Slavic Ritual - The London Magazine

The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, Bohumil Hrabal, trans. James Naughton, NYRB Classics, 2015, 320pp, £10.99 (paperback)

In the region now known as the Czech Republic, free speech has experienced a turbulent history. From Nazi occupation to 1968’s Prague Spring, and later the Velvet Revolution, outspoken dissenters faced harsh punishments. One such victim was Bohumil Hrabal, recognised as one of Czech literature’s greatest voices, whose work was banned twice in his lifetime. English-speaking readers have been exposed to select writings, and now available in an edition translated with skill and charm by James Naughton is his portrait of the rapidly changing Czech landscape, The Little Town Where Time Stood Still.

Born in 1914 in Moravia, Hrabal had a largely proletarian career, and his familiarity with hard work is apparent in these realistic depictions of working life, with much of his writing focusing on the intimate ways upheaval affects normal people. When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops, Hrabal was banned from publishing but continued to release illegal samizdat editions, commonly used by dissenters. After publicly renouncing his criticism of the Socialist regime in 1975, he was considered ‘rehabilitated’ and once more permitted publication, and subsequently his work became accessible to a much larger readership. While Hrabal’s persecution is noteworthy, more interesting here is how it influenced his portrayals of protest and transformation at microcosmic levels.

This edition consists of two stories; Cutting it Short and The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, published in samizdat in 1976 and 1973, united through shared characters and several interweaving tales involving the population of the rural town of Nymburk. Set before WWII, Cutting it Short is the portrait of Maryška, a vivacious and strong minded woman who is constantly in conflict with her husband, Francin, over her ‘improper’ behaviour. The second story is narrated by Maryška and Francin’s son, and follows the final years of WWII. Both stories star Francin’s brother, Josef ‘Uncle’ Pepin, a big-mouthed, large-hearted veteran of WWI, whose charming, saucy commentaries contribute largely to the book’s humour.

The facts of Hrabal’s narratives are generally grounded in autobiogra- phy. Hrabal’s mother, Marie, met his stepfather František while working in a brewery, the family later moving to Nymburk where František became manager of another brewery; closely paralleling events in The Little Town Where Time Stood Still. Such authenticity underscores the veracity of Hrabal’s portrayals; that these people seem so genuine is due both to his masterful creation of complex, believable characters, and the fact that they were folks he knew. Consequently, the effects of socio-political change upon them is palpable, and encourages us to imagine how we would feel if our little town was being irrevocably transformed.

In Cutting it Short, we follow Maryška through her daily life in the sleepy town of Nymburk. Unfulfilled by her role as housewife, she takes it upon herself to find entertainment (and trouble) around the brewery run by her husband, the uptight and inhibited Francin. Maryška symbolises the 20th century’s ongoing social transformation. Comparable to the town where she resides, she bestrides the frontier between old world and new – the realm of tradition and feminine convention, and the burgeoning dominion of liberation, freedom, and equality. She is hyper-feminine; ladylike, sensual, and highly creative, but also stubborn, impulsive, and even has violent traits stereotypically associated with masculinity. Only her authority over Francin matches her strength of mind; she sees ‘how (her) eyes entrapped him like the eyes of a striped python when they stare at a frightened finch,’ and in embracing this she elevates herself to unspoken ruler of their household, despite Francin’s occasional attempts to overturn this dichotomy.

Several remarkable scenes highlight the conflict between old and new. The first is Maryška’s involvement in slaughtering a pig; an act, the butcher informs her, that is ‘the same as a priest serving mass, because, after all, both are a matter of flesh and blood’. Hrabal often associates worship and ceremony with mundane tasks or images, bringing Catholicism down to the level of man and beast. Indeed, the butcher is portrayed as a symbol of an ancient holiness. Maryška describes his mirth as ‘laughter from somewhere way back out of pagan times, when people believed in the force of blood and spittle.’ What ensues is a ‘slaughtering party,’ equal parts hilarious and disturbing, with Maryška and the butcher as priests, adorning the workers and the brewery’s board members with smears of pigs blood, uniting the lower and upper classes in primitive ritual.

