with an East German family in Berlin. These two experiences had a profound effect upon me. They gave me a realistic grounding upon which to build a greater understanding of these events. The peaceful resistance movements which stood up to these totalitarian regimes fascinated me. My interests at school in literature and activism concerning human rights issues began to coalesce at this time, hence, following on from that initial question of how could a playwright become a President, I became very interested in samizdat (banned and unofficial literature circulated privately and secretly in typescript) as an underground phenomenon, as a means of resistance, and an expression of the irrepressible human urge towards freedom. Later on at university, as part of my undergraduate degree in anthropology, I researched and wrote a short dissertation on the subject of samizdat and civic resistance. On the wall of my bedroom in my student digs at the time, blu-tacked above my desk was one of the posters of Václav Havel which I’d been given that Christmas back in 1989.

I read a lot of Václav Havel’s plays and his political prose. I particularly liked the Vaněk Plays which managed to twist situations, suspicions and sympathies through clever word-play in the fine tradition of absurdist theatre. Essays such as ‘Power of the Powerless’ which expressed his concept of resistance through the everyday acts of choosing to ‘live in truth’ rather than buying into the little lies which make us all complicit in our own oppression seemed to resonate beyond the totalitarian constraints which he was fighting against, it seemed to me that they could equally well apply to the way we choose to live and organise our lives in the West and how much credence and legitimacy we afford to our own political leaders and the kind of powers they exercise over us in our collective name. It seems ironic that the Castle which Havel managed to enter after so many years of frustration and persecution was perhaps somewhat prophetically akin to the Castle which inspired the Prague born writer, Franz Kafka, to which his much beleaguered character, K, was never granted admittance. That idea of the everyman pitted against the overwhelming bureaucracy of the impenetrable machine which is trying to break him is a theme which has continued to intrigue me, and in many ways has evolved or transmuted even into the core question of my current PhD research – how the individual fits into and navigates the enormity of the systems of imperialism and global history, how we each strive to survive especially if we’re not fortunate enough to be in the upper echelons who seem to have all their advantages handed to them on a plate.

A subversive birthday greeting to 'Ferdinand Vanek', a character in one of Havel's plays, published in an official Communist Party-run Newspaper on Vaclav Havel's birthday in 1989

It’s no wonder then that one particular essay of Havel’s painted a vivid picture which has never faded from my mind. It’s a short piece of prose, playfully titled ‘Meeting Gorbachev,’ originally published in 1987 only two years before the events of the Velvet Revolution and Havel’s election as President, in which he describes how one evening, whilst he is out walking his dog he happened to pass a theatre, outside which a small gathering of people are waiting to get a glimpse of a great man. The great man is Mikhail Gorbachev, then the leader of the USSR, who was on a State visit to Prague and was being entertained at a gala performance that evening. Havel stops to watch the ‘Glasnost Czar’ and finds himself (despite his opposing convictions) gradually being seduced by the man’s charisma, sucked into the collective spirit of anticipation he unconsciously finds himself waving at Gorbachev and Gorbachev waving back in that strange disconnected sense of intimate connection which arises between a celebrity and their fan, fused together by the unreal intoxication of close proximity. Havel was by no means a wholly obscure, nor unknown character at this time, but even still, despite the thawing of authoritarianism which Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost (Openness) and Perestroika (Restructuring) were beginning to initiate, that leap which propelled Havel to the Castle still seemed almost unimaginable at that time. Yet only two years later in his first Presidential New Year’s Address he was able to speak candidly to the Czechoslovakian people, opening with the following words: “For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. – I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.” – No longer a playwright leading a dissident movement, he was now leading a nation in transition, a world leader – like Gorbachev, standing on a world stage.

