Ian Courtenay Johnston

“ For people whose language has never come close to facing extinction, it is difficult to imagine the complex difficulties of the task of restoration. Once Czech had all but disappeared as the language of government, education, and most artistic, religious, and intellectual life, those urging its return had, in effect, no literate Czech-speaking audience (often they themselves were not particularly fluent themselves) and had to present their defences of Czech culture in German. ”

“ What room was there for an art which focused exclusively on the individual at the expense of national issues? Should art concern itself with universal social principles rather than a Czech agenda? And so on. ”

“ This feature of Hašek’s style creates a curious tension in places between the harsh tone of the narrator and the more amusingly ironic presence of Švejk, as if we are witnessing an often implausibly funny comedy in front of an ominously real and graphic backdrop of atrocity. As I shall be discussing later, this tension qualifies the comedy in some complex ways and encourages us to respond to it not necessarily as the affirmation of a healthy alternative vision of life but as something potentially more absurd, much darker than conventional comic satire might suggest. ”

“ Music breeds rhythmic movement and heartbeat. Art Nouveau is primarily a mimic art which evokes, assumes, and in the end leads to a certain way of human behaviour. (Franco Borsi, quoted Mucha 126)
How useful such a comment is for understanding particular works is open to debate, but it is a reminder that, at least in the eyes of its practitioners, Art Nouveau was never about mere decoration. Given its sense of having an important social and political purpose and the emphasis on symbols of spiritual energy, most Art Nouveau stands diametrically opposed to the notion of Art for Art’s sake. ”

“ And some people, no doubt, believed that Hitler might well stop his aggressive expansion once he had created his greater Germany. However, quite apart from a massive betrayal of earlier assurances and the failure even to consult the Czech government, the action handed over an important economic power and its armed forces to the Nazis without a struggle, thus removing a potentially vital ally from the coming war, and it certainly bolstered Hitler’s reputation and power in Germany. ”

“ The first important principle of the Art Nouveau movement was a desire to get rid of the distinctions between high and low art or major and minor arts. For many artists the essential thing was for art to affect and unify the lives of the people, not just in expensive oil paintings on rich people’s walls or in institutional salons, but in the essential objects of their daily lives—their homes, furnishings, cups and saucers, advertisements, wall hangings—everything from door handles to lamp posts and sewer gratings and toilet seats. ”

“ He is some official’s batman or a regimental orderly, without the freedom to choose. His function is to accept the label pinned on him by others, to obey orders without question, to carry out duties for other people, and to go where they tell him. That is a fate he shares with all other lower ranks in the book. The only real freedom he experiences as an observer of people making choices about who they are or want to be occurs, ironically enough, in the lunatic asylum:
“There’s a freedom there which not even Socialists have ever dreamed of. ”

“ They had no rich tradition of printed works written in Czech (literature, history, poetry, or even school books, the essential tools for cultural development) . All these had to be produced. A Czech tradition had to, as it were, be invented, so that the National Revival had an effective Czech content. It is an astonishing tribute to the untiring efforts of Czech intellectuals and artists that their efforts in the second half of the nineteenth century were so successful. ”

“ From that point on, the story of Czech modernism becomes the struggle between the continuing search for a national style, a Czech identity expressed in and developed by art and architecture, and the influential ideas and inspirations acquired from the vital and changing international artistic scene. In the development of this national identity, how was one to sort out the conflicting demands of the specifically Czech tradition established by the National Revival and the growing demand for other priorities not anchored in that tradition? ”

“ What sets Mucha apart from almost all other artists in the “movement,” however, is another passion which increasingly dominated his personal and working life—his commitment to Slavic culture. He was deeply convinced, no doubt on the basis of his own experience, that art should not concern itself with what was merely new but should develop itself out of old ethnic and national traditions: “The Ecole Estienne,” he wrote (in his reform proposals for Paris art schools) “is standing guard over a corpse . . . It is good to cultivate tradition in art, but at the same time . ”

“ Architectural beauty can only be a constructed beauty expressed through the materials, but residing in an almost dramatic counterweight to the material. (Janák, quoted Moravánsky)
The spiritual purpose of architecture was to make this dynamic imaginative creativity manifest. Beyond that it had no social or political or national agenda. Janák expressly denied that architecture should have as its aim any improvement in society, Czech or otherwise: it is an "independent activity that has no obligations except to itself" (quoted, Švácha Architecture . . . 128) . ”

“ He will carry out orders in his own manner, and if things go wrong, well, that’s just how it is. Hence, he’s always in difficulty when he has to deal with the life blood of the bureaucracy—paperwork or phone calls or precise timetables, things which demand that he pay close attention and care about a particular outcome for the sake of a larger enterprise. In that sense, he ironically subverts the bureaucracy by accepting its authority, sometimes enthusiastically, and continuing to be himself within the limits imposed. ”

“ World War I got rid of the Austrians, the Nazis got rid of the Jews, the aftermath of World War II got rid of the Germans and Hungarians, and the Velvet divorce in 1998 got rid of the Slovaks. And so now, for the first time in centuries, the Czech people have a country, the Czech Republic, where people of the same ethnic origins make up about 98 percent of the population, and there is one official and uncontested language and a flourishing national culture (a reminder of the ethnic divisiveness of earlier times remains, however, in the Romany minority of about 250,000 gypsies) . ”

