Why don’t you call me when you visit London?

Because I am always everywhere in a hurry. I can’t remember that I ever had some sort of free evening, when I would have free time. I always have to quickly write something or finish something, or at least to concentrate. I don’t know how people concentrate or how people think, but my thinking goes always ten seconds, then half an hour nothing, then ten seconds, and so on, so it takes some times, my thinking. I am on what you English call a tight schedule.

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Kundera’s new novel is entitled Slowness, and one has the impression for poets that poetry embodies this principle, it embodies a metabolism, which is extremely slow so that words can be digested, and the universal space, the spaces of time, of histories, of thought, can be taken in. And this is anti-thetical to present day society. So, which side do you choose?

I liked Slowness, and I like Kundera.. I like what he thinks. But I completely disagree with what he thinks about the speed. For me, the most, inner feeling, the fast movement, the tempo, is the right thing. I don’t like to be slow, I don’t like to even speak too slowly, I speak too quickly sometimes. It’s simply my tempo is fast, I can’t help it, I like it as it is. 

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It’s the Mayakovsky school of poetry?

Unfortunately, I never met Mayakovsky in his time, so I don’t know how he liked fast or slow movements. But, in a way, the fast-going words of Mayakovsky were always attractive to me. Of course his topics were quite exotic for me, because it was in a way very Russian or very 20’s and 30’s and so on, but maybe this is one way of a very fast poetry. Very quick poetry.

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Revolutionary?

Well, I have to use the obvious metaphoric reply of the poet. Every good poet is revolutionary in a way, or it should be. If it's not a little revolutionary it’s boring. So the poet’s stand, the poet’s point of view, should be sort of original and in a way against many other points of view. In this way it should be revolutionary. In Mayakovsky I never felt exactly that he really means it, really means it. I thought it was just interesting exercises, without being too engaged in the stuff he’s speaking about. He just does it in his way, in arrogant poetic way, that’s all. My feeling was he didn’t believe it. 

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Do you think this can be applied to the Bolshevik Revolution? It was done in a sort of haphazard, casual way, as an experiment?

Well, I don’t know. I think…you know, my principle definition of what is now being called Bolshevik times, is the best description was the class struggle. That means the struggle of the people who had six classes against the people who had even high school or university. So in this sense, it was a class struggle. Of course, any more sensitive intelligentsia had to suffer under the class struggle except for the very hectic, very acute periods of time. I think every real intelligent poet had to feel the tension in himself and had to be always on the edge of something. On being against or protesting.

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Do you think it was necessary for poets such as Mandelstam to be given sort of cold night classes, to be sent away in exile, that literature, that poetry was so important within these times to execute people?

Poetry is not important, but the executioners and administrators can make it very important. That means if you ban it, if you prosecute the poets, by this token they would be very important, very popular, and it gives poetry the momentum; being under the pressure. Actually, this was very important for Communist, Socialist countries. We have been just under acute pressure, which was different from the west, and this gave our way of writing some impact, some momentum.

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What was the impact, the scientific surgery, of censorship? What was the role of censorship during these times?

It’s fashionable to say that the censors sort of shaped the book, shaped the literary expression, shaped the metaphoric richness of the poems, which is partly not true. Once in London we spoke with Škvorecký about it, and he agreed with my point. That first, you have to be the poet, and the right poetry, and then you may speak weight of what the censor did to you or did to it, but usually that’s the secondary influence. Besides, you know there was again the class struggle. The censor was usually the man with the poor classes, and so by definition, anybody, even the most simpleminded poets, would be well above his head. So it was very easy sometimes, to escape his attention. Besides, the nature of the censorship was clear, surreal reason. That means you could never forget what would be objectionable. Of course if you would write “Stalin is an assassin,” he would censor it, but you could have written it in another way.

I have many times written about Russian generals and marshals and so on, but I would call them Latin, Greek or something, or Chinese. So you could easily escape it. But what he would protest was usually, at least in my case, quite unpredictable. You know, a beautiful incident which I had, I had in a poem which is about Cinderella, the fairy tale. And there it said that carts are coming to the ball, and gathering of the dwarves is applauding, and to my greatest astonishment, this line was censored. And I asked why, of the editor, one would never see the censor, the editor of the publishing house would see him, but I never, he was sort of unreachable being for me. And the explanation was, you know, this line is objectionable because very many members of the poet bureau are of small growth.

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Would you have survived if you weren’t a scientist, if you didn’t have a very, very distinguished career as a scientist? 

Well, of course, the second or the first profession made it a lot easier. Because at least, I had lots of time. As a non-person, you had lots of time. No interviews, no articles, no contributions, nowhere. But in addition I was a non-person in a Czech way. It means everybody knew that my name could not appear. But I had written every second week a column for a new magazine, and it was always in that the general principle for one quarter of the text I had written as a non-person, that it was not signed. And people, because I have a very peculiar, prosaic style, some smart readers would find out that it was me. 

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Do you think economic systems create non-persons in the sense that within a very, very stringent capitalist world that business, the efficiency of business, negates poetry, the possibilities of publishing poetry in other words? Do you think that being a non-person is being amplified by the present economic situation in Czech Republic, and in fact throughout Western society?

Of course, you have many possibilities of defense. Basically, one has the feeling, to say, metaphorically, that there are many more poets than poetry readers. So, that has to do very little with economy. It has to do with the existential situation of the population. But still, the beginning, the young people can find their way to publish it. Always something is coming up, a new magazine which will die after a year so, or they can publish their work at their own expense – which is now very easy, provided you have the money. So, I think the greatest obstacle today is not so much economy, but is the plenty. The plentiness of today…

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April 1997

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