In the summers of 1992 and 1993 London seemed to be full of second-hand market stalls selling off old Soviet memorabilia. I used to rummage through these – mostly army surplus: old uniforms, enamel badges, fabric patches, peaked caps and the like. I never bought anything, though I knew acutely that these things were the material remnants of an era which had now ended – these were tangible pieces of history which were slowly being dispersed and lost, merging into the blank space of the future, dissolving memory into the stuff of history books and dusty museum displays. The few tangible pieces of this history which I had in my possession – two tiny fragments of the Berlin Wall, four posters of Václav Havel, and a small, blue toy Trabant – were more than enough for me, because they were part of a lived experience, my lived experience, something which was greater than the sum of its parts. The experience of seeing real Trabants beetling about the streets of Berlin, of talking to German friends from both sides of that former dividing Wall, the Iron Curtain itself, hearing what life had really been like for them and how it had all so suddenly fallen apart and what they felt about it. Seeing and touching and breathing-in the last days of that moment in history for myself, and the fact that it was all suffused with that genuine sense of hope and optimism was something which had entered too deep into my soul to ever be forgotten or subsumed even by the passing of time. I can still picture it all so clearly in my mind.

It’s amazing now to talk to younger friends and colleagues who have no or next-to-no knowledge of these things. The Cold War is just a murky blank, merely the backdrop to old James Bond movies and redundant spy novels. It’s a defunct era. This seems almost incomprehensible to me, but that is simply the way of the world. Time does move on. And the world has changed so much in just the last two decades. We’ve accelerated at light speed, our fingers firmly pressed to the fast-forward button. The recent past has been all too swiftly eclipsed. But such memories and experiences are the important things which we really need to pass on. I realise now that it must have felt very much the same for my grandparents’ generation in the decades that followed on from the Second World War; they understood how vital it was that their life stories and experiences should be passed on. Some say that history is cyclical – that it has a tendency to repeat itself if we’re not careful. The current rise of nationalism and its discontents are proof enough, should we care to notice it.

The main set of posters I was given were designed by Joska Skalnik, using a photograph taken by Miloš Fikejz, and show Havel very much as a man of the people with the call to send ‘Havel na Hrad.’ The second poster is a version which depicts Havel in a much more statesman-like manner, dressed in a smart suit and with the tag line promising a ‘guarantee of free elections.’ Both posters are notably in the national colours of white, red and blue. Thirty years is a long time ago now in many respects. Even though there are still many people alive who remember those events – the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of the USSR – people who  remember it all far more intimately than I do. I feel it’s important that these remembrances on each major anniversary shouldn’t be allowed to fade quietly from our collective memory. And so perhaps my small part in keeping those memories preserved and accessible for the future has been partly fulfilled in a small way this year by my donating those election posters – as tangible pieces of history – to the British Library to mark this thirtieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution; where I hope they will be used by curators and visitors in the study rooms and in future exhibitions seeking to understand and interpret the past, and to remember those days in Czechoslovakia in the last two months of 1989, when anything seemed possible and all possibilities seemed so positive; when the future was still to be found and was still something to be looked forward to.

Also on 'Waymarks'

"The Wind of Change" - Germany 1991 & 1993 

Rest In Peace - Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)

Andrei Makine - An Homage to Lost Time

I first discovered the writer Andreï Makine in the pages of the TLS in 2000. It was a review of his novel, Once Upon the River Love. I remember the review intrigued me so much that I went straight to one of the big bookshops on London’s Charing Cross Road (Books, etc. – sadly now long gone) where I found and bought a copy. Just reading the first page I sensed there was something special about the way these words were crafted (and so ably translated, as are all Makine’s books, by Geoffrey Strachan). I was hooked. I went on to read his subsequent books, almost keeping pace at first, as each was translated into English. I began to see how certain themes recur in his novels. These seemed to give hints and clues, suggestive of the author’s own background. Indeed, Makine’s own story is as intriguing as his plotlines. Over the years, the interviews with him which I’ve read in newspapers and magazines tend to give very scant detail about this author and his life – reading them, it’s almost as if he is one of his own characters, so deftly yet sparingly sketched out. A loose yet fluid set of lines, roughing out the suggestion of a figure, lightly delineated on a blank white page. A form upon which we can overlay the contours of a character. Indeed, it seems all too easy for us to project something of our own imaginations as readers, conjuring up the picture of a man as exile, as a writer, as an artist.

