Slovak Writers After 1993.

MURRAY DAVIS, ROBERT

The Slovak literary community is fond of the line, "Writing is not an occupation; it is a destiny." Writers throughout the world would probably agree, though some would emphasize the economic disadvantages implied by the first clause and others-especially when the work goes or is received badly-the more Sophoclean aspects of the second. Slovak writers in chorus are very un- Sophoclean in their eagerness to discuss circumstance rather than fate. And to an even greater degree than is usual in Central Europe, the circumstances are partly economic, in larger part political, and in the largest sense historical.

Recent Slovak literary-and all other-history centers on three dates: 1948, when the communists took power in Czechoslovakia and imposed alien economic and cultural systems; 1989, when the Velvet Revolution restored the opportunity to re-create the climate as well as the institutions of capitalist democracy; and 1993, when the Czech and Slovak Republics arranged a more or less amicable divorce-opposed by some family members-and for the first time in almost a millennium Slovaks were free at least to attempt to define themselves and to determine their national identity.

Slovak writers historically have had not only a place in the country, in a sense difficult for Americans to understand, but they were instrumental, indeed essential, in creating the idea of a country. As one Slovak writer said, for a hundred and fifty years writers represented the only means by which a people-not officially a nation-could define as well as express itself. In the Renaissance, writing in the vernacular was for Dante and other literary nationalists an act of assertion. Writing in Slovak-rather than in German or Hungarian under the Habsburgs or later in Czech-was an act of defiance. So was opposition to Russian domination. Now the Russians are gone, and with them, as the Bulgarian writer Ivailo Dichev points out in "Desires: The Erotics of Communism," a source of energy, at least for Mr. N., a dissident whose "happiness was his battle. How grey his life is now that communism has gone." Other writers found energy in indirection. Milan Richter, the Slovak poet, says that when his work was suppressed, he was forced to develop a subtext. In "The White Dog" Rudolf Sloboda's character describes one way of doing this: "writing this autobiography of mine as if I were describing the life of the white dog." Of course, the dog can't laugh or talk, and the writer has to omit all sorts of things as inappropriate to a dog's point of view. But, the speaker concludes,

No one can blame me for making a dog think. After all, for the future reader it's not important whether I thought this, or the dog. It's important for the future reader to know how this could have been seen in our own time. And this way I don't even have to worry about someone who can't understand any of my memoirs calling me an idiot; he'll simply blame it all on the white dog.

Now dissent has become pointless and writing in Slovak routine, and routine is less heartening than resistance. This is especially true because, like other former Soviet bloc countries, Slovakia is now making the difficult transition from socialist to capitalist ideas and institutions-with the added complication of developing institutions independent of the former Czechoslovakia. In 1948 the government nationalized publishing houses and split editorial, distribution, and printing functions into three separate divisions, putting the first two under the Ministry of Culture and the third under the Ministry of Economics. Only six publishers were licensed, and each was confined to a narrowly defined niche. All bookstores were owned by the government.

Under this system, those who belonged to the official Union of Slovak Writers could do fairly well. Typical press runs for best sellers were twenty to thirty thousand copies, and government subsidies kept prices so low that, as translator Peter Kerlick says, people could decide whether to buy a book or a bottle of wine-lover and bread optional and extra, presumably.

In 1989 four hundred publishing houses emerged, most very small. But printing and distribution were and to some extent still are separate, so that publishers have no control over costs. And some have not figured out the connection between demand and supply. One novelist complained to his publisher that copies were not being distributed. Well, the publisher replied, we should keep some for people to buy in a year or so. The novelist, though hardly a trained economist, tried to explain that it might be possible to print more copies and thus increase sales. Apparently he was not successful, for we were unable to find a copy of his new book in any of five bookstores in a large provincial town-or in Bratislava bookstores outside a five-block radius from the Writers Club.

But even if books were distributed rationally, prices are now so high that even the most popular books sell about three thousand copies, and press runs are more typically one thousand for prose and six hundred for poetry. As a result, no one can make a living solely from writing.

Therefore, most writers rely increasingly on external support. A major source is the Slovak Literary Fund, which receives two percent of royalties paid for all creative work. A board independent of the government and composed of members chosen by the various writers' associations administers the fund. Writers who have contracts and can show that they have completed sixty percent of a manuscript can apply for fellowships which free them to write for three or six months. In addition, members of the various writers' organizations can apply once a year for thirty-day residencies, housing and food paid, in one of several houses for writers, including the very plush Budmerice Castle, where, in a room used by Brezhnev and Havel, I wrote the first draft of this paper. (In the words of Gustav Murin, self-described as the oldest young Slovak writer, not all communist ideas were bad.)

Writers can also apply for research grants and for publishing subsidies. But on a day-to-day basis, the most important job of the Literary Fund is to subsidize the Writers Club in Bratislava, for that not only provides a gathering place for writers but features reduced prices for meals prepared by a leading Slovak chef.

