Corfu Blues and Global Views: The Czech Republic celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution; Czechoslovakia, 1989; Československo; Sametová Revoluce

From Radio Prague International:

TAKING STOCK OF DEMOCRACY 30 YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF COMMUNISM

CZECHS MARK 30 YEARS SINCE THE ONSET OF THE VELVET REVOLUTION

1989: THE VELVET REVOLUTION IN CONTEXT (OR HOW ‘NOVEMBER’ BEGAN IN ‘JANUARY’)

CZECHOSLOVAKIA' VELVET REVOLUTION IN PICTURES BU BOHUMIL EICHLER, The Guardian

Photo: Radio Prague

Velvet Revolution dissidents warn against new threats to Czech freedom - On the 30th anniversary of the uprising, Václav Havel’s allies say the revolution’s ideals are again at risk, The Guardian

From Friendship Magazine, Bratislava, June, 1989:

Above, from an interview I gave to Friendship, published in June, 1989 and circulated to all secondary schools throughout Czechoslovakia. Some typical letters from teachers and parents, received after its publication:

From Spišska Nová Ves, dated 13 June 1989:

“I liked your article in Friendship very much and am completely in accordance with your creeds and opinions as to the freedom of expression, the importance of travelling, etc”

Another letter came from P., dated 19 June 1989:

“Our children, from Šumava to Tatras, will read your open words about barbed-wire and freedom of expression. That’s just what they need."

The following are some unedited notes from my journal, written in Prague, 19-21 November 1989, and 29-30 November 1989:

Sunday Evening, 19 November.

After my arrival in Prague on the overnight train from Warsaw I booked in at the Forum and then went for a walk around Prague, bathed in wonderful November sunshine. The bells of St. Vitus were ringing out for St.Agnes, recently canonized in Rome. Prague was at its loveliest. I strolled through Old Town Square, visited the Týn Church, then crossed Charles Bridge to pay my respects at the commemorative tombstone of Elizabeth Jane Weston, Prague’s British Renaissance Latin poet, at the church of St. Thomas. I crossed Charles Bridge again and headed for the Hotel Intercontinental where I was invited to listen to an American journalist briefing his colleagues about the alleged killing on Friday of a Czech student, Martin Šmíd, following the Vyšehrad Commemoration on November 17^th,of the 50^th Anniversary of the Nazi closing of the University (when another student, Jan Opletal, was killed). According to the journalist, forty students were being treated in hospital (Czechoslovak TV had talked of ten); there were broken arms and many stitches needed. Journalists had also been injured, an American had needed stitches and Ed Lucas, an enterprising British resident reporter, had been knocked unconscious. The American spoke of a meeting he had just attended, where there had been demands for free elections, for the ‘murderers’ to go on trial, calls for ‘Russian troops out!’ and a demand that there should be no meeting between Bush and Gorbachev unless Gorbachev first sent instructions to Prague and various guarantees were given. At a church service earlier in the morning the priest had told his congregation, ‘Now is the time for the people to rise up, to stand up for its rights’, and he had been applauded. The situation was finally unraveling, said the retired Czech journalist who’d beckoned me to join the group. Perhaps the bells of St. Vitus were not ringing for St.Agnes after all. They sounded to me like a message for the people.

Meanwhile the ducks and swans basked happily on the Vltava; old men were fishing in flat-bottomed boats. Tourists, as oblivious as the swans to the signals of history, traipsed over Charles Bridge. There was a richer range of graffiti and quotations daubed on the John Lennon Wall: invocations of the names of T.G.Masaryk and the philosopher, Jan Patočka. The simplest,’ Svoboda’ (Freedom), was the most significant of all. There were few people around; in my mind’s eye I saw the huge crowd which had gathered to celebrate the anniversary of Lennon’s death in December, when our visiting poet Roger McGough had been dragged into the thick of the crowd, to read three of his most famous Liverpool poems.

Monday 20^th November.

I arrived at Muzeum Metro-Station at 8.30 am, and emerged by the Statue of St. Wenceslas. The base of the equestrian statue had been transformed into an altar for freedom. Solidified candle-wax covered the stone. Hundreds of candles were burning, national flags adorned the statue and there was a banner demanding Free Elections. A student was reading out a proclamation to a group of 20 bystanders. Nearby, people were queuing for the newspaper, Svobodné Slovo. I bought two copies.

November 17^th had become the decisive day, loaded with symbolic meaning. The nation’s anger was directed against the new Nazis who had used unforgivable violence and shocking cruelty against their own children.

I went to the office, and told the Czech staff with absolute certainty that the government would fall; “There is no way it can survive after this’, I said.