The fact’s state: he was born in the USSR, in Krasnoyarsk in 1957. He was allowed by the Soviet authorities to come to Paris in 1987 as part of a teacher’s exchange programme, where – despite the thawing of the Cold War – he defected to the West. He was granted asylum. Lived rough for a while, including two weeks living in a cemetery. He settled in Paris, and has lived there ever since. Absolutely committed to a writer’s life. His major breakthrough came with the publication of his novel, Le Testament Français, in 1995. A novel which achieved the unprecedented feat of winning both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, as well as the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. Writing in French prose so finely crafted he had to claim his books were translations from Russian originals in order to persuade his publishers that he’d actually written them himself. Before coming to France, in the Soviet Union he’d been a teacher. He’d also served in the Red Army, tank corps; posted to conflict zones in Angola and Afghanistan. He was an orphan, raised by his grandmother. Makine may well even be an adopted name; the grandmother perhaps not his grandmother after all. Such are the sketchy details, the bare bones of possible facts which seem to beg for elaboration. Facts that suggest so many questions, but how to sift through such layers so lightly laid down – they seem so thin, almost opaque, like the thin leaves of the thinnest onion-skin Bible paper. Not so much the whole truth, but rather nothing of the truth at all? – Less of a life’s testament than a palimpsest of speculation. Questions and echoes.

But perhaps the facts are all there? – Hiding in plain sight. After all, the themes which recur most frequently across his novels seem to echo those bare facts known of the author’s life. The grandmother who speaks French. Looking down the barrel of a tank gun in a conflict zone. An exiled writer seeking to reconnect with the past. Familiar tropes indeed. Albeit refracted in myriad ways which make the truth even harder to pin down. But then that’s the essence of all his stories right there. It’s not so much about the truth as more about the feeling. The reckoning with an unfathomable past. How the individual is lost in the immensity of history. Engulfed and overwhelmed, yet somehow surviving. Bobbing back up to the surface. Constantly. Carried along by the tidal flow of time and events. And eventually set down on the wayside of history to think, ponder and reflect on all of it. What it means, what matters, and, moreover, what doesn’t matter at all. Life isn’t lived in the details of history, but rather that’s where a life is lost. It’s only in the present resurfacing that through recollection some sort of sense can be made of it all. But even then, all those certainties unfathomed and arrived at can all be swept away again in the merest blink of an instant. After which, once emerged again; shot out from the other side of the welter, can we begin to recalibrate, realign, reset and remember from a different vantage point. Life is fluid. Unchanging in its ceaseless changeability. Like Heraclitus’ river.

Makine is often compared to other writers: To Proust. Tolstoy. Bonin. Chekov. Balzac. Stendal. Solzhenitsyn. But I tend to think this is simply a lazy journalistic take. He’s Russian; he writes in French. Perhaps at best though such comparisons are a means to attempt to signpost him, pointing as definitively as possible in the direction of truly great literature. The grand tradition of the Great Russian novel. A la recherché … and all that. Which is fine by me. I think Makine is probably one of our greatest living writers. But I think in time he will come to be seen as standing amidst this august company on his own terms. For the distinctiveness of his own voice and for the themes he chooses to explore and unpick that most clearly characterise our own era. In that sense I genuinely think he is one of the foremost writers of our times. And I say this because he captures our present preoccupation with the past so well. Such that he is capturing not just the zeitgeist of the present, but that he is doing so in a way which is refracting even within the rapidly changing nature of our times. When I began reading his works there was a sense of nostalgia mixed with a fascination for the incomprehensible. As a child growing up in the 1980s, at the tail end of the Cold War (not that we really knew it was the tail end at the time), the Second World War still didn’t seem all that long ago. It was still a living memory, as was the First World War even. But the world I knew, the world I was growing up in, seemed utterly removed from those two calamitous eras. Life was now infinitely better and improved. There was still a looming existential threat, nuclear holocaust and mutually assured destruction; but it all seemed so very far away. And as the thaw set in with the era of Glasnost and Perestroika everything seemed to be heading in the right direction. The end of the decade only confirmed it. The Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution (overlooking the inconvenient anomalies of Tiananmen Square and the former Yugoslavia) – the 1990s now seem like halcyon days, all taken so much for granted. Requiem for the East bridges this divide perfectly, yet it also manages to highlight the undercurrents which persist (largely unseen but there in plain sight) into the present day.