The Ministry of Culture is another source of funds. By law, one percent of the annual budget of Slovakia must be devoted to culture. The Ministry has never received anything even close to that, but it still has enough money to subsidize publication of some books and to support the National Center for Slovak Literature, described as "an institution contributing conceptually to the revitalization of the literary process in the new economic conditions." It is subdivided into sections for literary criticism, literary translation, international promotion, distribution, and publishing, including a number of literary magazines and, in English and German, the Slovak Literary Review.

This is an irregularly published tabloid-one in 1996, two in 1997 thus far- devoted to translations, biographical sketches, news of conferences and recent publications, and stories about Slovak publishing houses. For non-Slovaks, this is the most accessible and perhaps the most reliable source of information about Slovak literary life. It seems to represent writers of all genres, schools of opinion, and ages-the youngest in the first three issues born in 1967.

As recipients of official support, writers have found it useful to organize. Under the communists, of course, there was only one organization, the Union of Slovak Writers. (Slovaks insisted on their identity even when they were officially joined to the Czechs.) In December 1989, a group calling itself the "Community of Writers of Slovakia" split from the Union, in order, as its president said, "to protest against the inability or unwillingness of the Congress's participants to clear the communist-totalitarian past of the Union." Slovak PEN already existed, and four other groups subsequently emerged. The Ministry of Culture persuaded them to form the Association of Slovak Writers (AOSS) in order to be able to deal with one group. But in 1992, partly because of the strains over impending separation from the Czechs and the accompanying political controversies, a group calling itself the Society of Slovak Writers withdrew. Not all of these writers were former communists, but most emphasized Slovak nationalist issues and advocated separation from the Czechs, and in varying degrees supported and were supported by the Meeiar regime. Until May 1998, the Society seemed homogenous, but at the annual meeting late in that month there were reports that questions were raised for the first time about the distribution of money to members and about the use of funds gained from privatization to pay ministerial salaries rather than to fund cultural activities.

The other writers' organizations, sometimes described as democratic or cosmopolitan, are generally less enthusiastic about Slovak independence and about the Meeiar regime. The Community of Writers, for example, is dedicated to keeping the sensibility against attempts to build new versions of totality and dictatorship, attempts to liquidate democracy." Currently six groups make up the AOSS: the Community, the Club of Independent Writers, the Club of Nonfiction Writers, the Slovak Center of PEN International, the Union of Hungarian Writers in Slovakia, and the Union of Ukrainian Writers in Slovakia. They describe themselves as "a voluntary and democratic organization of equal and independent writers' organizations [that] pursues the overall interests of Slovak literature and literatures of the nationalities living in Slovakia."

The Society and the various constituent groups in the Association have over three hundred members each. To be admitted to membership in any of these groups, a writer should usually have published two books and be recommended by two current members. Only members can use the Writers Club, and with some exceptions they are the only ones eligible for residencies at the houses for writers. But young writers seem to be less interested than their elders in membership or in the divisions that the two large organizations represent.

Among the older writers, it is generally accepted that people in the two groups are hostile toward each other or at least communicate very little. Ostensibly the divisions are ideological, but in practice the conflict seems to have more to do with limited resources and perhaps even more with the attempt of older writers to see that their work gets into print. One cosmopolitan says that the Society's members are like a man driving a car without brakes down a steep hill. He can steer a little left or right, but basically he is out of control. Another writer agrees that the conflicts have little to do with literature. Debates would be healthy or at least potentially productive if they focused on the role of literature or methods of representation, but there is no real debate or even discussion. The current climate is stultifying and leads, he says, to "thinking along stupid lines."

Writers in the Association tend to resent the higher level of funding given to those who support the Meeiar government, which in turn is suspicious of those who seek funds and contacts abroad and criticize the regime at home. And, as I have said, younger writers are apparently ignoring both those writers nostalgic for tighter control and the accompanying support of pre-1989 days and those who seek to canonize the dissidents or to put themselves into that group retroactively.

Even if Meeiar's coalition does not survive the September election, the situation of Slovak writers as a whole will not improve markedly in the immediate future. The Association might get more funding, the Society less. But the pot will not get larger. Most books are distributed primarily in Bratislava, where only ten percent of Slovaks live. Writers are therefore isolated from most of the population, so much so that they are not even aware of their isolation. And even if the books got beyond the city limits of Bratislava, book prices are too high for wide distribution. And even if they were distributed, according to one intellectual who befriends writers but is not himself a writer, ninety-five percent of Slovaks don't read books at all and the remaining five percent read books only in translation. That leaves the writers to read one another-if they are on the same side politically. That may be unduly cynical.

However, another intellectual is no more hopeful, because, he says, readership and everything else in Slovakia is divided along geographic lines, plains (with a large Hungarian population) in the south and three mountain chains with numerous sharply separated valleys in the north. As a result, he says, Slovaks are prone to what Italians call "campanilesmo," a devotion to the area from which they can see the bell tower of their parish church and an inclination to distrust anyone or anything from anywhere else. This attitude limits another kind of market accessible to some small countries and linguistic groups: the expatriates. Hungary is a good example. But Slovak intellectuals maintain that Slovaks abroad are not a viable market because they carry with them regional rivalries and resentments.

