Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (72 page)

BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City

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Another, perhaps more important mentor was František Matouš Klácel, an Augustinian priest who had been reprimanded for his Hegelian
views and had conceived the idea of trying to organize ideal humanity from scratch, as it were, by founding a “Czech-Moravian brother- and sisterhood” of the happy few. Božena N

mcová, whom he called “Sister Ludmila,” was among the charter members of this small group, and Klácel addressed a series of letters to her, published in 1849 as a book on the origins of modern socialism and communism, the first treatise on these matters written in Czech. Klácel, too, admired her from afar, but when she slept with another brother, everybody was jealous and the brotherand sisterhood came to a premature end before it had really flourished. Klácel submitted to the ecclesiastical authorities again but later left for the United States, where he edited a number of Czech liberal newspapers for the poor people who had left their Bohemian homeland.

She had little patience with poetry, and by the mid-1840s she joined those romantic philologists and writers, German, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Serb, who collected and retold fairy tales and the stories current, as they thought, among simple people—efforts intended to strengthen the national self-consciousness of societies still, or once again, deprived of states of their own. She was not, as the brothers Grimm and their Czech ally Karel Jaromír Erben had been, predominantly concerned with folk authenticity, and in the Slovak fairy tales and legends she gathered on many field trips to Slovakia, she magnificently played with the idiomatic potentialities of combining Czech and Slovak vocabulary, probably appreciated by modern readers even more than by her own contemporaries.
Babi

ka
(
The Grandmother
), written at a time of despair and misery, intimately relates to her earlier anthropological interests in the service of national reawakening, but fortunately goes far beyond these restraints. She recalls the idyllic days of her childhood at home in northeastern Bohemia and the old woman closest to her heart; though she looks back at these serene days through tears, her evocations of peasant costumes, local habits of speech, and recurrent feasts and pilgrimages are remarkably precise. Portraits and scenes, not plots and counterplots (though more rapidly developing in the final chapters), predominate; the life of her grandmother, symbolic of strong vitality, loving wisdom, and the Czech plebeian tradition, distinctly emerges in confrontation with that of the duchess living in the nearby castle and poor Viktorka, a half-mad peasant girl roaming through the forests. Her social station has kept the duchess from living close to nature and people; and if the grandmother likens herself to a gnarled pear tree that has survived many a storm, the duchess enjoys but a collection of stones and desiccated plants on her shelves (she has no children of her own, only an adopted daughter). Critics and film
producers have long felt that Božena N

mcová hid many of her own passions in Viktorka, the girl seduced by a soldier and left with a child, whom she drowns. Viktorka lives in a cave, wanders through the woods, gathers berries, and snatches pieces of bread left for her on the windowsills by peasants—until she is killed in the woods by lightning. (The real Viktorka was an alcoholic mother of two, who miserably died on the road not long after the novel was published.) It is the grandmother whom people call a truly “happy woman” without doubts or hesitations.

For more than a hundred years now,
Babi

ka
has been fundamental to the Czech prose canon, dear to any child and adult, and the long efforts of official critics to celebrate N

mcová as a socialist realist, relying on folk types and the optimism of the people, prompted an opposition that accentuated her romanticism, early stressed by the critic F. X. Šalda. Yet this debate about generalities has obfuscated the more difficult question of how Božena N

mcová used the literary conventions of her moment for her own purposes and where she fell victim to them. Czech feminists are lucky that the modern Czech prose tradition begins in her writings; instead of trying so hard to demonstrate that her father was Mettemich or another prince, it is far more important to grasp her pride and her thirst for independence, her plea for women’s education (she had almost none), her defense of Jews in the words of an old Czech peasant in her reports from southern Bohemia, and her sudden decision to come, in the disguise of a countrywoman, to the help of the Prague insurrectionists of June 1848 (too late, of course). Even before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, critical interests began to shift, and, as is suggested by a challenging inquiry undertaken by the Swiss scholar and translator Susanna Roth, among Czech writers at home and in exile Božena N

mcová is now being read and thought about in many different ways, and not only in response to the political correctness of yesteryear. Attention reaches out for the masterpieces among her smaller prose pieces, for instance,

i Doby
(
Four Seasons
), revealing in a few veiled pages the trauma of love defiled by marriage, or
Divá Bára
(
The Wild Bára),
celebrating innocence and energy. Important artists like Ji

i Kolá

and many writers, among them Eva Kant