CULTURAL LIFE OF CZECHS

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28265, 1 May 1957, Page 10

CULTURAL LIFE OF CZECHS

Trend Seen To Liberalism (By a Reuter Correspondent) PRAGUE. A slow move towards liberalism away from strict adherence to “socialist realism” is taking place in the cultural life of Czechoslovakia. Former artistic and cultural taboos are disappearing. There are signs that “socialist realism,” introduced into the Soviet Union by Stalin and passed on later to her communist allies, is losing its position as Czechoslovakia’s exclusive cultural doctrine.

The change began in painting. Prague crowds were recently startled to see pictures of nudes in the windows of art galleries for the first time since 1948, when the Communists took over power. Official communist propaganda fo? long regarded nudes as typical of the decadence of Western art. At the same time, fewer of the typical “masterpieces” of “socialist realism,” showing factories tractors, workers marching to the barricades with jaw thrust forward and carrying giant red flags, or Stalin addressing co-operative farm workers were displayed. More than anywhere else, the new trend is being felt in the theatre, where several satirical plays are being performed before packed and enthusiastic audiences in Prague. Before World War 11, satire was a favourite feature on the Czechoslovak stage, but it lapsed when the Communists came to power.

One of the plays now being produced, “Caesar,” is a new version of a highly successful pre-war Czechoslovak satire on totalitarian dictators. It has been rewritten to satirise shortcomings in Czechoslovakia’s present economic and political life. Another satire, “I am not he,” at Prague’s Realist Theatre, is an attack on careerism, a communist heresy, and describes attempts to improve one’s own position at the expense of others. A third successful play is by a Turkish author, Nazim Hikmet, who, in “Does Filip Filipek Exist or Not?” satirises the cult of personality. A new Czechoslovak film, in the same vein, is “Focus, Please,” which satirises bureaucracy and corruption in state-run enterprises, and Czechoslovak literary critics, who toe the party line and get into endless tangles when two high officials express divergent opinions about the same book. For the first time, too, in 30 years, theatre crowds have booed a performance at Prague’s austere National Theatre. The occasion was a daringly imaginative staging of Mozart’s opera, “Magic Flute,” which touched off a storm of controversy in newspapers and weekly reviews. This opera was intended by the composer to be cast in Egyptian times and to portray the conflict of good and evil. But Hrdlicka, one of Czechoslovakia’s youngest directors, dressed the cast in costumes of the “gay nineties”—and then introduced Hitler and Mussolini. Cultural organisations and music critics denounced the production as “pseudo-realist” and even “existentialist.” The Mozart bicentenary celebration committee declared that the production revealed the “weakness of the artistic leadership” of the Prague National Theatre. The chorus of protests was without precedent here since the Communists’ accession to power. A slow evolution is noticeable, too, in literature. Two new reviews, “Kultura 1957” and “Svetova Literatura,” are publishing without discrimination- contributions from contemporary writers. They also devote considerable space to reports on trends in cultural life abroad, including the West. Some authors, such as Rudyard Kipling and Kafka, who were earlier frowned upon by Czechoslovakia’s Communist leadership, or even banned altogether, are reappearing in bookshops for the first time since 1948. The first translations into the Czechoslovak language of some Western authors are also being prepared. They include work by Ernest Hemingway, and Graham Greene. At the same time, several Czechoslovak newspapers have called for more adventure and love stories by Czechoslovak authors to remedy what they describe as “shortcomings” in this type of entertainment under the nine-year-old Communist regime. In another unusual move, a semi-official review “Literarny Noviny,” organ of the Czechoslovak writers’ union, recently startled its readers by criticising some newly published volumes of Soviet poetry. In a review of the works, it wrote: “There is no need to hide the fact that Soviet poetry is in no way better than that of Czechoslovakia —indeed, it is rather worse.”

Elsewhere the same magazine, commenting on the momentous changes in the Communist world during 1956, said “windows are again being opened on to the world . . , The idea has been abandoned, it is hoped for good, that apart from Communist writers, literature in the capitalist countries is in a state of decay. “The best precept is to put an end to prohibitionist barriers and to allow free competition between Socialist literature and idealist conceptions from which the former is bound to emerge victorious.” A dissenting voice, however, comes from the “Rude Pravo,” the official newspaper of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, which complained of ideas that the doctrine of “socialist realism” is a restrictive influence—“as if this doctrine did not permit the achievement of valuable works” it commented, “as if the ideal of communism were not a sufficiently noble subject for inspiration.”