At 4pm I arrived at Muzeum again, on my way to the office to meet my colleagues, to attend a lecture on Shakespeare by Professor Stanley Wells. It was almost impossible to climb the station’s stairs because of the pushing, excited crowds. It seemed potentially dangerous, but this was an occasion not to be missed, a turning-point in the nation’s history. It seemed as if half-a-million people filled the square, although 200,000 can seem like half a million when you’re squashed in the middle of them. Students were standing all over the statue; flags were draped over the King and his horse, candles were burning and the main banner now read ‘Free Elections and Pluralistic Democracy.’ Elsewhere people were carrying home-made banners such as ‘Down with Tyranny’. I saw Ed Lucas and the two British lectors. I forced my way with great difficulty through the joyful revolutionary crowd, amazed at the spirit of brave solidarity and the waves of roars and rattling of keys.

I made my way to the Academy of Sciences on Národní Street. In Room 206, Professor Štříbrný introduced Professor Stanley Wells, whose topic was ‘Shakespeare: Editor as Director’. Prof. Štříbrný made a statement about his sense of sympathy for the students’ academic and political demands and referred to this important point in the nation’s history. Prof. Štříbrný had been Head of the English Department at Charles University until the Soviet Invasion crushed the Prague Spring. He lost the job and was expelled from the Party because the English Department was seen as one of the more dangerously outspoken centres of ‘Socialism with a human face’. Now, ‘after twenty years of normalization’, Czechoslovakia was becoming ‘normal’ once again, as one banner put it.
Professor Wells stood beside a large bust of Lenin and commenced his lecture. Outside, the crowds were marching past the National Theatre, and Professor Wells’ voice was drowned by the chanting, clapping and roaring for truth:

“Pravda vítěze” (“Truth will prevail”)
“Národ sobě” (The Nation unto itself)
“Long live the actors”
“Long live Havel”
“Strength in Unity”
“It’s already cracked!” (ie the Communist System)
“Jakeš to the waste-paper basket!” (a play on words in Czech, “Jakeše do koše!”)

There were hundreds of banners proclaiming, “Už je dost” (“Enough”), ‘Free Elections’ and similar slogans almost impossible to imagine in the streets of Prague.

Academic matters may seem irrelevant at such a time, but Professor Wells delivered a fine lecture against the waves of chanting and the hundreds of thousands marching past the National Theatre, saluting and applauding the striking actors:

“At’ žíji herci!” (‘Long live the actors!’)

The striking actors waved down at the crowds from the large windows of the Nová Scená directly opposite the balcony of the Academy of Sciences where we had all gone to stand when the lecture ended.

I looked at the bust of Lenin when we finally went back indoors, and I said to an elderly Czech translator that a bust of Shakespeare would seem more appropriate than one of Lenin for the Academy of Sciences; he told me not to say such things out loud, although I am sure he secretly agrees that Shakespeare is more important and relevant, and means much more than Lenin to the Czech nation. I recalled the Cheek by Jowl production of The Tempest which had been such a success at the same Nová Scená eight months earlier, when Caliban repeatedly and insistently beat the floor howling “Free-dom, high-day, high-day free-dom, free-dom!”

From Dannie Abse, Prague Fall, The Listener, 10 November, 1988

Michael Foot, Charles University, Lecture on Byron

Shakespeare WILL win, I thought, not Lenin. ‘Long live the actors’! The students will vote for English, not Russian. They will soon be saying so, out loud. It’s a real revolution, and the government will fall, whether asked to resign, or as a result of the general strike which is planned to follow up the students’ and the actors’ strikes.

November 21^st.

I bought the newspaper before I set off for a week in Budapest; Rudé Právo’s headline was “Dialogue Yes: Confrontation No.”

I was glad to be in Prague to see this new era dawning, even though, for me, it marked the end of my posting. It was appropriate that I met Anna Masaryková at the Council last night. She had come to see Olivier in one of his Shakespearean roles, but the film show was cancelled because most people were out in Wenceslas Square. Anna decided to go and see what was happening, after another member of the audience seized the opportunity to read out a proclamation of the Union of Journalists.

November 30^th.

On November 29^th I spent one more night in Prague, and the staff reported all the exciting events which had occurred while I was in Hungary. Many more young people have been visiting the office, anxious for contact and materials about British ideas and traditions. The Czech staff seem quite transformed by the events: they are now proud, jubilant, unified and liberated, excited in the best and fullest sense. In the restaurant where they took me for a final farewell, a Czech came up to tell us that the Federal Assembly has just decided in its meeting to accede to the opposition’s demands to dissolve the leading role of the Communist Party and to do away with Marxism-Leninism in schools (he realised we were British and thought we should be “the first to know”).

