This book comprises mainly short stories, but includes an assemblage of occasional prose and verse, as well as a piece of literary journalism (and one short story ironically subtitled ‘A Novel’). The contents are so varied as to belie the precision of the title. Prose it is, but the picture that emerges is saturated with complexity and nuance, though not all stories are equal in quality. In his introduction, Czech novelist Ivan Klima backgrounds the choices:
If you consider the date of this collection you must think how difficult it would be, now, to publish a book with the same title. In 1989 the Berlin Wall was breached and the Soviet Union, having lost the Cold War, made its unsteady way toward adopting a new name and a market economy. But in 1994 no-one could have anticipated how Eastern Europe would look after a generation had elapsed. If you had asked the editor of this collection about such things he might have said that democracy would lead to a flourishing polis in any of the countries where lived the writers – most of them still, in 2020, still alive – with works published in this book. March could never have anticipated that the democratic deficit that is visible in so many Eastern European countries is echoed in other parts of the world notably, since 2016, in the United States of America.
But because the stories in the book are, many of them, so good, we can forgive the book’s prescriptive title, though “description of a struggle” might better have just been left off the dustjacket with its photograph taken on a street in Prague in 1968. The nearest approximation to the truth seems to have presented itself to the book’s producers as the best candidate. Whose struggle does the title refer to? To Eastern Europeans’ struggle? To the Cold War between the West and the USSR? To the struggle of the individual to find and maintain a place in the world, a struggle common to people wherever they live? To our struggle to grasp the nature of reality itself? To all of these things?
Another struggle is the one needed to get these authors’ work recognised on the international stage. Only one name had I come across before, that being Ismail Kadare, from Albania, whose short story ‘The Concert’ is here. It deals with Chairman Mao and is satirical, but I wouldn’t say that it’s the best of the bunch. The book’s diversity is overwhelming but Estonian writer Viivi Luik’s short story ‘The Beauty of History’ seems a suitable stand-in for the signification embodied in the title. Its use of code words and cyphers progresses, as this three-page story completes, into a cryptic meditation on a police state during a cold war.
Surprisingly, trees feature in a significant number of stories, such as Laszlo Marton’s lovely ‘The Sunken Apple Tree’, a family tale with magical elements, that was translated from the Hungarian. It tells of a child who died. In Hanna Krall’s ‘Retina’, translated from the Polish, there is a village near “dark green wooded hills”; this piece of literary journalism (or, possibly, fact-based fiction) deals with the Red Army Faction, a German terror group. In Drago Jancar’s ‘Repetition’, which was translated from the Slovenian, a group of armed men, possibly partisans, comes across a village where, “The glimmer of early morning light penetrated through the branches and trunks of trees, blinding the men of the night.” What they find in the village is disturbing and seems to presage disaster.
There are woods and trees also in Rein Tootmaa’s ‘We Gaze Up into the Tops of the Spruce Trees’, which was translated from the Estonian. It is a kind of love story, or a chapter from a tale of love, but it is also another thing entirely, full of longing and a sense of the impossibility of happiness. In Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu’s ‘The Dream’ you are also not quite sure what is real and what is imagined by the narrator. Trees appear in this story as well:
Another Czech story has a husband and wife at the centre of the narrative. This is Alexandra Berkova’s ‘He wakes Up’, which seems to be taken from life and recounts the events in a man’s day. Her story is wryly funny. Humour is found in a number of stories, including Jerzy Pilch’s ‘The Register of Adulteresses’, which is set inside a house and which was translated from the Polish. ‘Bohumil Hrabal’s ‘The Pink Scarf’ is a whimsical story set at the time of the uprising in Prague, and centres on a young man who, at a wedding, appears to wear a snake as a scarf. In ‘Down the Danube’ by Peter Esterhazy, a Hungarian man is travelling and giving an ironic account of his journey. Slovakian writer Rudolf Sloboda’s ‘The White Dog’ is also full of laughter and sadness. Sometimes the humour is acerbic or dark; a pig takes centre stage in Romanian author George Cusnarencu’s ‘The War’.
Metafictional elements are strong in Peter Nadas’ ‘Vivisection’, a Hungarian tale focalised through the eyes of an art student who is attending a drawing class. The story asks us to think about how reality is constructed, and questions the validity of the authorial position. The author, born in 1942, worked for a time as a journalist. In ‘The Secret of my Youth’, translated from the Albanian, Mimoza Ahmeti uses metafictional elements to interrogate both the narrative process, the state of the world behind the Iron Curtain, and the promise of happiness offered by countries in the West. Ahmeti’s story reminded me of Ivanauskaite’s contribution. A Hungarian, Lajos Grendel, who was born in 1948 and published his first novel in 1979, uses, in ‘The Contents of Suitcases’, the idea of the novel to question the very likelihood of existence. This stunning story which, like Nadas’, could have been written in any country in the world, was dedicated to Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.
