[In the following essay, Hajek provides a brief overview of Czech underground writing during the 1970s and later.]

Placed in Bech's hands, it felt lighter than, from the thickness of it, he had expected. Only the right-hand pages held words; the left-hand held mirrored ghosts of words, the other side showing through. He had been returned to some archetypal sense of what a book was: it was an elemental sheaf, bound together by love and daring, to be passed with excitement from hand to hand. Bech had imagined the pathos, the implied pecking of furtive typewriters, but not the defiant beauty of the product.

—John Updike, Bech in Czech

These books irritate the Western reader by what they're saying—by the intensity of participation they demand of him.

—Jiří Gruša, What's a Life Worth? (an interview)

Samizdat was not a Czech invention. The very word has been borrowed from another language, Russian. It describes homemade spirit, too often the only consolation left to a desperate people when spiritual resources have failed them.

It was a big backward step, too. Six hundred years after Gutenberg, the writers of a country where the first book had been printed ten years before the same feat was achieved by Caxton were thrown back almost overnight into the Middle Ages. In the early 1970s, the freeze that allowed the premature Prague Spring of 1968 drove many Czech writers into exile, while a publication ban affected the best of those who stayed. The number of outstanding authors forcibly segregated from their readership exceeded any such measures taken against literature in the Stalinist 1950s. Few had expected that this absurdity would last for a full twenty years, but the unabating fury of the regime soon convinced them that culture was in for a long and cruel winter.

After initial stupefaction at the systematic devastation of an essential part of Czech national life (in Slovakia it never reached quite the same proportions), the writers' instincts revived and they started to look for substitute means of addressing their audience. At first, they resorted to reading their manuscripts to each other in Ivan Klíma's home, but this rather intellectually incestuous arrangement soon proved unsatisfactory, particularly when the political police suddenly developed an interest in such literary gatherings. No one could have blamed the writers had they given in to despair. But instead of obliterating the memory of their vocation with the help of samogon (homemade brew), they decided to make use of the other and more beneficial self-help invention of the Russian intellectual at odds with the authorities—samizdat.

From a clandestine network of friends passing to each other typed copies of their new work, the initiative developed over the years into a parallel publishing system. It could never compete with the huge printings of bland works of unobjectionable authors with which the official publishing houses were flooding the book market, but at least in cities the inquisitive reader did not have much difficulty in obtaining access to what was in fact a banned literature. Samizdat was also an important source of new writing for the equally active and enterprising publishers of Czech (and some Slovak) books in exile.

Czech literature had seldom enjoyed the luxury of existing as the intellectual self-indulgence of a privileged group surrounded by a dark sea of illiteracy. Throughout the many centuries of its history it had followed closely—perhaps too closely—the social and political life of the country, and there had been many periods when it took upon itself the duty of contributing to the erudition and refinement of the population.

In view of the tradition of addressing national problems more or less directly, it would not have been surprising if Czech samizdat prose of the 1970s and 1980s had decided to cast aside aesthetic concerns and had instead turned bluntly to the task of providing inspiration and instilling fortitude in a nation once again suppressed. In fact, a few academics in the West were so sure that this would happen that they dismissed samizdat and exile writing beforehand and wasted two decades searching for rare incidences of talent and quality solely in books that were properly printed and bound in Czechoslovakia.

With a few exceptions, however, the expected politicization of Czech samizdat prose did not take place at all. That is not to say that authors who had been almost physically pushed to the fringes of society retreated into an embittered solipsistic isolation. They were of course deprived of the chance to acquire immediate experience in certain areas that were now closed to them, such as public life or the workplace. But the barrier in the case of the latter was occasionally breached—as Václav Havel's play Audience and Ivan Klíma's novel Love and Garbage witness—while an exciting substitute for the former could be found in the intense relationships of the dissident ghetto, as depicted in Ludvík Vaculík's novel The Czech Dream Book.

This concentration on the essential aspects of life and the human condition, which the dissidents referred to as living in truth, is reflected in much of the banned authors' writing. It may not be obvious at first sight: for that they had become too sophisticated. There is certainly none of the nineteenth-century didacticism and patriotic fervor practiced by their forefathers when they faced a similar situation under Austrian rule. The dissident writers of the 1970s and 1980s took a broader view. But there is no hiding the fact that their prose is written by people living in a kind of open, unhealing wound who viewed with amazement the tenacity of the absurdity into which the country was once again plunged.

The samizdat (or “unofficial”) literature of the period is often compared to Kafka's writing. However, in a sense he just described in his own peculiar way an absurdity that had been endemic in that part of the world for a long time. How long it had festered there is exposed in the present volume both by Jan Trefulka's historical fairy tale and by Egon Bondy's seemingly straight account of a historical event. Other stories, Karel Pecka's for instance, present current versions of the same phenomenon. All three of them are typical “Czech stories,” as such tales of painful hilarity have become known.

Pain is an ever-present overtone: it is forced into the open in Eda Kriscová's short story, in which an attempt is made to exorcise it; but besides individual pain there is also a bass note of more general suffering that softly reverberates through the background elsewhere. Quite often it is related to the collapse of morality: the erosion of social ethics was one of the striking features of Czechoslovakia's recent past, and as it affected even the most intimate aspects of private lives, it could not have been ignored by writers. Lenka Procházková reflects on a case of callous self-interest in Come Have a Taste, and the contrast between the banality of the story itself and the poignancy of the treatment is as imaginative as the subdued, gentle moralism of Alexander Kliment, who posits an illusive world of perennial values, where even death behaves decently, against the very real evil unleashed all around.

Any comment on the oppressive climate in which they lived usually appeared in the work of banned samizdat writers only after it had undergone a transformation into such allegory. Sometimes the process may have been so subtle that the hint would escape an uninitiated reader. Otherwise there was little direct reference to political realities. In this respect, Ludvík Vaculík was exceptional. While many of his colleagues depended on introspection, he commented relentlessly on the state of affairs in Czechoslovakia in his feuilletons—concise, penetrating pieces of personal, often slightly idiosyncratic opinion that gained him great popularity in Czechoslovakia and admiration abroad. His writing is an outstanding example of that distinctly East European sublimation of politics into literature.

Samizdat has also provided uncommon insights into the nature of literary creation. A literature written for no reward, in conditions of high risk of persecution, with little hope of dissemination, which could not really call things by their proper names. Who were these people who even in such circumstances chose to dedicate their lives to the suffering and joy brought by putting pen to paper? Was writing for them merely a lifeline? Or a means of reasserting fertile variety against the deadening monotony of a dogmatic system? What kind of literature did they produce when they were liberated from the demands of patriotic education, ideology, and a wide readership, while being completely insulated from and immune to any commercial pressures? Will they and their work survive now that conditions have radically changed again?