SOURCE: "The Czech Nobel Laureate Jaroslav Seifert," in World Literature Today, Vol. 59, No. 2, Spring, 1985, pp. 173-75.

[Harkins is an American educator and critic who specializes in Slavic Studies. In the essay below, he provides a brief overview of Seifert's career.]

The award of the 1984 Nobel Prize in Literature to the aging Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert naturally raised many questions—hardly new ones. The Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy has demonstrated a striking preference for lyric poetry in recent years, a preference that the reading public scarcely shares. At least five prizewinners from the past eighteen years have been poets, not counting Seifert himself. The award to Pablo Neruda in 1971 reminds us parenthetically that this Chilean poet had taken his unusual (but somehow Spanish-sounding) pen name from Seifert's great countryman, Jan Neruda (1834–91), who, unfortunately, did not himself live quite long enough to qualify for the prize.

As a writer, Seifert has the distinction of having survived the great period of Czech interwar literature (he began to publish in 1920) and having continued to be productive in recent decades, even under communism (though for a time he could not publish). Thus he unites in his person the two great eras of Czech literature in our century: the interwar period of the twenties and thirties, and the "thaw" period of the sixties. No other Czech writer of major stature has accomplished this, save Seifert's great (perhaps even greater?) fellow poet, Vladimír Holan (1905–80). The time of World War II narrowed the ranks of Czech literature: the brothers Čapek, Vladimír Vančura, and Karel Poláček perished between 1938 and 1945. The toll was unusually heavy among writers of prose; the lyric poets proved longer-lived. The death of František Halas in 1949, of Vítězslav Nezval in 1958, and finally of Holan himself in 1980 eliminated Seifert's competition.

Born in Prague in 1901 into a working-class family, Seifert began as a leftist poet; his two collections Město v slzách (The City in Tears; 1920) and Samá láska (Nothing but Love; 1923) are among the earliest and most outstanding productions of so-called Czech proletarian poetry. The first collection depicted the poverty and struggle of the city while recalling the sufferings of the war; the second linked love and sensual pleasure to the future victory of the proletariat. Along with Halas and other young poets, however, Seifert soon fell victim to a curious Marxist ideological deviation. The Marxist theoretician Karel Teige (1900–51) came to preach a new gospel of "poetism," whereby poets should celebrate the sensual joys of modern urbanized life and its new, partly mechanized pleasures. They should also celebrate the poetic word as expressed in punning and other sorts of verbal play and in fresh poetic imagery. Poetism was influenced by Dadaism and Italian futurism, and it in turn was later to merge with Czech surrealism. This joyful playing with words and images was to prove agreeable for Seifert, who was naturally of a sunnier disposition than are most great poets, but its presumptive assertion that the poet might look forward to the victory of the proletariat before actually storming the fortress of the bourgeoisie was of course an ideological heresy, one that subsequently had to be expunged.

Seifert produced two poetist collections, Na vlnách T.S.F. (On the Radio Waves; 1925) and Slavík zpívá špatně (The Nightingale Sings Poorly; 1926). The title of the second collection is Seifert's reproach to himself for his ideological deviation, but the poetist heresy still continues, now mixed with a note of the horror of existence, a note that is perhaps a bit strained in his case. This era came to an end for Seifert in 1929, when he and six other party writers signed a manifesto rejecting the new leadership of Klement Gottwald. In reply, the party expelled the seven writers, and Seifert, who had supported himself through leftist journalism, now went over to the Social Democrats.

With the youthful temptations of proletarianism and poetism put behind him, Seifert entered upon his maturity and the first period of his greatness. In his next two collections, Jablko s klína (An Apple from One's Lap; 1933) and Ruce Venušiny (The Arms of Venus; 1935), he achieved, for the first time, a firm balance between form and content, a balance among the elements of language (expressive and at times bordering on the colloquial), images, and a songlike verse intonation. At the same time a new cheerfulness emerged, a tone quite exceptional in that gloomy period, obsessed with the Great Depression and terrified by the rise of Hitler. Seifert's new mood may seem to have resembled that of an ostrich with its head in the sand, but in fact it was more or less an expression of the optimistic Czech spirit, embodied in a more vulgar way in Jaroslav Hašek's good soldier Švejk. Love is the subject of many of these verses, a quite concretely limned love, as the title of the second collection suggests. Dialogue is common, and the use of gender in Czech past-tense verbs makes possible an unusual economy in the identification of the conversing sexual partners.