Other global themes appear, such as anti-Semitism in Jan Johanides’ ‘Memorial to Don Giovanni’, which was translated from the Slovakian. Some stories have different institutions at their core, such as Romanian author Ana Blandiana’s ‘The Open Window’, which is set in a prison and which avails itself of magic, or Piotr Szewc’s ‘Annihilation’, which recounts the adventures of two policemen out one night on the streets of a Polish town. In ‘Mina’, a story by writer and journalist Pawel Huelle, the subject is madness and a Polish mental asylum sits at the centre of the narrative. This is a lovely story full of longing and regret. In Czech writer Ondrej Neff a librarian is entranced by dust and his behaviour confuses villagers.
A sense of sadness also pervades Svetlana Vasilieva’s ‘The Time of Peonies’, though there is laughter in this story as well. It was translated from the Russian and is like an allegory; it uses tropes common to depictions of the USSR, such as hoarding and kleptomania. At the centre of the drama, appropriately, is a policeman. Appropriate because this list started with a story about codes and espionage, or perhaps codes and terrorism.
What is certain is that the long shadow of Russia still extends over the nations in which these 22 writers appeared in order to give us their unique and incomparable gifts. It’s probably worth mentioning that the stories picked out for notice here – and there were many stories I didn’t finish reading – mostly have indeterminate endings. Nothing wrong with that, of course, as good short stories often seem like a light switch has been flicked suddenly, illuminating for an instant an otherwise dark room. For that instant you can make out figures moving across the floor or a man sitting at a table talking on the telephone (as in Jerzy Pilch’s story). Then, just as suddenly, the switch is snapped off and the room again goes black. Night, light, night. Like life itself.
This anthology shows how writers ‘inside’ were generally resistant to a bipolar vision. Their world is not orverrun by corrupt Party secretaries, members of the secret police, or unwavering dissidents: it is full of ordinary people, loving and hating each other, committing rape, suffering, dying, waging pointless wars; here (as everywhere) trees blossom in spring, sons love their mothers, husbands long for a mistress; here (as everywhere else in the world) there are rogues, saints, eccentrics and lunatics, but most people have their ordinary joys and worries, prepare weddings or pig-slaughterings, some get drunk, others have higher aspirations, seeing that even in situations outwardly lacking in liberty those who try may find a good deal of freedom, while others go through life as a witness observing the strange theatrical spectacle offered by an existence full of paradoxes.While the struggle was real and many people got out and lived elsewhere, or else tried to get out, the word “description” barely assists a curious person, looking for something to read, to grasp the nature of the range of things in this collection. Stories, some of them, so strange and beautiful that you are not sure if you are dreaming or if you are awake. Self-referential, humorous, tragic and funny. A kaleidoscope of ways of seeing and understanding reality, as diverse and challenging as anything that might have been published in a country in the world. But published, of course, only after the Iron Curtain had come crashing down.
If you consider the date of this collection you must think how difficult it would be, now, to publish a book with the same title. In 1989 the Berlin Wall was breached and the Soviet Union, having lost the Cold War, made its unsteady way toward adopting a new name and a market economy. But in 1994 no-one could have anticipated how Eastern Europe would look after a generation had elapsed. If you had asked the editor of this collection about such things he might have said that democracy would lead to a flourishing polis in any of the countries where lived the writers – most of them still, in 2020, still alive – with works published in this book. March could never have anticipated that the democratic deficit that is visible in so many Eastern European countries is echoed in other parts of the world notably, since 2016, in the United States of America.
But because the stories in the book are, many of them, so good, we can forgive the book’s prescriptive title, though “description of a struggle” might better have just been left off the dustjacket with its photograph taken on a street in Prague in 1968. The nearest approximation to the truth seems to have presented itself to the book’s producers as the best candidate. Whose struggle does the title refer to? To Eastern Europeans’ struggle? To the Cold War between the West and the USSR? To the struggle of the individual to find and maintain a place in the world, a struggle common to people wherever they live? To our struggle to grasp the nature of reality itself? To all of these things?
Another struggle is the one needed to get these authors’ work recognised on the international stage. Only one name had I come across before, that being Ismail Kadare, from Albania, whose short story ‘The Concert’ is here. It deals with Chairman Mao and is satirical, but I wouldn’t say that it’s the best of the bunch. The book’s diversity is overwhelming but Estonian writer Viivi Luik’s short story ‘The Beauty of History’ seems a suitable stand-in for the signification embodied in the title. Its use of code words and cyphers progresses, as this three-page story completes, into a cryptic meditation on a police state during a cold war.
Surprisingly, trees feature in a significant number of stories, such as Laszlo Marton’s lovely ‘The Sunken Apple Tree’, a family tale with magical elements, that was translated from the Hungarian. It tells of a child who died. In Hanna Krall’s ‘Retina’, translated from the Polish, there is a village near “dark green wooded hills”; this piece of literary journalism (or, possibly, fact-based fiction) deals with the Red Army Faction, a German terror group. In Drago Jancar’s ‘Repetition’, which was translated from the Slovenian, a group of armed men, possibly partisans, comes across a village where, “The glimmer of early morning light penetrated through the branches and trunks of trees, blinding the men of the night.” What they find in the village is disturbing and seems to presage disaster.
