Rosemary Kavan, Love and Freedom: My Unexpected Life in Prague (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 278 pp. Originally published as Freedom at a Price: An Englishwoman’s Life in Czechoslovakia (London: Verso, 1985).
In reading Janko Jesenský’s The Democrats, I found myself as intrigued as anything by the book’s translator, Jean Rosemary Edwards, also known as Rosemary Kavan (or, in Czech, Rosemary Kavanová). I’d found out a little about her—she married Czech Communist Pavel Kavan, lived in Czechoslovakia during the communist rise to power, enjoyed a short stay with him working at the embassy in London, and then returned to Prague only for Pavel to be arrested—like countless other true-believer communists—by his own party and country on trumped-up charges of treason. Pavel was released sooner than his sentenced twenty-five years, but his health was destroyed and he died in the late 1950s. Rosemary stuck it out in Prague until her older son Jan Kavan’s liberal activism in the Prague Spring, and her support of it, threatened her own liberty and life. She escaped Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s and stayed away until her death of cancer in 1981.
This memoir of her life, finished shortly before her death and published by her aforementioned son, fills in much of those details, not least of all the extremely difficult marriage she had with Pavel. Confusing their chemistry with love (hardly an original mistake) and his ideological passion for the whole human race with the ability to love well and attentively a single person, she stuck by her man, his short temper, inconsiderateness, neglect, and occasional violence notwithstanding. The communist commitment to ending the exploitation of man by man rarely noticed the problem of the exploitation of woman by man.
Rosemary resolved to leave Pavel, but circumstances caused her to delay and then made it impossible. A man abandoned by all his friends and colleagues in a situation of political betrayal needs his wife, even if their love is dead. Rosemary, honorably enough, refused to divorce him while he was in prison, but that did not deter her from an extended affair with a man much better suited to her. After all, for all she knew, she would be a “grass widow” for a quarter-century. Pavel’s return necessitated the dismissal of the lover. Pavel was sufficiently damaged by the prison experience, and also sufficiently isolated in long periods of uninterrupted thought, to recognize the ways that he had failed Rosemary as a husband. But it by no means cured him, and in the end an exhausted Rosemary made a weak attempt at suicide. During her recovery Pavel died of a heart attack. She confesses still to admiring his principles, if rueful about the difficulties of living with a principled man.
A word about her exhaustion: another case of the communist exploitation of women. It is a widely documented phenomenon that the communist commitment to equality on paper for the sexes and the requirement of full employment did not actually balance the score between men and women: it only added to women’s burdens. They still had to raise the children, cook and clean, and spend an ungodly number of hours on line for the inadequate supply of basic goods and foodstuffs. Many if not most rose to the occasion, but not without cost, as Rosemary’s case shows. She gives no small part of the book over to the problems of hunger and malnutrition, verging on starvation, and her children’s constant illnesses.
As to my own curiosity about her translating work, it certainly wasn’t the original goal or direction of her career. Like all good communists, she took whatever job she could, and at the outset she actually desired to work in heavy industry, an expression of proletarian ideology. But whether in a factory, teaching English, tracing designs on carbon paper, or helping to lay tram and train tracks, she was constantly dogged by official suspicion of her English origins and bourgeois upbringing. The sheer fact of her loyalty to her new and difficult-to-live-in country or marriage to a devoutly communist Czech husband was not enough to allay political suspicion. It was only after her rather random translation of a technical manual won an international prize that she was invited to work on more prestigious translations—and ultimately, with Artia, starting with a book of fairy tales and moving on to a short story by Karel Čapek (who gave the world the word “robot”), before taking on novels, even in Slovak, which she admits she didn’t understand quite as well as Czech.
What her memoir does not contain is a serious questioning of whether the communist ideology to which she and Pavel devoted their lives was worth it (unlike Jo Langer, another memoirist married to a believing communist). It is a truism of communists, even non-communists, nowadays: well, what happened in the Soviet Union and its satellites and China and Cuba is not “really” communism; if communism had been done right, it never would have turned out like that. Was the reign of the secret police and the bureaucracy that made Rosemary’s life, and that of so many other Czechs and Slovaks, into a living hell “real” communism or some failure to live up to its own ideals?
I won’t pretend that several years now of reading up on and reflecting on the history of the region hasn’t made a partisan of me—but in the other direction. I don’t think it was a mistake. I think, whatever the grand designs and noble intentions, what the communists got was exactly what they were going to get.
Here is just one reason among many why that was the case. The soulless and soul-destroying bureaucracy that persecuted Pavel and so many others was the necessary counterpoint to the envisioned communist state. The goal of communism is, as its own name indicates, a collective, which aspires to unity and comprehensive rule of all by all. But the two major problems that arise are, first, that enforced unity by definition must suppress individuals as well as any groupings smaller than the whole (which is why “bourgeois nationalism” was a convenient slur by Soviets against any other communist country attempting to chart its own path); and second, this supposed equality enacted at the scale of mass society means that a bureaucracy utterly indifferent to individual cases must be set into place, and once that happens, it takes on a life of its own.
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Bureaucratic overreach certainly can and does happen outside of communism; Kafka, the greatest poet of bureaucracy’s evils, pre-dated the rise of communism in his native Czech Lands. But because of the communist goal/fiction of unity and collectivity, the rules themselves must take precedence over all else, and no one has any motivation to break them, because that would be to out yourself as an individual defying the collective norm. The result is that bureaucracy takes on a metastatic life of its own, rule of law is ellided with rule of bureaucracy, and the pathological power-hungry individual actually encounters no one to stop him—because there are no parallel responsible individuals to inhibit him. This irony is illustrated well in Pavel Kavan’s life: he never realized that his principled commitment actually made a naked individualist out of him, and as such, he had to be hewn down by the collectivist bureaucracy.
The counterintuitive truth is that collective decision-making happens best when there is no collective. It happens best when there is genuine democratic freedom and genuine market freedom, every individual joining various groups of various sizes that bump up against each other and through their interactions coming to something like a reality that everyone can live with—until the next moment, when things change again, as they should. Spare me the wailing about the evils of the free market: what you are instinctively objecting to is all the ways that corporations and governments collude to make things unfree, to protect their own profits, or exact the toll on the commons. But that’s not the same as a genuinely free market of goods, services, labor, movement, speech, and ideas. It is not an accident that the nations that have enacted communism have also been the most brutal and most opposed to individual freedom of thought and movement in memory. The problem is intrinsic, not incidental.
For all that, Kavan’s memoir is a great read, mapping out her personal life story and its emotional extremes against the backdrop of a dramatic and horrifying chapter in European history. The last decade of her life was spent in raising awareness of what people were suffering in Czechoslovakia, translating still more for Britain’s Palach Press (named in honor of the student who set fire to himself as a protest against the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of the Prague Spring). It’s a tragedy that she didn’t live to see the doors open at long last.
But her heartfelt story stands as a cautionary tale: desiring to make the world a better place and succeeding in doing so are not the same thing. Overly optimistic Americans are just as guilty of conflating the two as naive communists. We will excuse nearly anything on the grounds that we believe it will make the world a better place.
But is it so extremely easy to resolve the mind-bogglingly complex world into a pat set of policies guaranteeing instant improvement? Have we still not learned the law of unintended consequences? Our own small individual lives face the kickback from attempted improvements all the time. Whence the hubris that asserts we can fix entire swaths of society or nations by sheer dogged imposition?
Maybe the best way to make the world a better place—is to stop trying.