Joshua Jones: Mysteries of the Prague Writers’ Festival

Photo: Rossano B. Maniscalchi 

In the fall of 2020, I saw the final act of the Prague Writers’ Festival take place, at the growing height of the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic in the Czech Republic, when almost all events - sporting, dramatic, and otherwise cultural - were facing indefinite postponement. To this hour, the social and financial proportions of the catastrophe are still not established to a precise figure. Future estimations will be made, but the true cost will scarcely be known. I think of this, staring at the condensation on the window of my apartment, more or less locked in. Despite global lockdowns, the Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka, billed as a central participant in the festival, travelled from Lagos to a change in London, where he was to fly onwards to Prague’s sprawling Václav Havel airport. That is, until he was denied boarding at Heathrow.

Michael March, the president of the festival, informed me at this time that he was contacting the Czech Embassy in London. Some dispute ensued, to which I was not privy. An embassy official, carrying letters signed by both the minister of culture and the minister of foreign affairs accompanied Soyinka, who had stayed overnight in a hotel at his own expense, to the terminal, bringing the author’s business-class tickets with him. The airport staff, checking the no-fly register on their databases, again refused him access to board. Soyinka, holder of a Schengen visa, as ever, remained calm. There was no persuading the airport staff. There are pandemic regulations, they told him. The Czech official insisted that the writer as a guest of the Czech Republic would get on the plane that very day, by order of the embassy, producing the letters. Only then, with some reluctance, was Soyinka allowed to fly.

I ask myself what could have driven Wole Soyinka, a Nobel recipient, a man so lauded he has no need for further publicity, to endure this. It seems that only a sense of duty could have compelled him, a resistance against the collapse of culture. Death is confirmed, Michael later said to me, immortality is tentative. For several weeks, it had already seemed unavoidable that the event would be called off. Soyinka, aged eighty-six, strolled into the K+K Hotel Central on Hybernská on the night of the festival, where I observed his entry from the plush sofa of the lobby. You are to receive a prize, Michael proclaimed, thanking him kindly. Am I? He asked. He had not realised. Quite humbly, he went upstairs to his suite, suitcase trailing behind him.

I initially made contact with the festival during the first wave of the pandemic, a hollow dirge coming from the construction site on Krasová continuing seemingly without end, the sound, best compared to the ceaseless movement of wind on stone, reminiscent of the cries of something peacefully faraway. Outside, the usual Žižkov sounds were strangely reduced. The barking of dogs, the grinding of skateboarders, the wailing of drunks, did not so much stop altogether, as elide gradually into the coughing of a few lone voices in the night. The homeless, with no place to isolate, were moved on by armed police.

Curfews were enforced. Masked, hunched figures passed under the window of the apartment, hurrying like golems. The unprepared wrapped their faces with scarves. Under quarantine, there is little time for travel on foot, restricted only to the memory of certain features. Buildings. Monuments. The television tower, formerly a mark of Soviet folly, even adorned with the immense metal babies of David Černý, became something of a monolith. Elsewhere, the numerous baroque plague columns of the starry old city resumed a similar meaning.

Michael March was born in 1946, in New York. He is a poet. What I know of him can be presented as certain facts, dates, occasions, but this is insufficient. During the Cold War, March was residing in London, where he at some point, though the exact dates are unknown, became involved in certain moments of dissidence.

Writers who were banned or otherwise excluded from publishing or performing in their home states on the east side of the Iron Curtain, were invited on March’s behalf to present readings in London, where they were hosted alternately at what is presently memorialised as Keats House, and in Covent Garden theatres. A gesture of defiance. Under the Helsinki Accord, March was able to shift a fair number of writers into the country, beginning in the late seventies, establishing a publishing and reading circuit with the editor of the journal Index on Censorship, George Theiner, through which the great Czech poet, Vladimír Holan, was introduced to a British audience.

If any time can be said to be the genesis of what became the eventual festival, when March lived in Keats Grove in Hampstead, where the paraffin heating came with two choices, blue or pink, it is the years in which the writers came to England. The apex, it seems, was Child of Europe, an event which took its name from the work of Polish poet, Czesław Miłosz, brought to the National Theatre in February 1989 on the eve of the Soviet collapse, televised and broadcast on radio, eight writers from communist countries then in turmoil, brought together to perform.