Perhaps more hopeful is the attempt to bring Slovak literature to a wider audience through translation. SLOLIA, or Slovak Literature Abroad, was established in 1995 to fund translations of Slovak literature and to subsidize publication in books or in special sections of foreign magazines. And it is prepared to invite foreign publishers to Slovakia and to conduct seminars and symposia to encourage wider dissemination of Slovak work.

All of this has to do with structural rather than textual matters-that is, with the general situation of the writer rather than the actual writing. That is more difficult for the outsider to comprehend. Still, it is clear that writers are dealing with various legacies from the past: Milan Richter and Jan Johanides write about the Holocaust; Martin {imeeka deals with life under communism in The Year of the Frog, published first in samizdat and currently the only recent Slovak novel available in English. More recently, Gustav Murin has echoed Oscar Wilde's view that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce, in contrasting the generations of 1968 and 1989 in Ako sa ma} (How Are You?), published in 1998 and not yet translated.

Murin's experience may not be typical, but it indicates some of the problems faced by writers over the past fifteen years or so. He completed a first draft of a novel in 1984 and sent it to two Slovak publishers. Both rejected it as too sensitive politically, so it was distributed privately. Murin says he didn't think of it as samizdat, though that is what it was. Three years later, he entered the manuscript in a Czechoslovak federal contest-and won. The prize guaranteed publication, and the manuscript was submitted to Sm|na, a publisher that had rejected it in 1984. They recognized the story, and it still made them nervous. Since they couldn't reject if officially, they temporized until a Prague publisher, Mlade Fronta, issued it in Czech. This was in June 1989, four or five months before the Velvet Revolution.

Murin wanted the novel published in Slovakia, and he offered it to Arega, a publishing house founded by dissidents. Like their predecessors, they didn't refuse it, but they didn't accept it. Thinking that revision might help, and encouraged by the possibility of a film version, Murin kept working on it. Finally he realized that Arega was not going to publish it. Meanwhile, he had become involved with Slovak PEN, and this gave him new insight into issues that previously he had seen as black communists and white dissidents. But, he realized, some of the dissidents had been communists, and in the final revision he deals with the compromises the dissidents made before 1989 and their subsequent attempts to whitewash themselves-themes that, he maintains, are new in Slovak literature. Finally, with financial help from a friend, the novel was published in 1998.

The strongest attacks on the book have apparently come from {imeeka's anti- Meeiar paper, Domino Forum. One contributor to a feature called "What I'm Reading" claimed that she wasn't reading Murin's book, and a week later another contributor and ex-party member wrote that it would be better if Murin were silent. Even Jan Budai, a leader of the 1989 revolution later discredited by revelation of his association with the KGB, is said to regard the book as an attack on the current opposition.

Clearly the controversy over the book is more political than literary. The dissidents want to defeat Meeiar. So does Murin, but he feels that the dissidents need to admit their pasts in order to establish credibility with the people-with whom, like most intellectuals, they have less contact than people on the far right and pragmatists like Meeiar.

Regardless of the quality-or fate-of Murin's book, he is attempting to write about contemporary issues. Of course, not every work of literature is overtly political. Many of the poems in Not Waiting for Miracles: Seventeen Contemporary Slovak Poets (1993) have themes which can be described as universal: love, loss, longing, a rueful recognition that a teen-age son will never again outgrow his shoes or have a haircut. Some of the women poets, notably Tatjana Lehanova, are strikingly though not stridently feminist. There are experiments in prose and poetry ranging from Wittgensteinian analysis of farts to neosurrealist collages. And the young poets featured in the Slovak Literary Review seem almost determinedly unpolitical.

In many ways, of course, the situation of the Slovak writer is like that of writers everywhere: it is difficult to get work done at all. For Slovaks, publishing that work is easier politically than it was before 1989, but financially things are much more difficult. And emotionally the situation is tense.

Before I left the U.S. for Bratislava, Murin indicated by e-mail that he would be glad to see me because Slovak writers are so divided by ideology that he had no one to talk to. This is clearly compared to what, for on our first walk through central Bratislava toward the Writers Club, we halted every fifty feet or so to greet a friend of his, sometimes a cluster of friends. Many of them are writers.

Therefore, if all writers were on speaking terms, they not only wouldn't get any work done, they would be in Zen's paradoxical universe and never reach any destination. The outsider is forced to conclude that while Slovaks may not relish disaster with quite the gusto of their Hungarian neighbors, they are not ready to tempt fate by seeming too happy or fortunate.

Still, if there are nearly seven hundred members of writers' organizations who have published at least two books each, not to speak of unnumbered members of hungry new generations, literature in Slovakia can hardly be regarded as moribund.

University of Oklahoma