Vienna to Prague

This is a tale about heroism of ordinary people, not about epic feats. A beautifully written story with a sober yet elegant and poetic style. The trains are an essential part of all the characters’ lives in their jobs and their personal memories, and are related to the fight of Czechs partisans at the end of the II World War, which is the time the novel is placed. The novel is both dramatic and comic, and Hrabal's sense of humor is one of his most remarkable features, following the best tradition of Czech's Literature, particularly Jaroslav Hasek. The mixture of drama and comedy, as well as the human touch and tenderness which envelops the characters makes this novel very moving to every reader.

The Munich crisis of 1938, in which Great Britain and France decided to appease Hitler's demands to annex the Sudentenland, has provoked a vast amount of historical writing. But historians have had, until now, only a vague understanding of the roles played by the Soviet Union and by Czechoslovakia, the country whose very existence was at the center of the crisis. Igor Lukes explores this turbulent and tragic era from the new perspective of the Prague government itself. At the center of this study is Edvard Benes, a Czechoslovak foreign policy strategist and a major player in the political machinations of the era. The work analyzes the Prague Government's attempts to secure the existence of the Republic of Czechoslovakia in the treacherous space between the millstones of the East and West. It studies Benes's relationship with Joseph Stalin, outlines the role assigned to Czechoslovak communists by the VIIth Congress of the Communist International in 1935, and dissects Prague's secret negotiations with Berlin and Benes's role in the famous Tukhachevsky affair. Using secret archives in both Prague and Russia, this work is an accurate and original rendition of the events that sparked the Second World War.

These five mystery tales by an acclaimed Czech émigré writer feature the melancholy Prague detective of The Mournful Demeanor of Lieutenant Boruvka and Sins for Father Knox. Engaging, well written, and witty, they also offer chilling glimpses of life in Czechoslovakia around the time of the Soviet invasion. When the trails of murders of several young girls lead to people with political connections (a son of a high official involved with illegal drugs, a trucking company party secretary running a theft ring, a bank manager with years of party service, and a Soviet soldier), the cases are hushed up. To avenge his growing sense of outrage, Boruvka lets the man responsible for the death of a fanatical secret police informer escape out of the country, ending behind bars himself.

Several of these interconnected, intensely poignant stories evoke the author's comic fishing trips with his charming father, a champion traveling salesman and avid fisherman. Other pieces evoke the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. In "The Death of Beautiful Deer," the father poaches a deer to give his sons a last good meal before their departure to a concentration camp. In another story, before he is himself deported, the father again risks his life to fish for carp in a pond that as a Jew he no longer owns. This first English translation of Pavel's work captures the magic of his touchingly poetic, bittersweet tales about the joys of fishing, the beauty of nature, and the strength we derive from it.

This big, lush political novel spans 20 years of recent Czech history, culminating in the Prague Spring and the Russian invasion of 1968. Shortly after the war, Danny Smiricky, the cynical hero of Skvorecky's novel The Engineer of Human Souls, is present--although dozing--in a rural Bohemian church when a statue of St. Joseph moves on its pedestal, seemingly of its own volition. The Catholic clergy call it a miracle, but the Communist secret police conduct their own investigation. Alleging that the event was a fraud, they torture and murder the attending priest. In the more liberal political climate of the late '60s, Smiricky sets out to help a crusading journalist solve the mystery; the novel is loosely structured as a detective story, complete with clues and false trails. But Smiricky's real role is devil's advocate, standing aside from the unfolding drama of modern history--he refers to himself as a "Good Soldier Svejk"--in order to comment on it. As a writer of well-received operettas, Smiricky has special access to the intellectuals involved in the Prague Spring uprising, and he takes amusing, nasty jibes at the real participants. Czech President Havel becomes "the world-famous playwright Hejl" who is already organizing for his future political party; the writer Bohumil Hrabal, also portrayed in an unflattering light, has been transformed into the "gifted non-party novelist Nabal"; etc. Skvorecky's ambitious attempt to capture the spirit and feel of this turbulent era makes for fascinating reading.

