Now sitting behind walls, they’ve placed you in a cell
The angels of Brixen, exhorting death’s knell.
A tale for young children, a puppet ballet,
They pull on the strings without coming out into day.
By the letter of the law of the gavel,
Now think about justice, Havlíček, Havel.
The ovation that followed exceeded all measure. The fact that such songs could be sung led one to suspect that the occupying regime was losing some of its capricious vigilance.
Paradoxically for singers, as well as artists who refused to bow to the people in charge, these times brought a certain satisfaction. The public was waiting for any kind of rebellious gestures and vehemently accepted them.
At the beginning of the ’80s, more and more groups were springing up that, unlike the charter, were not political. They strove only for independent thought and action.
I was invited by a group of young evangelicals from a congregation in Vinohrady to say something about samizdat literature. After my lecture, they showed me a thick typewritten volume. They were publishing it four times a year. Every three months, each member of the congregation had to write or translate an article from his field and bring several copies to their meeting. There the contributions were compiled and bound. I liked this idea so much that I told my friends about it, and we started putting together our own monthly typewritten journal. Because publishing any sort of periodical (even a typewritten one) was still against the law, we listed the individual contributions on the first page beneath the word “Contents.” And thus our journal became known simply as Contents.
*
More and more often I was visited by strangers, sometimes even students (there was also a young teaching assistant of Czech literature who came around once a month all the way from Olomouc), to ask if they could borrow some of our samizdat texts. They usually returned the books after about a month and then asked to borrow others. I soon realized that each of them had his own circle of friends to whom he was lending the books. These were not groups of rebels but simply people who saw the current regime as baleful, hampering freedom, and therefore worthy of contempt.
Of course we had to keep everything secret — what we were doing, where we met, what we talked about. Originally, there were eight of us who put together Contents, but the number of regular contributors soon grew to around twenty. We usually gathered at one of our apartments, but we alternated and never said aloud where the following meeting would be. We would finish our work and then pass around a piece of paper with the date and place of the next one.
These meetings were important. A person expelled from normal everyday life, shut out everywhere, and forbidden to work among people with whom he shared common values, or at least professional interests, needed to feel some sort of acceptance among friends. Therefore we met in private. These meetings were in no way conspiratorial. I sometimes organized evenings and we would play different games. Ludvík Vaculík hosted gatherings that regularly occurred during a weekend nearest an equinox or solstice — these meetings usually attracted more of us. Among those who came from Prague, in addition to those most persecuted by the police, were the theater critic of the banned Literární noviny, Sergej Machonin, Milan Jungmann, the prose writer Lenka Procházková (banned most likely because she was the daughter of Jan Procházka, a writer who was currently despised by the regime), Eda Kriseová (banned simply because she refused to join in passive assent), and the poet Petr Kabeš for whom it was unimaginable to publish work alongside the official versifiers. Friends also came from Slovakia: Milan Šimečka and Miro Kusý, sometimes even Ivan Kadlečík. From Brno, the prose writer Honza Trefulka, the dramatist Milan Uhde, Mr. and Mrs. Kotrlý, and sometimes the Catholic poet Zdeněk Roztrekl (he had barely escaped execution in one of the first show trials).
These get-togethers required much caution. We rarely met at home; preferably, either we went to someone’s country house (if possible, one belonging to a nonmember of our group), or we rented a few cottages at the Brno Dam. The meeting always began with an encouraging evaluation of the political situation by our colleague, a congenital optimist and the author of many exceptional political essays, Milan Šimečka. He sensed our need to hear something hopeful and managed to find in Czech and foreign politics clear signs of approaching radical changes. He usually concluded: The occupying regime is in its final days and will be gone before our next meeting.
Then Milan Uhde would read his skeptical supplementary report in which he would overturn most of what his predecessor had said; he would reel off all the depressing and retrograde signs of contemporary societal development as too many people accepted the policies of those in power. (Unfortunately, for many years, he was correct.) Then Ludvík Vaculík usually read a feuilleton he had prepared for the new issue of Contents. Of course we also used these meetings to drink beer, grill food, and revel in the feeling that we were free people living in a society of other free people.
It was heartening how this solidarity helped us overcome the absurd situation in which, as writers and literary critics, we could not publish or even appear in public. On the other hand, there emerged a ridiculous and harmful professional divide between banned and unbanned. We had definitely been locked up in some sort of ghetto, but we were also locking ourselves in. (During this entire time, I never met with a single officially published colleague, with the exception of Jaroslav Dietl, whom I regularly visited to play Mariáš, and I think some of my friends held even this friendship against me.)
To our surprise, the secret police never once interrupted our meetings. I think they were unaware of them. They hadn’t been able to secure a single informer among us, and we told no one, not even our closest friends, about our gatherings.
*
I no longer remember who lent me the samizdat edition of The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows. It summarized the findings of a team of scientists who had been studying the effects on the environment of our speedy industrial development and the finitude of natural resources. Few texts spoke to me so forcefully, and its message stuck in my mind. I realized that we were all so wrapped up in our own everyday affairs and struggles with the discreditable regime that we couldn’t think about anything else. In the meantime, however, another specter was emerging that did not differentiate between the free and unfree parts of the world. It was engendered by the same selfishness, the same careless relationship to nature, something that we could not live without but that our greed was destroying. For Contents, I wrote a short essay on a rather unusual subject (unusual at least for us at the time) called “The End of Civilization.”
People now have a life-and-death connection with our civilization, and if it dies, they must die with it. They will die by the thousands and the millions, perhaps in famines or epidemics that can no longer be conquered, perhaps in a desperate and unwinnable war that will destroy everything.
But even if they manage to avoid war, people will die just the same. They will die of despair or because they have lost the ability to earn their daily bread or because they will have destroyed nature, which sustained them from time immemorial. Entire regions of the world will be depopulated and places that had recently radiated light will reek of the plague.