A paradox: the gaps in historical thinking become larger whenever the scale is made
smaller, made increasingly lived-in, made, in other words, more human. Until as
recently as 2012, Jiří Hájíček’s South Bohemian tales have had little presence in the
world of literature in-translation to English. They have been unduly neglected. Though
with the obscurity of the moments that his narratives portray, the gap between the
spoken-for and the unspoken, it is no small irony that his works have eluded the annals
of contemporary translated literature. These are lives that remain innately hidden.

But they are no less the stuff of history, history the stuff that human lives make and are
made within. Rural life, villages and townships, garages and village dances, election
days and football matches, local lives punctuated with passing figures, memories of
historical trauma mingled with recalled banalities. Hájíček’s worlds are ones at the same
time submersed in the major discourses of power in modern Europe, and tucked away
from their urban points of operation.

There is a futility to this separateness that is surmised in the title of his collection of
short stories, Dřevěný nůž, or in English, The Wooden Knife.

Michal’s brother was walking back and forth across the room, waving
his arms and shaking his head in anger. “A wooden knife! That’s bullshit,
do you understand!? A wooden knife isn’t good for shit. It’s nonsense,
stupid, so throw it in the fire or bust it on the chopping block. Shit!”

These stories, four of which were translated into English alongside Hájíček’s 2005
novel, Selský baroko, or Rustic Baroque, all come up against this same unyielding
mentality, the tradition that binds smaller communities together thrashing against its
own resistance to change. Change, in the rustic sense, is not only the loss of
community or family, but the fleeting beauty of life, the impressionistic experience of
living.

Everything he looked at made him feel like crying - the tin sprinkling can
and the pansy beds and the old bicycle propped against the fence. He went
to the garden looking for the dog, but he couldn’t find it.

The past and the present exist in stories told by those who were there to live it, to relate
it nowadays over a glass of beer, always demarcated by the events that have, by their
endless retelling, blurred between history and myth. The Second World War. The rise of
Soviet Communism. The fall of Soviet Communism. The Velvet Revolution. The new
democratic Czech Republic. But in the past, where the unacceptable, the forbidden,
was desirable, the present finds that same desire mute, and already accepted.

But Táňa was already standing in front of the ballot box with the state
coat of arms, erect again, and in the fingers of her right hand she was
holding white panties, directly above the opening in the box for the ballots.

This scene takes place in a story translated as Melancholy Leaves from Democracy’s
Autumn Trees. It is 1996. All traditions are overturned, that of the village lectern-keeper,
that of the new senatorial democracy, which no one seems to trust, and that of the old
and wilfully half-forgotten communist system.

Hájíček presents tales of moral crimes and social misdemeanours, that no sooner have
they taken place, are efforts made to scrub them out, until what is left behind can be
partitioned, replaced, bartered off. Day-to-day life trades in old rumours and new gossip.
This is the very material from which history is made, renovated, and sequestered. But
as much as he writes of futility, he writes of the pastoral, the humble, the rustic baroque,
more so than the picturesque romantic. In the end, pastoral humility is perhaps entailed
within the same sense of the futile, and is not without its vision of hope. And this hope is
a literary one, futile because of its inability to alter the past, hopeful in its promise to
invent it.

Author: Joshua Jones