What foundations for the eventual festival were set on British soil remain clear in dates and facts, but are muffled in the noise of history. However deep they may have been, March uprooted the operation from London to Prague in 1991, just after the transition of the communist state of Czechoslovakia into a democratic nation, soon to be divided into the republics of Czechia and Slovakia, respectively. The year of Sametová revoluce, the bloodless Velvet Revolution in November 1989, ostensibly heralded the beginning of the democracy, under which March’s plan to develop a cosmopolitan festival, not strictly of literature, but of writers themselves, as figures who represent the moving whims of the polis, took shape.

The offices, I was told, I would find on Národní třída, in a block above a tiled courtyard, where one or two kavárnas, a leafy květiny, an art-supply shop and an auction-house looked in on each other, a Warhol Monroe peering out from the latter window, dayglo and ever-smiling. As I went under the stone sign that read PLATYZ, I walked through an arch and came to a glass door framed with brass. Inside, darkness. It was a Friday, perhaps 10AM. I pressed the buzzer, but there was no immediate answer. I waited. Within I could see the metal frame of an old elevator, the shadows of the marble steps.

Upstairs I was greeted at the door by a woman who I had spoken to briefly via email, but who I had never met, nor had any idea of the later significance she would have. She introduced herself as Vlasta. On her business card her surname was given: Brtníková-March. Michael’s wife. Her hair, dyed a burning red, framed a face of intense and elegant kindness. I apologised for the poor quality of my Czech as, in cryptic English, she told me to take a seat. She would be right back.

When she returned, I took my eyes from the framed images on the wall. Portraits of Beckett and Pinter, of Sontag, Rushdie and a number of others. The rooms showed shelves of books through their doors, in Czech, English, Russian, French and so on, a handful of them bearing Vlasta’s name, some of them, Michael’s. In one hand, Vlasta held out a small china plate, which I accepted, taking an ornamental silver fork to a slice of cake. In the other, she produced a cup of coffee. Asking, she agreed, and I removed my surgical mask.

In the coming months, I would become accustomed to the sound, moving through the office rooms, the parquet floor creaking underfoot, of the organ hymns coming from the direction of the cobbled path below the office, seemingly propelled from a huge distance of space, of time. From the windows in this direction it was possible to see the antique structure of a building that appeared to be a church, its stones black from years of rain, cramped into the narrow passage, a copper Zwiebelturm greened with age on its slanted roof. In all the time I spent in those offices, gazing at it from the window, I never once saw a living soul pass in and out of its doors.

In truth, the atmosphere was hopeful. The world, in most respects, was coming to a painstaking halt, but existence, rarely intimidated entirely, continued. And still a vague melancholy hung in the air, the feeling of the dispossessed, a leaning I later found in lines March himself had written.

Should there be a table—

push it away — and forget it

was ever there

The world itself was in a state of perpetual waiting. Scores of people forced to confront solitude such as they may have never before known. Already this seems like an element of the past. Remembering became disremembering. Empires, ways-of-life, ideals, went under scrutiny. The furniture of existence, that which could be depended on for solidity when rested on, quickly revealed itself as never having been there at all. But lockdown in Prague, finishing its primary stage, was beginning to lift. Faces, so unfamiliar after more than a month of seeing them concealed by hygienic masks, seemed stranger still exposed to the air, to the raw contaminated elements of the city, of life.

The key idea of the festival, Michael told me, was not to coordinate a social event, but to initiate dialogue. It was not, in that sense, practical. From many angles, it seemed wildly impractical. Thales, it is told in fragments of antiquity, found himself so preoccupied by matters of the clouds, he fell into a well. What sights he may have seen down there are not known, but it is commonly believed that from the pit of a well, it is possible to see the stars during the day. I thought often of this anecdote after my first meeting with the poet, who assigned me certain tasks pertaining to the festival, literary work. In the well, I could not tell if I had fallen, or been lowered by other hands.

