Rudolf Jašík, Dead Soldiers Don’t Sing, trans. Karel Kornell (Prague: Artia, 1963), 371 pp.
There was no question but that I had to track down this novel, one of only three from the Slovak published by Artia in the early 1960s in English to prove that good-quality literature can come from Communist nations, too. However, as only six libraries worldwide appear to have it (four of them in Denmark—uh, what’s that all about?) and I have never even once seen it for sale on any used book site, I was getting desperate.
Which explains why I finally forked over an astronomical sum to get a scan from the U.S. Library of Congress. I won’t say exactly so much; only that it made the $60 I threw away on The Heiress look like a deal by comparison.
Unfortunately, compulsion of this nature rarely pays off, and so it is in this case. Dead Soldiers Don’t Sing is an incredibly tedious read. It’s mostly the ruminations of an entirely too large and under-differentiated cast of characters, and even the battle scenes are poorly executed and unengaging.
Need you ask why such a long, dull book merited translation and publication? Because, of course, it was anti-fascist and pro-communist. That was pretty much all it took to meet Artia’s mandate. Jašík’s other novel under this imprint, St. Elizabeth’s Square, and the third and final Slovak novel from Artia, Janko Jesenský’s The Democrats, are also diatribes against the evils of the Nazi-controlled puppet state of supposedly independent Slovakia in the late 1930s and early 40s.
Dead Soldiers Don’t Sing has its moments and its merits. It illustrates, if not very excitingly, the awfulness of Slovaks being recruited to fight for a Nazi cause they didn’t believe in, hearing rumors of Nazi plans to extinguish Slavs once they got done with the Jews and the French, and the sense of collusion in fighting against fellow Slavs, primarily the Russians, on the eastern front. Jašík easily conflates “fellow Slavs” with “righteous Bolsheviks,” though, and that was undoubtedly convenient for the communist censors of the ČSSR.
Click on the cover to order your copy of my memoir!
In fact, Jašík intended to carry on with his epic. The Epilogue sketches out the intended plot for the next volume, which would carry the action from the despair of the winter of 1942/1943 into the joyous days of the Slovak National Uprising against the Nazis. The Epilogue asserts that “Even though the Uprising was temporarily defeated by the numerical superiority of the German forces, it heralded the liberation of the country…” Um, false. The Uprising failed because the Soviets deliberately did not show up in time—which meant they could waltz in with their tanks, just a little bit later, and play deliverer, making it that much easier to reassign an eventually reunited Czechoslovakia to the Eastern Bloc and thus the Soviet sphere of influence.
The lesson bears repeating: the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend!
A final note on the translator, Karel Kornell. He was a Czech, not a Slovak, but this is not altogether surprising—as far as I can tell, the two other translators of the two other Artia novels from Slovak were primarily acquainted with Czech, but the two languages are close enough to allow for fudging. I can’t find out all that much about Kornell, but it appears that he must have eventually defected, because in 1986 he published a memoir in English entitled I Am a Czech, published in Britain.
I’m glad this is the end of my run with Artia’s novels from Slovak. They did better with pop-up books.