As mentioned, a plan was conceived in the 1960s to completely destroy the buildings of Old Most in order to exploit the earth underneath for its rich deposits. The idea was to level all the buildings, change the course of the Bílina riverbed (here affectionately called the Běla), and to build an enormous expanse of panel-houses around the expansion of the city (“I’m a city of reinforced concrete”) in order to accommodate the majority of newly arrived citizen-workers, in the process institutionalizing oppression in the establishment of a wildly disastrous, misguidedly ultra-modern, city center. Among its many other faults, this plan greatly over-designed Most. The New Most was intended to accommodate one-hundred-thousand citizens, but Most’s population at its height had been only seventy thousand. Most New or Old, much emptiness is still there. Altogether, thirty-four municipalities in the area of Most have thus far been destroyed in the pursuit of polluting, inefficient lignite — these include the pre-industrial villages such as Židovice, Libkovice, Ervěnice, Kopisty (the liquidation of this last village interrupted the ancient continuity of settlement between Most and Litvínov). And so Pavel Brycz writes in the voice of the city he’s chronicling: “I am a city, a new city. I cannot bear witness to the past,” for how can a city bear witness to a life predating its very existence, a life it was in many ways created to destroy? “Kde domov můj?” Brycz quotes elsewhere, “Where is my home?” — the first words of the Czech anthem, the song of a nation that for too long existed only in hope. As Brycz asks this question, so does his city. Where to find a city’s home if not in itself, of itself, among its own people?
I, City — the first ever full-length English translation of Pavel Brycz’s work — is many things. A collection of stories. Of prose-poems. A novel-in-stories. A series of sketches in the best easterly European tradition of Danilo Kiš, or Isaac Babel. Formal and topical inspiration can most convincingly be found in the Czech literature Brycz holds closest to his heart: the poetry of mid-century writers like Václav Hrabě and Josef Kainar (both of whom wrote texts that were to be much used as rock lyrics); Karel Konrád (1899–1971) is an essential precursor, especially in his trilogy Robinsonáda, Rinaldino and Dinah, a pastiche of prose and poetry that lovingly chronicles the first loves and comings-of-age of adolescent boys in Bohemia. Additionally, Karel Poláček’s bucolic-humorous children’s book, Bylo nás pět [We Made Five], is referenced here if not as a model for Brycz’s work then as a model for Most’s budding poets. As Brycz makes fictional people say factual things and factual people (Franz Kafka, John Paul II, the last Czechoslovak communist president Gustáv Husák) say fictional things, post-modernity via Gabriel García Márquez and other so-called Magical Realists makes its almost requisite — though noiseless — appearance.
Though Brycz’s ideal is a curious sort of anthropomorphism, proposing to make his city talk, it seems the “I” purporting to be Most is much larger than anything that can be contained on a map — almost an entire consciousness, at enough of a remove from the town itself that he, she, or it can observe and can know seemingly everything, past and present. The “I” is a view not from below, which is the view of the earth, scarred beneath the city, but from above, which is the view of the transcendent, of heaven. If Brycz’s “I” is to be terrestrial, though, it must be an “I” released, set free, seemingly risen from the land, which has been defiled in man’s pursuit of power, to ascend high above Most’s people, in order to narrate their lives, and the life of their city, from the vantage of a simpler, more hopeful future — even as the concrete panel-houses tower, too, dwarfing the spires of the Deacon’s Church, in man’s strained attempt at the divine.
But narration here is no straightforward affair. Brycz doesn’t actually write about the people of Most, as it would seem. If pre-industrial Realism is the standard, there are no “real people” in Brycz’s text; it’s almost as if Brycz is implying it’s impossible for “real people” to survive in Most. Rather, these mostly silent, shy and lonely beings (the Hrabalian denizens of the Liars’ Bench aside) seem frozen in time, petrified, oftentimes placed in the background of any action, which is overwhelmingly historical, or an action of memory. They lose their color, fading into black and white, ghosts slowly dragging themselves on the most mundane of errands through the sooty streets. Their horror is not immediate. The one Nazi in this book does not seem particularly evil; no one in these pages gets deported to labor or re-education camps. But the horror is surely there, a cancer buried like coal. Concomitantly, Brycz never describes Most as Most, Most as a whole. Rather, his gaze lights on individual lives, on discrete histories that resist any civic coherence. Most seems like an abandoned place at the end of the world, a planet unto itself suspended in the polluted void, surrounded by “non-existence” — symbolized best in the “real world” by the Romany (Gypsy) ghetto on the outskirts of town. This area, located in the Chanov district, would be home to “the petite Gypsy woman” (if Gypsy she is), Dezider Balogh the boxer and champion urinator, and the thieves who kill and eat the dog at the villa in Zahražany, which itself is a metaphor for Most’s post-communist reconstruction. Built in the 1980s especially for Most’s Romany as “compensation for the unsatisfactory housing in Old Most,” Chanov, a square of ruinous panel-houses, contains great poverty. It seems almost totally ungoverned even today. Public drunkenness is the norm. Unemployment is just short of total. Beyond these outskirts is Niemandsland, no-man’s land, marked only by the Krušné hory, the Ore Mountains, over which — it is rumored — one would find Germany.
As Most’s people emerge from the pollution, or from the swamp from which the town was founded, we find not individuals, despite their estrangements, despite their loneliness, but representatives. Theirs are historical lives that mistrust history, or that live it at least with typical Schweikian irony. Tellingly, many here are named Novák (which, according to the phone book, is Most’s commonest surname). This is like a book about America in which almost everyone is named Smith. This abstraction, Brycz’s alchemical making of archetype out of stereotype, isn’t accomplished in a spirit of abuse. Brycz obviously loves his “Mosters,” and has more than empathy, or sympathy — he is one of them. As the author, the entity most easily identified with an “I,” he is their city (Most, which, as Brycz tells us, is also Prague, Paris and ancient Babylon), as are all his “Mosters,” all collectively becoming the speaker and subject, experienced and experiencing only in their respective manifestations, their private existences: in what Brycz calls “appearances,” which are brief revelations, or recognitions, Joycean epiphanies straight out of a Bohemian Dubliners. Of course, each “appearance” is modified by an adjectival subtitle. In the most ironic backwater of a cynical East, experience, like emotion, must always be qualified. In “An Appearance, Human,” for example, Brycz writes, “I am a city, I am full of people. Nothing human is strange to me. I love people. And not because they are great. But because they are small, I love them.” A statement naïve on the surface, but knowing underneath. Strangely for a plot of despoiled earth, nothing human is strange to it. It is talking of, and to, and maybe by, the very people who have destroyed it, who have destroyed themselves, whether they’re the oldest Sudeten holdovers from before the war, or the most recent opportunists who’ve just come to the city to mine the last riches before the earth can give no more.