       Líbal jsi mne na čelo či ústa,
       nevím
       —zaslechla jsem jenom sladký hlas
       a tma hustá
       obklopila úžas polekaných řas.
 
       Na čelo jsem políbal tě v spěchu,
       nebo omámila mě
       vůně tvého proudícího dechu,
       ale nevím
 
       —zaslechl jsem jenom sladký hlas
       a tma hustá
       obklopila úžas polekaných řas,
       libalas mne na čelo či ústa?
 
       (Whether you [the man] kissed me on the forehead or the mouth
       I do not know
       I [the woman] heard only a sweet voice
       and thick darkness
       enveloped the horror of frightened eyelids.
 
       On the forehead I [the man] kissed you in haste
       for I was intoxicated with
       the perfume of your streaming breath,
       but I do not know
 
       I [the man] heard only a sweet voice
       and thick darkness
       enveloped the horror of frightened eyelids,
       did you [the woman] kiss me on the forehead or the mouth?)

Events caught up with Seifert, and in 1938, on the eve of the Munich agreement, he published a collection entitled Zhasněte světla (Put Out the Lights), the title of which was to become a memorable phrase evocative of the war for his people. That war made Seifert an involuntary prisoner of his native city, Prague, while the German Occupation restricted his choice of themes. In Světlem oděná (Clad in Light; 1940), the first of his collections to concentrate on a single topic, he turned to a celebration of the beauties of Prague itself. He is mindful of the city's complex and glorious, yet often troubled past, suggesting the unutterable thought of the sadness of the present. Indeed, the themes of sensual love and of Prague (itself often the object of the poet's sensual love—in Czech the name of Prague is feminine in gender) are Seifert's favorite themes, and they appear in his early periods as well as in his mature work and his most recent poetry.

Přilba hlíny (The Helmet of Clay; 1945) celebrates the Prague Uprising against German rule in May of that year. The long waiting of the war and the admiration of Prague's beauties now achieve their own apotheosis.

                        "Praze"
 
        Tak jsem tě miloval a miloval jen slovy,
        má Praho líbezná; když pláš svůj šeříkový
        jsi rozhalila včera odhodlaně,
        oč více řekli ti, kdo měli zbraně.
 
        .....
 
        Na dlažbě leží mrtví a krev studu
        mě polévá a věčně, věčně budu
        si vyčítat, že nejsem mezi nimi.
        Ty město statečné, jsi mezi statečnými
        a budeš věčně, věčně, všechny časy.
 
        Ten den ti chyběl do tvé slunné krásy.
 
        (So I loved you and loved you with words,
        my beauteous Prague; when yesterday with resolution
        you spread open your lilac cape,
        how much more they could say, those who had arms.
 
        .....
 
        On the pavement lay the dead, and the blood of shame
        washed me, and ever, ever shall I blame myself
        that I was not among them.
        O hero city—among heroes
        You will exist eternally, for all time.
 
        That day made perfect and complete your sunny beauty.)

The events of February 1948 brought the Communists to power, led by that same Klement Gottwald whom Seifert had rejected as a leader in 1929. The Social Democratic Party was hurriedly and almost forcibly merged with the Communists. Seifert had thus lost his political identity, and in 1949 he retired from newspaper work. If he continued to devote himself to poetry, it was written "for the drawer," as East Europeans have come to say. He did succeed in publishing several collections of children's verse, the ideological qualifications for which were less rigorous. Unlike Nezval, he was no poetic collaborator with the new regime.

When the question of a writer's freedom could again be posed openly, Seifert stood up to be counted. At the Second Congress of Czechoslovak Writers at the end of April 1956, it was he and his fellow poet František Hrubín who openly called for an end to controls on literature. Seifert proposed that writers should serve as mankind's conscience, no doubt intending this as a rejoinder to Stalin's formula of writers as "the engineers of human souls." In 1968, during the Prague Spring, he served on a commission for the rehabilitation of writers who had been persecuted.

The Prague Spring made it possible for Seifert to publish again, and in 1967 he brought out two collections of verse (presumably written earlier), Odlévání zvonů (The Casting of Bells) and Halleyová kometa (Halley's Comet). These volumes initiated a new phase in Seifert's work, with their style of utter simplicity and directness. The older, songlike poetry gives way here to a new poetry of essential statement. The style is so simple, direct, and bare that many of these poems could be used in language classes for teaching Czech to foreigners.