Over the following weeks, the festival drew closer and closer, in line with increasing warnings regarding the spread of the disease. The Czech Republic, once celebrated the world over for its strict and efficient handling of the first wave, was rapidly becoming inundated with ever-more cases of infection, while many remained in a post-traumatic bliss following the loosening of rules, confronted with the old truth: that the unbearable always seems impossible. One morning, returning from a student I tutored in Smíchov, a woman fainted on the tram, trying to disembark. The weather, unusually hot even for that time of year, had everyone in short-sleeves, sunglasses, the woman in question carrying a pink suitcase as the carriage had come to a halt at Masarykovo nádraží, where she lost consciousness. Along the tramcar fellow travellers looked on as the driver, wearing a militaristic cap, came to her assistance, joined by one or two others. Faces peered back, alarmed, somehow mildly amused, confronted with the spectacle of their own disbelief.

Forgetting is a simple task, perhaps the simplest of all, and the most futile. How can it be possible? Opinions changed by the day, by the hour, as the situation continued to unfold. Important political figures took to their podiums on national television, insisting that the economy must not be allowed to stagnate. Others claimed that the health crisis would cause a total infrastructural collapse. Michael, when I spoke to him, insisted that the festival would go ahead. Nothing could change the fact that four of the attendant writers had already withdrawn their participation from the event. Posters, I soon noticed, had already begun to go up around the city.

Czech minister of culture, Lubomír Zaorálek, was in close communication with March as the days grew shorter. From what I understand, the then minister of health, Roman Prymula, later dismissed from his position after violating his own hygiene regulations, gave an order to Zaorálek, subsequently passed on to March. The festival will not take place. But the order itself, delivered over the phone, was given ten minutes before the festival was to begin. Close it down, Zaorálek was told, quite clearly. And in opposition to this, the minister of culture refused. The festival would go ahead.

It is harder to create inertia, than to destroy it, Michael later told me. It was at this point I began to understand something of the concept March, who I admired then for his unchangeability, had referred to when he had spoken to me of the responsibility intellectuals have to the exchange of culture in the polis. If there was any logic, not valour, in the persistence of the festival, it was to this reason he adhered. To him, the festival was more than an arrangement, it was a philosophical structure.

A few of the writers had walked to Anežský klášter, Saint Agnes Monastery, and I had joined them. When they arrived, the red carpet was already studded with photojournalists. Among them, March stood beside Zaorálek, both in face-coverings, gesturing voicelessly. With them, Wole Soyinka stayed quiet, nodding, refraining from his usual eloquence, cameras snapping at him in all directions. It was hard to believe this man had crossed such huge distances undaunted by the global threat. That the writers in attendance, from Greece, Italy, South Bohemia, the Netherlands, had all converged at this point, in the arches of a thirteenth century church, from which a jackdaw alighted from a tall crucifix. Amid the tense glamour of the people gathered in the courtyard, the sheer bloody-minded determination for free expression that had been achieved went blissfully unnoticed, subdued as it was by their own contradictory fear, not hidden, but shown for all to see, by the very wearing of that necessary object of concealment, their hygienic masks.

Is this a question of forever? It is hard to imagine chaos, then it is not. Thoughts passed through rooms packed with spectators, the same halls where friars and nuns had once busied themselves, had once practiced a certain faith. Conversations, March insisted to me, were the essential part of the festival, a movement that had been specifically constructed as far as possible outside the framework of the previous regime. It was at this point I began to feel a connection between the velocity of my own infiltration into the ranks of the literary world, and the way in which the festival had similarly introduced itself into the confines of an injured city - město zraněné hrdosti - a city of wounded pride, where the regality of kingdom and commerce, had been confronted with the reality of censorship and skewed socialism, against which the festival took its place.

It was Aeschylus who spoke of the immortality of the festival, March had said, standing under the lights. I liked the totality of the moment, the feeling of a precipice, of the last (admittedly educated, sometimes high-society, sometimes not) denizens of a civilisation on the border of ruin, and the feeling seemed to spread through the room, as March announced, with measured solemnity, that this festival would be the last. What, then, must outlive it?

When I returned to the offices some weeks later, I walked under the sign that read PLATYZ, through the passage to the court, pausing at a display-box set against the wall, where the names of the final year’s writers hung suspended - Wole Soyinka, Ersi Sotiropolous, Jiří Hájíček, Daňa Horáková, Arnon Grunberg - and numerous others, including the ones who, under mounting pandemic restrictions, had withdrawn their participation from the event. Their photographs were stored securely behind the glass.