Later, the introduction of a wireless to the town epitomises a pivotal rupture from past to present. The wireless represents progression from old to new: from isolation to integration. Inspired, Maryška rushes home to engage in several acts of literal severance. First, she cuts her skirt shorter, and her legs, now ‘capable of arousing much surprise and delight, but also much civic indignation,’ cause one man to swerve off the road upon seeing her bare-kneed astride her bicycle. Then, upon encountering the brewery dog Mutzek, she feeds him cream puffs from the town bakery before brutally cutting his tail shorter with an axe. This juxtaposition of compassion with inhumane violence captures Maryška’s tightrope walk between traditional, repressed housewife and modern liberated woman. Maryška explains to the dog that the style now is to be shorter, just like her skirt, although Mutzek, like the townsfolk, cannot understand.

The title of this story in Czech is Postřižiny, which expresses the Slavic ritual of a child’s inaugural haircut. Maryška’s thick and lustrous hair, used by Hrabal as a symbol of femininity, further emphasises her emblematic nature as one caught between old and new. When she asks Bod’a the barber to cut it, he refers to it as a, ‘surviving link with the old Austria,’ and, ‘cutting it short would be like spitting on the host after holy communion’. Maryška, however, will hear none of this, leaving the salon with a short bob, but is chased on her way home by indignant townsfolk who regarded her hair as a ‘historical monument’ of the land that they are unwilling to see change. In his shock at Maryška’s boldness, and in an act symbolising the punishment of protesters and dissenters, Francin takes the tube of the bike pump and whips her across the bottom in a futile attempt to beat the spirit of liberation out of her.

Star of the second story is the absurd, irritating, but ultimately charming Uncle Pepin, Hrabal’s nod to the old guard of the Austrian army. Just as Maryška represents the shock of the new, so Pepin embodies nostalgia for the past. A raconteur with an anecdote for every situation, he frequently soliloquises about the good old days. For Hrabal’s purposes, Pepin embodies the working class; a bawdy drunk who doesn’t follow orders, but whose ‘angry fuming’ incites the brewery workers into productivity. Francin, maddened by his brother’s drunkenness and exaggerations about the war, eventually asks him to leave, forcing Pepin to occupy the workers’ quarters. Through the narration, we see the division between two worlds: the ugly, uncomfortable barracks of the working class, where Pepin lives, and the residence of the comfortable, elegant middle-class, where his family resides; ‘a world which is cut in two like St Martin’s cloak with his sword, but continues nonetheless, adjacent to itself’. This is a further rift between old and new that the townsfolk are unsteadily, and unwillingly, navigating.

When the Gestapo come to Nymburk and commandeer the brewery, a German kommandant called Hansi Friedrich usurps Francin’s position, his presence inciting Pepin’s nationalistic pride. Hrabal uses Pepin to capture the tension between National Socialists and Czech Austrians, with the volatile veteran relentlessly goading Friedrich by mocking Germany’s chances of success. After one particular incident, the local constable makes Pepin obtain a doctor’s note stating that he is mentally unstable, absolving him of accountability from his behaviour towards Friedrich. The constable warns Francin that ‘that dancing of his would have landed the lot of you in a concentration camp,’ adding an air of stark realism to previous light-heartedness.

However, Pepin’s taunts prove correct, and Germany loses the war. Nonetheless, Nymburk remains threatened by change – this time from Socialism. The brewery becomes a national enterprise, and the workers rise up; ‘there’s no more bosses any more, we’re the masters now’. After Francin is fired, his relationship with Pepin changes, and their personalities appear to switch; Francin becomes the raucous loudmouth, while Pepin is quiet and submissive. Time is to blame, and as the men age the story becomes loaded with inevitability and fatalism. In recognition of both the end of an era and his own life’s imminent conclusion, Pepin loses his joie de vivre, sinking into silence and immobility. Upon leaving the old people’s home housing his brother, Francin walks past the town cemetery, observing the many graves of people he once knew, acknowledging that ‘I have only the key to the old times and the one for the new is denied me’. While Hrabal’s conclusion is somewhat morose, we remain enlivened by the vital progression represented by Maryška, recognising, like Francin, that locking the door to the past is sometimes the only way to open the way to the future.