This post was a Judges' Choice winner in the Jordan Center Blog's fourth annual Graduate Student Essay Competition.
Jennifer Helinek holds an MA in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from Columbia University’s Harriman Institute. She studies the literatures of East Central Europe, with an emphasis on questions surrounding the perceived “relevance” of literature both historically and today.
When people heard that I wrote my master’s thesis on a Czech literary prize, their first thought was written all over their faces, even before they said it out loud: “Wow, even for academia, that is niche.” Of course, in our current cultural context, they’re right. But what I love about this response is that it emphasizes one of the major points of my research: It is difficult for most twenty-first-century people to imagine a society that centers literature.
And yet, as was the case throughout much of East Central Europe, Czech writers and their work were essential to creating and sustaining their nation, right up until the end of the twentieth century. When that changed, an urgent question arose: How do you convince people that literature is important, when they never needed to be convinced of that before?
It is no exaggeration to say that writers built the Czech nation. “What immediately strikes a tourist from the United States or Western Europe,” Andrew Baruch Wachtel notes, “is that on the pedestals generally reserved in our lands for political and military figures, here one finds poets and writers.” Subsumed by empire, with little opportunity to form a civic conception of nationhood, Czechs rallied around the kind of nation-state whose “essence” would be defined by literary works in a common language.
This process mostly occurred in the nineteenth century, when figures like Alois Jirásek, Karel Havlíček Borovský, and František Palacký wrote texts that were foundational to the social and political spread of Czech nationalism. Throughout the Soviet-dominated communist period of the following century, a new crop of writers like Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, and Ludvík Vaculík continued the now traditional task of keeping Czech national identity alive. They seamlessly blended literary and political concerns, earning international attention for their contributions to both spheres of thought.
After the Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Kundera was horrified by the closure of the major Czech literary journals, and he expected his Western European friends to sympathize. Instead, he was met with their apathy: “When all the reviews in Czechoslovakia were liquidated, the entire nation knew it, and was in a state of anguish because of the immense impact of the event. If all the reviews in France or England disappeared, no one would notice it, not even their editors.” The uncomfortable (and unspoken) truth was, the distinctive economics of communism helped create an insular literary market that protected certain “elevated” forms of literature—poetry, experimental novels, philosophical plays—from competition with other, supposedly “lowbrow” genres like crime and romance fiction.
The situation changed with the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Havel (a playwright!) became president of a newly independent nation whose literary markets were financially destabilized at the same time as they were flooded with foreign authors and previously underrepresented genres. Czech publishing houses, elated by their sudden freedom, abruptly found themselves unable to sell the kind of literature that had been essential to the average reader just a few years prior.
In interviews for my thesis, various authors, editors, critics, and agents colorfully described the chaos of Czech publishing in the 1990s. With little warning, the nation-defining figure of the Czech writer transformed into the Western European writer of Kundera’s nightmares: a figurehead with limited effect on culture writ large, and seemingly little relevance to the broader population.
After a decade of turmoil, the Czech literary community began to find its footing again in the early 2000s, now equipped with hard-won market data and a certain amount of cynicism. In the capitalist era, literature would not be perceived as automatically relevant; it would be tasked with making itself so.
It was in this cultural moment that the Magnesia Litera was founded, in 2002. Now the Czech Republic’s most prestigious literary prize, the Magnesia Litera faced a number of challenges in its early days as it navigated new artistic realities. The modern literary prize has a relatively short international history—the most significant one of all, the Nobel Prize, was first awarded in 1901—but since that time, the concept has rapidly gained in popularity. And in the twenty-first century, Jennifer Szalai argues, “The true currency of prizes is recognition—in scarce supply as books struggle to cut through the glut of our crowded culture.”
As the Magnesia Litera’s founder, Pavel Mandys, described to me, there was a certain bittersweet element to this general flourishing of culture: “In the late 90s, the publishers realized that they are not very popular among readers. And [for] the readers also, everything was new. We got our first private TV. Blockbusters from the US came to the cinema [right after their initial release].” Other interviewees made similar comments about this period: Now that there was so much to do, who would bother reading like they had before?
With literature competing for an apparently finite share of the public’s interest, the Magnesia Litera set about establishing the “collective make-believe” that all prizes require. Through a shrewd combination of an Oscars-like format, journalism-friendly marketing, and just enough old fashioned literary elitism, the prize quickly built both its own prestige and that of the writers it awarded, in a feedback loop designed to increase the relevance of all involved. If you give us your eyeballs for one night, the prize subliminally promised, then we will show you—in an entertaining and suspenseful format, might we add—which books are most worthy of your precious time. And beyond the goal of promoting a specific set of shortlisted books in any given year, the Magnesia Litera sought to make the broader case that Czech writing was just as rich, accomplished, humorous, and insightful as ever.
Has the Magnesia Litera re-centralized literature in Czech society? No. Currently, no literary prize has that kind of power. But maybe these cultural conditions allow for a new relationship with writing in East Central Europe. One Czech editor confided to me that he doesn’t much value the idea that writers should act as the conscience of the nation. This often-romanticized perspective is, according to him, actually “a sick idea in itself.” In his view, a nation should be able to handle all the thorny questions of nationhood on its own, without “imposing that burden on poor literature.” Released from this task, whether willingly or not, twenty-first-century Czech literature can feel emboldened to “not serve any master other than itself.”