In all the shop-windows, on the walls of the metro-stations and amongst the flower-beds in Wenceslas Square there are pictures of President Masarýk and of Dubček. There are stickers saying, “I love Havel” and “I love Civic Forum”, which has its headquarters less than a hundred yards from the Council office.

Everyone agrees that it was the students and the actors who led the revolution, which is charged with national, cultural symbolism and great emotional significance. It is a civilised, wittily satirical, non-vengeful, non-violent revolution of people who are simply telling the Communists to disappear, go away, get lost! One member of staff, a few years older than me, said with deep sincerity, “For the first time of my life, I’m experiencing democracy’. Nobody expected it to come so soon. Another member of staff told me about a man, aged about 50, who’d come to the Council, very tentatively to ask for ELT materials, “a crash course, preferably” – he was a teacher of Marxism-Leninism anxious to learn English in a hurry.

If the revolution was led by the students and the actors, it was also led by the writers, the poets, translators and dramatists, by people like Havel, of course, but also by Byron and above all by Shakespeare, the two writers we celebrated in a joint exhibition just off Wenceslas Square in September 1988. President Masarýk wrote that ‘Byron exerted a strong influence on us Slavs”. Under the influence of John Bowring, Secretary of Byron’s Committee for Aid to Greece, and later the first translator of Czech poetry into English (“Cheskian Anthology, 1832), Byron might have given his life for the cause of Czechoslovak independence had he come out of Greece alive, or so I’d argued at the opening of the exhibition, to mark the Bicentenary of Byron’s birth. So, alongside rock ‘n’ roll, the Pope and Gorbachev, Havel and Poland’s Solidarity movement, let’s not forget Byron and Shakespeare.

We shouldn't forget John Milton, who had an important influence on Josef Jungmann.

T.G.Masaryk on Milton (from The Meaning of Czech History, p.50-51):

“With respect to Jungmann’s translation of Milton…there is no question that by means of this work Jungmann helped create our literary language….I have remarked some time ago regarding the beneficial effect of English literature on our development. To a large extent, the English have provided the subject matter for our literature, the Slavs the form.”

Josef Jungmann’s Paradise Lost (Ztracený Ráj), 1811
(Riot Police by the Statue of Jungmann)

Let it stand -
The statue of this Joseph!
He knew what was meant
By paradise lost.

Let's be proud of our office
In Jungmannová Street,
Though British books have been long suppressed.
Just repeat after him,
Repeat after John:
"What though the field is lost?
All is not lost......."
"Cot', že pole ztraceno?
po všem veta není......"

Josef Jungmann, defiant Czech,
By translating John Milton revived his own tongue;
In spite of the Austrian censors' office,
In spite of censors still to come:
Courage; th' unconquerable will!

(JP)

I can now tear up my poem “To the Czechs”, published in Prague 23 days before the revolution began.

“Cyril and Methodius,
Wycliffe and Payne,
Gave you so much;
But all in vain.”

The 16 poems were read, in English and Czech, at this event on 24th October, 1989:

A funny farewell present, a photo given to me by a good friend, the wonderful Jan Vodňanský, October 1989:

Apologies for repetition of some photos! Not everybody reads all blog postings...

From a speech by Professor Stanley Wells, CBE, about a very important day in the history of Czechoslovakia:

"In 1989 I visited Czechoslovakia at the invitation of its senior Shakespeare scholar Zdenek Stribrny, who for a quarter of a century had been forbidden to teach because of his liberal opinions. I landed at Prague airport on 19 November 1989, a date that has gone down in history as the first day of the Bloodless, or ‘Velvet’ Revolution. My lecture to the Czech Academy on the following day was punctuated by the chanting of the vast procession of protesters winding their way from Wenceslaus Square to the Presidential Palace. Afterwards I stood with members of my loyal audience on a balcony to witness the seemingly endless procession stream by, the walkers waving up to the tall plate-glass windows of the National Theatre whose actors, along with the students, had been prime movers in the protest. I still have the badge bearing the image of the president and playwright Vaclav Havel which was thrown down to me from a window as I made my way to Wenceslaus Square for the vast assembly addressed by Havel and Dubcek in which, I have learnt only recently, another playwright, one whom the RSC is celebrating this year – Harold Pinter – and his wife were also present".

I was there too, at the Czech Academy, at the lecture and on the balcony. A momentous occasion.

Our cultural exchange efforts seem to have been welcomed and appreciated, by writers, academics, artists, musicians, poets, students, translators, language teachers, schoolteachers, officials and dissidents.

Between March and October, 1989: