turer and administrator in a tertiary-level educational institution. Both also despised the aspects of social amelioration that could be seen both in the US and throughout Europe in the postwar period, as they believed that it flattened complex articulations of cultural tradition, reducing them to economic exchange (again, whether part of capitalism or communism), much in the manner that Le Corbusier wished to raze centuries-old accretions of architecture in cities and replace them with ranks of towerblocks on squat stilts, surrounded by highways. To repeat: Adorno lived in a democracy, whereas Zábrana lived under a Communist regime. That difference, though important, should not occlude continuities. Central to both of their works was the vilification of an epoch that had created what Adorno’s Frankfurt School colleague, Herbert Marcuse, labelled, ‘one-dimensional man.’
5
During his life, Zábrana experienced two severe crackdowns, the first in the wake of the putsch in 1948, and the second after the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. Later in the 1970s, as the regime loosened ever so slightly, even some of Zábrana’s friends and acquaintances began to speculate about adjusting their own careful distance from the state administration. Apparatchiks also began to admit publicly that mistakes had been made, and lessons learned. Zábrana was unconvinced. On such occasions (after a meeting, or after hearing a pronouncement on the radio), he would recite a long and thorough litany of communism’s offenses. In his view, they committed their worst crimes in the early years of the regime, and that guilt would never be erased or mitigated by any compromises or apologies. And variations on one idea repeat throughout the diaries, always presented as irrefutable and final proof of their guilt: they were capable of executing women.10 There are several dead women in The Lesser Histories (‘Dead Girl Remembered,’ ‘For a Dead Girl,’ not one ‘Witch Burning,’ but two). The 10
Zábrana, Celý život, 172, 187, 194–5, 227, 407, 759, 821, 985.
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witches are likely references to the victims of communism. Although only one woman, Milada Horáková, was executed, her death came to symbolize all the women who suffered violence at the hands of the Communists. In those witch-burning poems the accusation is drowned by Zábrana’s sense of guilt that he let this happen. (As one diary entry notes: ‘Am I supposed to spend my whole life agonizing over the memory of how they skewered you on a roasting spit? Nothing seemed more important – then. Nothing seems less interesting – now.’11) The other cases seem, at least in part, expressions of voyeuristic lyricism, reworkings of the old male theme of a young woman’s death, with its mixture of eros and loss. They are also opportunities to survey the era’s collective violence, some of it misogynistic (‘Dead Girl Remembered’), and elsewhere to glimpse the whole world from outside (as at the end of ‘For a Dead Girl’). One or two other poems express a listless suspicion of or cynicism toward women (for instance, ‘Sublet,’ ‘A Sentimental Journey,’ ‘Midnight Monolog’). ‘Jealousy’ in particular brims with animosity and disdain; it is most likely about a woman with whom he had an intense affair in his early Prague days, and who he discovered was cheating on him. There is a forceful sexual edge to most of this, which cannot always be corralled in the sphere of the personal, but is interwoven with the seething political violence of his lifetime (they hanged women). Communism proclaimed itself enlightened and progressive on the question of gender, and did indeed bring about some improvements. So, the flipside of Zábrana’s representations of women above was his detailed sardonic view of the Communist regime’s ideal female. One diary entry quotes a radio program: ‘“…the women at Strahov Stadium – this is a collective expression of the happiness of individually happy Czechoslovak women…” Zábrana carefully notes the date and even time of the broadcast ( June 9, 1975, 11:25am –
11
Zábrana, Celý život, 845.
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one more entry in the book of evidence he is compiling).12 And in 1981, he reports to his diary that Prague is hosting another Congress of Women. The headline in Rudé právo, the Party newspaper, runs: ‘Uniting Women in the Struggle for Peace and against the Threat of Nuclear War…’ Zábrana comments that ‘when I saw this, I realized it was a belated but cogent rejoinder (the first two words, at least) to a poem I wrote more than a quarter of a century ago: …there still are crowds of solitary women. What’s important is that they never unite.13
(Again, for the book of evidence, Zábrana gives the page number and title of his own collection.) A feminist of our time might see this as an expression of the wish to keep women separate and governable by men, as objects of male desire. Indeed, there are many passages that mull over the sexual attractions of women, but this may be an anachronistic reading. Communists did not allow citizens to form associations outside official structures, and that included any feminist organization. Some of these ideas come together in ‘Right-thinking Women,’ about his Stakhanovite fellow female factory workers in his early Prague days at Tatra Smíchov. No passage in the diaries expresses hostility toward the feminism of his mother’s circle. But that earlier feminism of the First Republic was co-opted and emptied of much meaning by the Communist regime. So, if we are to read Zábrana as anti-feminist, we must also acknowledge that the only possible version of feminism that was active in his adult life was organized and promoted by a repressive regime.
12 13
Zábrana, Celý život, 377. Zábrana, Celý život, 847.
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