This collection of seven short stories, one named for each morning of the week, is a nice introduction to the writing of Ivan Klima. He is a teller of tales and is in his element in the short story medium. The writing style evident in these stories, unlike some of his novels, is simple and accessible to any reader. The stories are light but they do reveal some of his world views. In his Tuesday Morning story Klima's, a Czech writer, is reunited with an old paramour 20 years after she fled Czechoslovakia for the West. They had no emotional relationship but spent an idyllic spring and summer meeting for a tryst every lunch time in a vacant lot in Prague. They meet for lunch upon her return and she asks him why he never left Czechoslovakia. Each story tells a small tale all are well written, amusing, and thoughtful. While this is far from Klima's most profound work they do paint a picture of life in Prague as it was lived by Klima and those around them. It is also clear from Merry Mornings that Klima loves Prague. It is his city and he is as attached to it as native Parisian might be to Paris.

The city of Prague has inspired a lot of fine literature, and Paul Wilson has done the English-speaking world a vast favor by compiling this anthology of 23 Prague stories. There are classics by the likes of Franz Kafka, Jan Neruda, and Ivan Klima, and lesser-known works making their English-translation debuts. There are autobiographical pieces, fiction, legend, stories from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, tales from the Soviet regime, and contemporary pieces from the Czech Republic. After reviewing Prague's history--cultural and political--he concludes that paradox is at Prague's heart, and irony and ridicule are its primary tools. Both devices are employed deftly throughout Wilson's anthology, providing clever, lyrical, and moving snippets of Prague's complex reality.

In this much-needed chronicle of a fascinating people, Hugh Agnew offers the first up-to-date single-volume history of the Czechs, providing an introduction to the major themes and contours of Czech history for the general reader. Agnew presents the most detailed chronology of the region currently available, from prehistory and the first Slavs to the Czech Republic's entrance into the European Union. Taking into account both Western and Marxist insights—as well as the input of the newest generation of Czech historians—he furnishes a comprehensive fusion of three different focuses on Czech history: a political-diplomatic view, a social-economic view, and a cultural-intellectual view.

This collection of critical pieces by the acclaimed Czech author of Waiting for the Darkness, Waiting for the Light offers a fine introduction to Klima's life, intellectual development and literary and cultural preoccupations. It includes essays on the author's boyhood, partly spent in the Nazi concentration camp Terezin; on his beginnings as a writer; and an interview with Philip Roth in which Klima expresses his views on Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera, among other people and topics. There is also an essay on the creation of Prague's samizdat press and some rather cranky feuilletons, short pieces written for same. But the longer the essays, the more powerful. Klima's description of the genesis of organized opposition to the Czech Communist government after 1968 and his long closing work, delineating the role that certain painful personal experiences played in Kafka's writing, especially of The Castle and In the Penal Colony, are particularly important. While exposing readers to Klima, this well-constructed collection will also help acquaint them with contemporary Czech letters, and with the circumstances surrounding the non-violent "velvet" revolution of 1989, one of recent history's most inspired episodes of intellectual activism and courage.

Having spent most of his life out of favor with his country's government, noted Czech author Klima shows what it's like for everyone-dissident and no dissident alike-to come out on the other side of the revolution. His protagonist, Pavel, who was imprisoned in his youth for attempting to flee beyond the barbed wire to freedom, simply tries to get by working as the cameraman for a TV station. When the Velvet Revolution comes, he finds himself cast in the role of reactionary by the brave new youth of his country and by his friend Peter, with whom he attempted to escape. In the end, freedom is not as good as it looked: power shifts are meaningless, people scramble for economic gain, and a sense of confused uncertainty reigns. "I'm always trying to satisfy the people who make the decisions," concedes Pavel. In taut, uncluttered prose, Klima dispassionately examines the despair of people who have been trying to satisfy others for so long that they no longer know how to find a place for themselves in the world.