Janko Jesenský, The Democrats, trans. Jean Rosemary Edwards (Prague: Artia Pocket Books, 1961).
This novel is another in the series produced by Artia, a Communist-era publishing house based out of Prague. Artia overwhelmingly favoring Czech authors, Jesenský’s book is one of only three (so far as I can tell) by Slovak authors that got translated into English. Therein lies a tale of its own.
What, exactly, was the motivation for a state-run publisher to produce English-language versions of its national literature? It takes little imagination to see the propaganda angle at work. For example, Rudolf Jašík’s St. Elizabeth’s Square recounts the horrors of growing anti-Semitism in pre-war Slovakia leading to collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, a very popular point of contrast for true-believer communists like the author—and one conveniently ignoring the totalitarian and anti-Semitic policies at work in the so-called workers’ paradise. But Jašík fit the bill so nicely that two of his novels were seen fit for wider a readership (a review of his Dead Soldiers Don’t Sing will be forthcoming) and hence comprise two-thirds of Artia’s modest Slovak translation program.
The prolific Janko Jesenský, author of The Democrats, didn’t quite have Jašík’s bonafides, but at least he had the good sense to die in 1945 after having openly expressed his opposition to fascism. Furthermore, in addition to his many writings, Jesenský produced a number of translations of Russian works into Slovak. The Communists could work with that. Better still, after the bumpy first twenty years of Czechoslovakia’s shared democratic experiment in the 1920s and 1930s, and the trauma of Nazi-imposed divorce, Jesenský was a Slovak known for his support of the unified Czechoslovak state over against Slovak autonomy. In the 1950s anyone who agitated for greater Slovak independence would be labeled a “bourgeois nationalist” and then tossed into prison for good measure.
Of course, none of this would have been good enough unless the story itself supported Communist ends. While there seems to be no evidence of Jesenský having Communist leanings himself, his book recounts in vivid detail the petty political rivalries of the apparently free and democractic state of Czechoslovakia—just the sort of thing that might undermine your confidence in claims for its innate superiority over, say, a centrally controlled one-party system. In fact, Jesenský wrote his book in the mid-1930s as the events of the story are taking place, based in part on his own experience. It’s not too hard to see how the novel could be taken as evidence of the fatal flaw in democratic capitalism.
Two chief plot lines intermingle, both revolving around Dr. Landík, a lawyer with ideological and political ambitions. The action is touched off when Landík shares a drink with local butcher Tolkoš and they brainstorm an Egalitarian Society, in which the peoples of Slovakia would not be divided into countless competing factions but unified as truly one and truly equal. However, Tolkoš immediately proves his provincial limitations by confessing that while he loves a local servant maid, Anička, he can’t bring himself to court her, much less marry her, because it would lower his social status in the eyes of others. Landík is so irritated by this attitude that he vows to befriend and court her himself—despite the even greater social gap—unless Tolkoš intervenes.
Well, you can guess what happens from there. Landík falls for Anička, beautiful and refined despite her lowly birth and lowlier working-class status, and in the process has to face his own ongoing and unacknowledged class prejudices. (Another detail to commend him to Communists!) Landík’s unseemly behavior sends shock waves through his profession and the town itself. Several well-placed functionaries try to blackball him, but in the end he is vindicated and rewarded with a new and better post in Bratislava.
However, Anička stays behind when Landík goes off to Bratislava, and in his new and more important surroundings, Landík forgets about the pretty girl and is lured by the trendy attractions of young Želka, a distant relative with a powerful father, whose company he begins to keep.
At this point, the plot branches off in meandering ways reminiscent of Dickens or Tolstoy, but the chief action is political jockeying and bureaucratic diplomacy. Which, let’s face it, is nowhere near as exciting as love, war, or high-stakes international intrigue. There’s a great deal about the implications of various laws (think a Jane Austen or George Eliot novel detailing how such laws limit women’s choices, but with a class perspective instead) and the competition between various political parties for votes. There’s a decent amount of comedy here, despite the slow pace.
It helps to remember that Czechoslovakia (as it was at the time) was the only Eastern Bloc country with experience of democracy before Communism; but at the time of the story, it was little more than fifteen years into democracy and they were still figuring it out. It appears that Jesenský thought the competition and mutual slander were indecent and degrading, working against national unity instead of in its favor. Not to mention the very personal motivations he perceived for this, that, or the other politician to adopt certain views or campaign for a certain party. The Democrats is not an entirely complimentary title after all.
After a great deal of rigamarole along these lines, plus a hitherto-unknown-father plot, the upright Landík finally sees through the fashions of Želka and her ambitious father and returns proudly to his humble Anička, who has been waiting for him all this time like a virtuous little woman should. At the end he declares that they have all they require, without cause to beg or brag, needing only each other to trust in: “Anička, we are not poor.” A little cliché, but harmless, class-conscious, and subtly disparaging of multi-party systems.
It turns out there’s another layer of intrigue behind the publication of this book. Because, after all, it has been translated into English—and by whom? It took a little digging to find out more about Rosemary Jean Edwards, as she is credited on the title page. Better known as Rosemary Kavan, she was an Englishwoman who met a Czech soldier during World War II and returned to live with him in reunited postwar Czechoslovakia. An avowed Communist, Pavel Kavan won a good post as a diplomat in London, but as the purges ramped up in 1950, he was recalled, put on show trial, and sentenced to twenty-five years on a trumped-up charge. He was released only four years later, but the betrayal had taken its toll on his health and he died not long after.
Rosemary stuck it out in Czechoslovakia for a good number of years after that, among other things working as translator from both Czech and Slovak—she seems to have been the principal translator for Artia, in fact. She supported the Prague Spring so, not surprisingly, after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968 she herself was arrested and finally in 1971 fled the country as a refugee and repatriated to England. In time she wrote a memoir, Love and Freedom, about her insider experience as a Westerner in Communist Czechoslovakia. It must have been a strange feeling on the one hand to have done so much to make Czech and Slovak literature known in the West—and at the same time to have done so as a collaborator with what would prove to be a treacherous regime.
The Democrats, like most of the Artia books now, are hard and/or expensive to get a hold of; I was lucky to find a copy to read through a U.S. library system. However, you can read the first section of it in a new translation by Rastislav Huba, a Slovak graduate of Bard College who translated and wrote an introduction to the book for his senior thesis. He gives further insight into the language and dialect choices that Jesenský made.