Biography
Pavel Kohout is one of the most controversial figures in postwar Czech cultural and political history. A poet, author, and playwright, Kohout has been influential as a devoted Stalinist, a communist reformer, a dissident involved in the underground, and finally as a persona non grata in his homeland. He remains a highly regarded and successful European author.
Born in 1928 to a middle-class family in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Kohout was graduated from high school in 1947 and then studied arts at the Charles University in Prague, from which he was graduated in 1952. He simultaneously embarked on his literary career by publishing, in 1945, his first verses. Between 1947 and 1949, Kohout worked for the Czechoslovak Radio and, after the communist coup in 1948, experienced a meteoric rise in his career as he became cultural attaché in Moscow (1949-1950), the editor in chief of the satiric weekly Dikobraz (Porcupine, 1950-1952), and then the editor of the Czechoslovak Soldier (1953-1955). Finally, after the inauguration of television broadcasting, he worked as an editor for Czechoslovak Television (1955-1957).
Disillusioned with the West, which had ceded Czechoslovakia to the Nazis and their atrocities as part of the “Appeasement Policy” of 1938, Kohout, like many of his countrymen (including author Kundera), became infatuated with Stalinist communism. A popular figure in Prague in the 1950’s, Kohout grandstanded publicly in favor of communists, certainly aware and even approving of the terrible crimes perpetrated by communist leaders in Czechoslovakia (thousands of dissidents, including poets, were imprisoned in mining camps or executed). Kohout supported the communists by writing satirical poems and plays lambasting the enemies of “our socialist state,” even to the point of accusing his personal enemies of anticommunism and applying to join the secret police (he was declined).
During the Nikita Khrushchev years, it gradually became clear to Kohout and other Czech cultural figures that they had allowed their country to become a subjugated province of the Soviet Union and would never achieve the utopia they had hoped communism would provide. The 1960’s marked a rise in a reformist communist movement in Czechoslovakia for which Kohout became as visible and as aggressive an advocate as he had been for Stalinism in the 1950’s. This was for him a far riskier prospect because now he opposed the dangerous and murderous political regime he had helped to create.
Kohout’s first stage triumph was his play Taková láska (such a love), which became the most performed play in Czechoslovakia, with 770 performances within four years of its appearance. It ran for more than five hundred performances in neighboring East Germany and was performed abroad—in the Soviet Union, Israel, South America, and South Africa. Kohout’s surprising success has to be considered in the light of the stilted, sterile dramatic productions of dogmatic Socialist Realism, which inhibited not only theater but also all the arts in the countries that subscribed to it. In Taková láska, Kohout rejected Socialist Realism in a play that, although by no means revolutionary or highly original by today’s standards, was nevertheless a courageous application of techniques that had been pioneered by such playwrights as Luigi Pirandello and Bertolt Brecht. This was enough to win for him the fame that he continues to enjoy.
Kohout engaged in a dialogue with Günter Grass in 1967, during the highly politically charged atmosphere on the eve of the heady experience that resulted in the Prague Spring, an ill-fated democratic revolution that was the culmination of reforms instigated by Kohout and others to achieve what they called “communism with a human face.” The revolution incited the Warsaw Pact in August...
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of 1968: a check on the reformers that ended with Soviet tanks rolling into Prague to establish a vicious neo-Stalinist regime that persisted through the 1980’s. The damage inflicted by the hardline communists resulted in a general demoralization and arrested the social development of the Czech people. Kohout’s correspondences with Grass were published in the aftermath of this crackdown, elevating Kohout to a level of international celebrity almost equal to that of Grass. During this time Kohout also enjoyed his one and only Broadway production:Poor Murderer, a play based on the short story “Msyl” by Leonid N. Andreev, appeared at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, running from October of 1976 to January of 1977 for a total of eighty-seven performances. Directed by Herbert Berghof, the production starred Laurence Luckinbill: Both men also worked on the English translation.
In 1967 and 1968, Kohout was among the most politically active writers during the remarkable congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union (1967) and during the process of liberal reforms (1968). He stood in the forefront of those who pressured the Communist government to undertake such reforms as would turn the country away from the inhumanity inherent in the communist system and make it respectful of the democratic and humanistic values befitting a central European country. For his collaboration with the communist reformers of the Prague Spring, he was later, following the Soviet military invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, branded a “counterrevolutionary.” Kohout’s characteristic and courageous reply to the regime that successfully managed to turn the clock back was to accept the challenge expressed in the label “counterrevolutionary” and to publish abroad his Aus dem Tagebuch eines Konterrevolutionaers (1969; From the Diary of a Counterrevolutionary, 1972). Indeed, many of Kohout’s works written in the late 1960’s and throughout the 1970’s were first published in German, although written in Czech.
During the crackdown, Kohout quite courageously joined the dissident underground with his characteristic aggressive approach. He became a close collaborator with Václav Havel and actively assisted in the drafting of an important human rights manifesto called Charter 77 in 1977. Kohout’s production of underground theater despite the Soviet prohibitions attracted the attention of Czech-born playwright Tom Stoppard, whose Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (pr. 1979, pb. 1980) was inspired by a 1977 visit with Kohout. This document attempted to hold the government to its previous agreements, such as its signing of the Helsinki Accord, which committed Czechoslovakia to a far-reaching acceptance of international norms of behavior that respected human rights. Havel was jailed and persecuted for his dissidence, Kohout was not, although he was perhaps more hated than Havel. The secret police attempted to assassinate Kohout, but the two policemen sent refused to carry out the murder: This scenario is eerily echoed by the events of Havel’s play Largo Desolato (pb. 1985; English translation, 1987), in which a dissident awaits assassination only to be told he is no longer important enough to warrant a bullet. Kohout was allowed, in 1978, to go to Vienna, Austria, to direct Nikolai Gogol’s Revizor (pr., pb. 1836; The Inspector General, 1890) in Vienna’s Burgtheater. Mercifully, Kohout was happy to find in Austria many loyal supporters among the theatergoers as well as among the influential personalities, a fact reflected in his winning the prestigious Austrian State Prize.
Being realistic about the true motivation behind the Czechoslovak authorities’ permission that allowed him to stay in Austria, Kohout brought along an Austrian television crew as he returned to the border crossing, sensing that he might not be allowed back. In 1982 Kohout dramatically landed at the Prague airport and demanded to see his daughter, further vexing the secret police. In 1989, the Soviets were removed from Czechoslovakia in a successful democratic revolution, and Havel was made president of the new Czech Republic, but his friend Kohout would never be allowed to return to Prague or reclaim his Czech citizenship. Kohout continues to write novels appreciated by German-and English-speaking countries, including his The Widow Killer, a 1940’s murder mystery featuring a Gestapo officer questioning his devotion to the Nazis, perhaps just as Kohout once questioned his devotion to hardline Stalinists.