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Artistic Life Under a Playwright President
| Article
# : |
17083 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1990 |
1,912 Words |
| Author
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Arnost Lustig
Arnost Lustig is a Czech novelist whose books include Darkness
Casts No Shadow, Diamonds of the Night, and A Prayer for
Katerina Horovitzova. He teaches literature and film at
American University. |
Following the revolution of November 17, 1989, Prague was suffused with enthusiasm. Today the mood is different; with no one knowing what the economic future may bring, insecurity prevails. The specter of unemployment and inflation looms over a land where there is immense pressure for change and the rules for everything are in flux. A certain pessimism is gaining in a beautiful country where only a year ago everybody was smiling about almost everything. Freedom, once a chimera, now a reality, is revealing a complex face.
At its outset, the Czechoslovak revolution differed in quality from the other uprisings in the rest of Eastern Europe. Called the Velvet Revolution, it contained an element of forgiveness, of national reconciliation. One English journalist marveled, "Look, a revolution where not even one window pane was broken." The Communist Party was not stripped of its riches. The communists were not tried and punished. One year later, however, the government moved to confiscate without compensation the party's properties (evaluated at $250 million). Crowds in the streets were calling for banning of the party and prosecution of its leaders.
In November 1989, and in the following months, everything had looked rosy. The theaters were filled, as were the streets, with a euphoric population. The country, which had been devastated under communist rule, still seemed rich. Czechoslovakia had been one of the ten most industrialized nations in the world, even after two world wars. It still seemed more prosperous than at least a hundred other countries.
Artists were, and still are, the best gauge of the contemporary state of mind of the nation. Dissidents, particularly dissident artists, have for decades been the ones to shatter the seemingly impregnable monolithic structure of communism, perhaps the most decadent and corrupt system in the world. In late 1989 Communism feel like a house of cards in Europe. But in the space created by its downfall lies a great unknown: the future.
In Czechoslovakia the arts express the country's most eloquent and understandable language at present. Writers, actors, painters, poets, playwrights, and the rest are the living barometer of the mood, hopes, and fears of the Czechoslovak people.
Why artists and the arts? In the first place, it was writers and playwrights who became the conscience of the land and its people, just as they once had in the past. This was not just by accident. At the very center of
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