Opinion The alphabet curtain

That “right” is the product of power,authority and ideology drunk on the utopian dream of building a paradise,and building a hell instead. The sounds and images of 1989 — the Autumn of Nations — have persisted. But what did the power that Mueller mentions do to people like her? Why did the experience of writers in these police states encapsulate and magnify the spiritual,cultural and political death-in-life of their compatriots?

If they were silenced or driven underground,writers behind the Iron Curtain bore the consequences of speaking out. Paradoxically,if they were not collaborationists,they could still invest freely in writing. And they captured,created and smuggled out (the last if they could not,or did not,emigrate) pictures of the post-Nazi totalitarian state; they enlightened and politically stimulated select compatriots through samizdat editions. But if Lech Walesa’s Solidarity was a workers’ movement in Poland or East Germany’s New Forum was led by civil society,erstwhile Czechoslovakia’s first post-

communist president,Vaclav Havel,was a playwright,essayist and intellectual of standing. To linger on Havel’s significance is to grasp the uniqueness of the Czech Velvet Revolution.

Under absolute state censorship,what is not suppressed is perverted. Of all its evils,what these writers grasped early on was the perversion of language,and where their task began: “political chaos is connected with the decay of language,and… one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end…” (George Orwell in “Politics and the English Language”,as pertinent as ever). This was more elemental than banning suspect writers,dismissing them from academic posts,subjecting them to abject labour in construction works or garbage disposal,spying on them,jailing them.

Even when literature in shackled societies performs extra-literary tasks,when litterateurs do what social scientists and philosophers should,their goal,first and last,is the rescue of language. In Love and Garbage,Ivan Klima’s autobiographical protagonist — a writer like himself dismissed from his post — composes an essay on Kafka while sweeping the street. In Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude,Hanta educates himself from books he saves from the hydraulic press he has been operating for 35 years that turns them to pulp. The assault on thought and expression and the physical destruction of knowledge is there for all to see. But without thought and its perfect expression,language dies,taking a culture’s repository of knowledge with it. And without language,there is no communication. Klima,reflecting on the decline of Czech under communism,coined the term “Jerkish” (English equivalent) — an invented language for communication between humans and chimpanzees,with a vocabulary of 225 words; Orwell’s “political English” meeting its Bohemian counterpart.

While the West learnt to read Czech émigrés like Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecky and later,internal “exiles” like Klima,Hrabal,Havel,Ludvik Vaculik,Jiri Grusa,et al,while America embraced Polish defector and supreme poet Czeslaw Milosz or the Nobel committee honoured him in 1980 (before the next Pole Wislawa Szymborska in 1996),it was Havel who,in Prague’s dissident political space,demonstrably gave Czechs their language back. The fall of the Berlin Wall on

November 9 — the Cold War’s starkest symbol — may yet strike us as the popular,defining image of the sudden end of communism,but its death was foretold in this struggle of a few to preserve civilisation against barbarism,who never

forgave Soviet tanks rolling into Prague on an August 1968 night.

Once the void created by totalitarianism was filled,once the

samizdat became redundant,the writer was no longer in intimate and inspirational contact with his reader,no longer in the same demand. Discos and sex shops eclipsed liberated book shops where serpentine queues would form immediately after 1989. That perhaps was not quite what the subterranean writers of communist Europe had sacrificed two-to-four decades of their lives for; but,having done their bit as intellectuals in one form of exile or the other — raising awkward questions,demolishing handed-down dogmas — they would be the last to complain about 1989. Having known hell,even purgatory is heaven.

sudeep.paul@expressindia.com