There are woods and trees also in Rein Tootmaa’s ‘We Gaze Up into the Tops of the Spruce Trees’, which was translated from the Estonian. It is a kind of love story, or a chapter from a tale of love, but it is also another thing entirely, full of longing and a sense of the impossibility of happiness. In Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu’s ‘The Dream’ you are also not quite sure what is real and what is imagined by the narrator. Trees appear in this story as well:
That night I dreamt of a key which someone had left in the forest. I had just descended a gentle slope into a dell where the beeches had grown sparse and slender, and the black soil between their trunks was dappled with bright white and yellow patterns of light. The sun shone dazzling through the branches swaying in a green breeze. The trees’ bark was peeling off and it gave forth a bitter tanic fragrance. A mist, caused not by vapour but by ennui and nostalgia, was coolly spilling into the eternal morning.Jurga Ivanauskaite’s ‘Two Stories about Suicide’, translated from the Lithuanian, mingles sadness and humour to create a gentle sense of pathos. The second of these stories, ‘Danguole L. (1960-87)’ involves a young woman on a ship who invites a stranger into her cabin. It turns out they have met before, though he remains faceless. The uncanny is also there in Teodor Laco’s fairy tale ‘The Pain of a Distant Winter’, translated from the Romanian, which is about a child and his mother in a forest. Family also features in Czech writer Eda Kriseova’s haunting ‘The Unborn’, which has strong supernatural elements and which has at its core a planned child.
Another Czech story has a husband and wife at the centre of the narrative. This is Alexandra Berkova’s ‘He wakes Up’, which seems to be taken from life and recounts the events in a man’s day. Her story is wryly funny. Humour is found in a number of stories, including Jerzy Pilch’s ‘The Register of Adulteresses’, which is set inside a house and which was translated from the Polish. ‘Bohumil Hrabal’s ‘The Pink Scarf’ is a whimsical story set at the time of the uprising in Prague, and centres on a young man who, at a wedding, appears to wear a snake as a scarf. In ‘Down the Danube’ by Peter Esterhazy, a Hungarian man is travelling and giving an ironic account of his journey. Slovakian writer Rudolf Sloboda’s ‘The White Dog’ is also full of laughter and sadness. Sometimes the humour is acerbic or dark; a pig takes centre stage in Romanian author George Cusnarencu’s ‘The War’.
Metafictional elements are strong in Peter Nadas’ ‘Vivisection’, a Hungarian tale focalised through the eyes of an art student who is attending a drawing class. The story asks us to think about how reality is constructed, and questions the validity of the authorial position. The author, born in 1942, worked for a time as a journalist. In ‘The Secret of my Youth’, translated from the Albanian, Mimoza Ahmeti uses metafictional elements to interrogate both the narrative process, the state of the world behind the Iron Curtain, and the promise of happiness offered by countries in the West. Ahmeti’s story reminded me of Ivanauskaite’s contribution. A Hungarian, Lajos Grendel, who was born in 1948 and published his first novel in 1979, uses, in ‘The Contents of Suitcases’, the idea of the novel to question the very likelihood of existence. This stunning story which, like Nadas’, could have been written in any country in the world, was dedicated to Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.
Other global themes appear, such as anti-Semitism in Jan Johanides’ ‘Memorial to Don Giovanni’, which was translated from the Slovakian. Some stories have different institutions at their core, such as Romanian author Ana Blandiana’s ‘The Open Window’, which is set in a prison and which avails itself of magic, or Piotr Szewc’s ‘Annihilation’, which recounts the adventures of two policemen out one night on the streets of a Polish town. In ‘Mina’, a story by writer and journalist Pawel Huelle, the subject is madness and a Polish mental asylum sits at the centre of the narrative. This is a lovely story full of longing and regret. In Czech writer Ondrej Neff a librarian is entranced by dust and his behaviour confuses villagers.
A sense of sadness also pervades Svetlana Vasilieva’s ‘The Time of Peonies’, though there is laughter in this story as well. It was translated from the Russian and is like an allegory; it uses tropes common to depictions of the USSR, such as hoarding and kleptomania. At the centre of the drama, appropriately, is a policeman. Appropriate because this list started with a story about codes and espionage, or perhaps codes and terrorism.
What is certain is that the long shadow of Russia still extends over the nations in which these 22 writers appeared in order to give us their unique and incomparable gifts. It’s probably worth mentioning that the stories picked out for notice here – and there were many stories I didn’t finish reading – mostly have indeterminate endings. Nothing wrong with that, of course, as good short stories often seem like a light switch has been flicked suddenly, illuminating for an instant an otherwise dark room. For that instant you can make out figures moving across the floor or a man sitting at a table talking on the telephone (as in Jerzy Pilch’s story). Then, just as suddenly, the switch is snapped off and the room again goes black. Night, light, night. Like life itself.
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