The aftermath of the Prague Spring saw the poet again in disfavor. Still, he continued to serve as president of the Union of Czech Writers until 1970, when increasing reaction made it impossible to go on and the union itself had to be dissolved. He was quoted in an émigré journal published in Rome as telling Gustav Husák, the new president, "You want us [the writers] to support your position because you know that we enjoy moral authority in the nation. But should we support you, we would lose that authority, and then we would be of no use to you." The avenues of publication were closed to the poet, and throughout the early seventies he was not even mentioned in the Czechoslovak public press. Like many of his fellow writers, he began to publish abroad. A long poem, Morový sloup (The Plague Column), one almost certainly written years earlier, appeared in Germany in 1971 and again in 1977, as did a volume of lyrics, Deštník z Piccadilly (An Umbrella from Piccadilly) in 1978. This caused the authorities to relent in Czechoslovakia, and the latter collection, with one poem missing, appeared in Prague the following year.

The Plague Column (American translation as The Plague Monument) is probably Seifert's masterpiece. As a long poem, it is virtually unprecedented in his oeuvre. A strange mixture of gloom and optimism, it deals with the poet's survival of the Stalinist era (in Czechoslovakia, from 1948 to 1953, when Stalin died). The title is a great and terrifying image of Czech history, which the poet identifies with his own precarious fate.

        Jenom si nedejte namluvit,
        že mor ve městě ustal.
        Viděl jsem ještě mnoho rakví
        vjíždět do této brány,
        která nebyla jediná.
 
        Mor dosud žurí a lékaři
        dávají nemoci patrně jiná jména,
        aby nevznikla panika.
        Je to stále táž stará smrt,
        nic jiného,
        a je tak nakažlivá,
        že jí neunikne ani živáček.
        (Don't be talked into believing
        that the plague here has let up.
        I've seen many fresh coffins
        coming through this gate
        and it's not the only way in.
 
        The plague still rages and the doctors
        are apparently giving it different names
        to prevent panic.
        But it's still the same old death,
        nothing else.
        and it's so contagious
        no living thing can escape it.)

The poet finds only a partial refuge in poetry and love.

        Co jsem napsal rondelů a písní!
        Byla válka na všech stranách světa
        a já šeptal náušnicím s routou
        milostné verše.
        Za to se trochu stydím.
        Či vlastně ani ne.
 
        (How many verses and rondels I've written!
        The whole world was at war
        and I whispered love verses
        to costly earrings.
        I'm a bit ashamed of that.
        Or actually I'm not.)

In spite of his pessimism as a prisoner of Czech fate and Czech history, the poet is not without hope, for love remains. He refers unenviously to the fate of the Czech émigrés.

        Ti, kdož odešli
        a rozprchli kvapem po zemích,
        už to snad poznali:
        Svět je hrozný!
 
        Nemilují a nejsou milováni.
        My aspožn milujem.
 
        (Those who hurried away
        to scatter themselves over the world,
        perhaps they've found out that
        the world is horrible!
 
        They do not love and they are not loved.
        We at least love.)

The lyrics of An Umbrella from Piccadilly end with an autobiographical statement that might seem to terminate the aged poet's career. Again he defends his right to love; love is the closest thing we have to miracle in this world. Life has proved too brief, however, and before the poet realizes it, death is at his door.

What claim does Seifert have to the Nobel Prize? We have seen that he is the last surviving member of a great literary generation. It must be added that he is a thoroughly Czech national writer, not so much of landscape or history (though his Prague poems do fall into this category) as of mood and attitude toward life. His cult of optimism and love is doubtless closer to the mood of his countrymen than was his fellow poet Halas's cult of gloom and death. In his lifetime he has created at least two kinds of poetic speech and commanded them thoroughly, one of song and one of statement; both are totally free from rhetoric.

To compare him with great poets of other national traditions would be invidious, for lyric poetry is too firmly planted in its own language. And in any case, the reason for selecting him may well have been that he was an East European, perhaps that he was a Czech. Karel Čapek was once denied the prize, in all likelihood because he was considered at the time too controversial as a declared foe of Nazi Germany. No Czech writer, in fact, had ever received it prior to the 1984 award. Seifert enjoys a unique position among his fellow writers: he has been a dissident and has published abroad, yet he is still, at the end of his long career, acceptable to the Prague regime. So, unlike Pasternak, he has been officially permitted to receive the prize and enjoy its honors. They are well merited.