Now though such things are getting harder not to see. It feels like we’re stuck in a deracinating chaos of rising nationalism, xenophobia, gameshow politicians summoning up goose-stepping delusions towards a nostalgia for broken empires and far flung wars, domestic terrorism, austerity, minimum living wages, zero-hours contracts, food banks, gold-plated elevators, expense claim scandals relating to superfluous second homes with pay-as-you-go pornography, duck houses and moats. Brexit as tragedy, farce and folly. Remembrance Day charity campaigns in which children wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Future Soldier” emblazoned across the front parade holding giant plastic red poppies – Lest we Forget, and, Never Again … Lions led by Donkeys; twas ever thus, and, so it seems, still it is. Hollow words parroted for unthinking times. Hidden agendas parodied into reality. “Fake News” fabricating a new set of Emperor’s clothes to distract from a corrupt and greedy global system which somehow manages to sustain itself as one economy after another tanks itself. Third World Debt. First World Guilt. Climate Change Denial. We’re not waving, we’re drowning in the largest gyre of plastic waste ever recorded choking the oceans and being ingested in the very food we all eat and the water we drink. What the hell has happened to all our bright tomorrows? That happy future heralded by the chants of ‘Freiheit’ – ‘Freedom’ and the ‘wind of change’ which we heard sung of so loudly and optimistically in the 1990s? – Makine himself has spoken out against these First World delusions and the duplicity underlying them in perhaps the most public forum he could, when being inducted into the Académie Française in 2016.

When I first began reading Andreï Makine’s novels they appealed to me because I simply couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to live through the horrors and deprivations of the two World Wars. What it must have been like to lead a life defined by duty and self-sacrifice. Even though I’d heard my grandparents telling their life stories, describing what it was really like. I could never properly picture what it would have been like had I had to live through it. The UK is unhealthily obsessed with this period – we were taught about it over and over at school, it’s on our television screens every night, either in documentaries (Dan Snow, Dan Snow, and more Dan Snow…), or sit-coms (think Dad’s Army, Allo Allo, Goodnight Sweetheart, etc.) – and this has been a constant since I was a child. Our Finest Hour. Never to be forgotten. And don’t you forget it! … But likewise, as a child of the Cold War, I was fascinated by what life might be like had I lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I vividly remember watching the parades of Soviet missile transporters passing through Moscow shown on the TV News. It was both chilling and beguiling. I later got a taste of what it might have been like when I stayed with a family in East Berlin in 1993. Makine’s novels give a window into that lost world of fear, labour camps, the KGB and Joseph Stalin forever looking over your shoulder and listening in on you. Of loyalties betrayed. The many veils of idealism and ideology. Naivety met by the bluntness suddenly emerging from the shadowy fog of reality. The deep lacerations of individual lives coerced, distorted, twisted and broken as so deftly described in A Hero’s Daughter.

His novels are often stories within stories. Not so much Russian dolls, but rather that strangely displaced schism of the mind – the here and now attempting to comprehend and contend with the past and its echoes. His novels always manage to expertly explore the place of the solitary human within that wider history, of the individual within that vast inhuman machinery of the State, and of States at war. Yet within this giant whirligig of time he manages to find small but universal anchors in the form of love, music, personal connection, links which lead ultimately to some form of redemption or reparation. The Life of an Unknown Man captures this perfectly. His novels can seem outwardly bleak but losing yourself within the sonorous nature of Makine’s prose they become transformative, and they somehow always manage to end on a profound note of hope and optimism. Nihilism has its silver linings. No matter how bad things become in the end the individual holds true. Hope shines through. Time is lost, but time is also regained even if it is reshaped – time and its recall remould us, reader and character, anew. This is the process and the point of indulging in or undertaking such strenuous meditations on the past. Experiencing the emotions of people other than ourselves. We know nothing if we don’t know what empathy truly is.

In that sense all Makine’s books are an homage to the indomitable spirit of ordinary souls who manage to remain unbroken by the malicious intent of the collective machine. The essential soul of all his characters ultimately survive and emerge unscathed. They represent a poetic homage to hope as the essential element of the human condition. And I hope, reading Makine, particularly in these troubled times; I hope that his books prove to be prescient and right. I still believe in that indomitable spirit of revolution which marked my teenage years so indelibly in the early 1990s – hence I hope our here and now is simply the story within a story that I will one day tell to my niece and nephews, and them to their children someday too. When the bright new tomorrows have eventually returned.