“ The term ‘flowering’ aptly describes an art that was fundamentally inspired by nature. Hence, the cultivation of a sense of intimacy in the second half of the nineteenth century by means of sombre wall-hangings, curtains overladen with trimmings, heavy upholstery and indoor gardens full of green plants, finally gave way to the need to observe the outside world. ”

“ Nonetheless, the movement's legacy of some strikingly original buildings in Prague which visitors from all over the world flock to see attests to the imaginative vitality of one of the more curious moments in the history of architecture. ”

“ Translating bad food to farts and then to shared jokes can happen, but only if we are fully human and not overwhelmed by a sense of our own importance. The jail may stink of the shit bucket, but perhaps that odour is associated with the sense of a great communal equality and humanity only available where no one can pretend to be more important that he, in fact, is. That may be why it is typical of inmates in the jail to share experiences and to sing—not doleful tunes of their common misery but all sorts of energetic songs which celebrate their moment of companionship. ”

“ Hence, in modern Czech intellectual and artistic life for most of the past century and a half political issues have been deeply involved in a way we do not witness nearly as much in the modern West (how often, for example, has the funeral of an artist here been an occasional of national political significance or even an expression of popular political sentiments or national identity?) ”

“ The style, in fact, has a tendency to engulf and transform the object and its material, until this material becomes an obedient mass in the thrall of linear rhythm. . . . The ornamentation is always alive, restless, and at the same time balanced. . . . Unlike the static ornamentation of nearly all other stylistic periods, in Art Nouveau it is always at one and the same time moving and in a state of equilibrium. Deep down there is a striving to subdue movement by means of well balanced harmony. ”

“ So the absurdity which governs human society is a permanent feature of existence. Humour is a way of coping moment by moment, but it has nothing to offer as an alternative vision. Life remains as cruel and absurd after the joke or the story as it was before (a point which the movement back and forth between Švejk’s adventures and the grimmer tones of the narrator emphasizes for us) .
Perhaps that is the reason why we don’t feel so disappointed that Hašek didn’t live to complete his novel. ”

“ What these various movement did have in common was a sense of trying something new, something which marked a decisive break with the traditional style in art, in an atmosphere of giddy new freedoms, a reinvigorating sense that art could and should matter—it should infuse the often very decadent and tired emotional climate of the end of the 19th century with a new sense of energy and spiritual purpose. ”

“ In fact, the most salient point about the development of the modern history of the Czech lands is the emergence at last of an independent and democratic Czech-speaking state relatively free of the traditional internal divisions and hostile external pressures, after hundreds of years of subservience to German-Austrian culture and political control, major internal conflicts, and a series of short-lived and often unhappy experiments (to use the mildest word available) with different political systems. ”

“ In that sense, attempting to destroy or correct old ways can be a way of encouraging us to create something better.
However, if we ask what creative moral vision underlies The Good Soldier Švejk, we cannot arrive at an answer as readily as we can with, say, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Aristophanes’ Frogs (not that these works are entirely unambiguous, of course) . For in Hašek’s novel, we are not given any very clear direction on how we ought to live our lives. There is certainly a very strong sense of human folly, greed, and cruelty, but is there anything in the novel beyond that? ”

“ For understandable reasons, a number of Czech artists have sought fame and fortune outside the Czech territory (or else have had to leave) and have thus, in the eyes of many of their compatriots, abandoned their important national responsibilities. When such artists become very famous internationally, as in the case, for example, of Alfons Mucha or Milan Kundera, their reputation and reception at home (as we shall see) have sometimes suffered because of an alleged lack of patriotism or engagement in matters of importance to the Czech nation. ”

“ That “war for the soul of the nation” is not over, of course, and, judging from the many unexpected turns of Czech history, it would be unwise to declare any cultural door permanently closed. Mucha’s work is still extremely popular in the West (especially with the renewed interest in Art Nouveau) , and there is now a modest Mucha Museum in Prague itself (operated by the artist’s grandson) . His dream of Slav nationalism is long out of date, of course (as it was at the time he donated his mythical re-interpretation of Czech history to his countrymen) . ”

“ The most beloved figures of the official versions of Czech history serve to bring joy into the man’s life only because he can turn them into snot sketches on glass—an “artistic” process that gives him so much pleasure he’s prepared to undergo repeated beatings rather than give it up. The humour here may be coarse, but it’s brutally effective. ”

“ Havel was a champion of maintaining a united federation of the two parts of the country, but his efforts were unsuccessful. Many Slovaks were fed up with the economic, political, and cultural domination of Prague, and many Czechs were not particularly enthusiastic about supporting the economically depressed region of Slovakia. On January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia officially and peacefully split into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (the Velvet Divorce) . Since that time, the Czech Republic has increasingly opened itself up to and sought economic ties with Western Europe. ”

“ As Henderson points out, he disliked the name of the “movement,” arguing that art was eternal and therefore could never be merely “noveau.” And he always insisted he followed his own sense of the important spiritual purposes of art, deriving his main inspiration from Czech traditions, rather than subscribing to the doctrines of any particular school. So even though many others associated his work so closely with Art Nouveau that they sometimes called it le style Mucha, that was not something which Mucha himself ever strove for or admitted. ”