Western Ruritania says no to Czechia

Last Thursday and Friday the world was treated to such Ruritanian high campness that it could have be forgiven for assuming that the Eurovision final had already begun. Alas, no, I refer to the seemingly slick and well funded PR campaign outlining the case to change the name of the Czech Republic to “the shorter, snappier Czechia” - the campaign to change the "official short form" of the country's name.
Gullible international news media outlets scrambled to interview Talking Heads from an organisation called “Go Czechia” that had made themselves available to describe “the desperate need to re-brand the Czech Republic” and end “the confusion” caused by forcing the happy adjective “Czech” into an uncomfortable and confusing noun. In the UK, news programmes desperate for an alternative to the launch of the “Brexit Poll Campaign” quickly pushed the item to the “quirky, let’s raise a smile slot” at the end of each bulletin. 

Social Media outlets both inside and outside the proposed “Czechia” lit up with discussions ranging in tone from banal to outrage. Some were confused with the timing, others not. Some mentioned previous attempts to change the name to Czechia beginning in 1993 or was it 1997 or even as late as 2007. Some had no particular preference for Czechia or the over long Czech Republic with or without the definite article. Others, including former presidential candidate, minister and “Prince”, Karel Schwarzenburg, proposed Bohemia as an alternative. Some acknowledged that this new stage in the ongoing and often confused discussion about identity has been going on for centuries. Most did not.

That the term “Czechia” is largely absent from most historical analyses of the province known as Bohemia for most of its history as a polity, is one of the many things covered only partially by the Go Czechia PR handout and website. On Friday, no media outlets took the time to read or question this admittedly long and therefore superficially credible list of “myths and facts about the short name of the Czech Republic” provided by and equally new “Czechia Initiative”.

This introduced an element of shame and laziness to those organisations since it takes very little time to notice the partial, loaded and misleading responses to the notions listed “myths” in the PR puff. Alarm bells begin ringing with “Fact 1” but they have melted by "Fact 2" which quotes that “English is very flexible and it will adopt Czechia in a similar way it accepted short country names for other countries recently introduced by, for example, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Myanmar and Croatia”. That these names are not very positive examples to support the to “the shorter, snappier Czechia” is another aspect of the very partial Czechia Initiative.

By the time the very notional reader reaches the last "Fact 16", alarm bells have rung, melted and turned cold. In a chilling, linguistically sloppy (designated here by the note ‘sic’) and totalitarian narrative, "Fact 16" states that, instead of an informed discussion or even a public vote:

 “The decision about(sic) the name “Czechia” has been made by those who are qualified by the law (sic) to make it. November 2014 (sic) statement of the Terminological (sic) Committee of the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadaster (sic) states: “According to the article 3 of Act 1994/200 on Land Surveying, the standardization of names of settlement and non-settlement units is a land surveying activity (sic) in public (sic) interest and its results and recommendations should be followed by national and local state institutions. The position of the Terminological (sic) Committee of the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadaster (sic), an advisory authority of the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadaster (sic) for the codification of country names, on the use of the name Česko and its foreign language variants (Czechia, Tschechien, Tchéquie, Chequia…) is positive (sic). This position on the use of the one-word name Česko and its equivalents in foreign languages has not changed since 1993 (sic). The experts (unidentified) unequivocally recommended the use of “Czechia” in English and its variants in other language (sic) (Tschechien, Tchéquie, Chequia etc.). This is not an opinion but the outcome of the process of standardization (sic).”

Who are these "experts"? What exactly is the "process of standardization"?

Debate over naming this area has been going on arguably since the first century in the Christian era. Tacitus mentions a place called Boiohaemum in his text, Germania. What the residents called it then is unrecorded but it is fair to say that since the first century, this name has not excited much interest outside the area of Boiohaemum. However, it is more than self-evident that the name has excited much interest inside the area and among its neighbours, particularly from the late nineteenth century onwards. One of the more balanced and better-researched surveys of these events takes the form of a fascinating article by Tom Dickins. It appears in the July 2011 edition of Slavonic and East European Review and runs to 54 pages. In addition to a complete history of the discussion, he provides an observation of such languor and learning that it deserves to be quoted in full, “It is striking that even English-speaking Bohemicists are reluctant to adopt Czechia, and in some cases oppose it on the not altogether rational grounds of euphony”.

The confused reader will be forgiven for thinking that a narrative about identity in a “far off” land is familiar theme. Those with a passing acquaintance with nineteenth century adventure fiction will be familiar with the less-than-convincing confusion of identities central to the plot of The Prisoner of Zenda set in the fictional land of Ruritania. A fictional land that popular scholarship has posited as not too far removed from Boiohaemum/ Bohemia/ Czech/ Czechia.

Ruritania’s two main features are that it is ruled by an absolutist clique and is unfortunate enough to possess deep social unrest. These are also conditions recently familiar to residents of the countries quoted above in Fact 2 demonstrating that “English is very flexible and it will adopt Czechia in a similar way it accepted short country names for other countries recently introduced by, for example, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Myanmar and Croatia”.

This might sound a little far fetched if unsupported by facts. Unfortunately, facts support the notion that the proposed new Czechia is a “nation ruled by an absolutist clique”. Facts also support a notion that all is not well in the proposed new Czechia. In recent weeks, a state visit by China’s President Xi excited much anger amongst its Czech citizens. Then, they had concerns that the Czech Republic, as it was then, was becoming a vassal of Chinese political and corporate interests. After that, the Panama Papers brought the recent flouting of Czech law by Czech political parties into sharp relief. Czechs began last week as citizens of the Czech Republic and ended it as potential citizens of new Czechia without even being consulted. Their perception is that corrupt practices remain while the corrupt remain in power and change means only the name - is hard to ignore.

On his Facebook page on Friday, Erik Best, the American commentator on Czech business and politics and founder of The Fleet Sheet and The Final Word, proposed his status for the day as a “Guide for foreigners. 1) Czechia 2) chechia 3) Chechnya 4) Chiquita”. This status received more than 30 comments in Czech and English including many stronger negative opinions on the Czechia initiative; suggestions shared by 80 of roughly 10,000 friends and followers. The allusion to power abusing its power for its own sake and mocking those without it was very difficult to miss.
All this contrasts unfavourably with how similar changes are implemented in other "far away" small countries like when Australia held a referendum about whether or not to keep the British Queen as head of state. New Zealand, even smaller and further away did the same for the proposed change to its national flag. Both countries engaged with international media outlets in thoughtful, well-researched, well-planned and well-resourced strategies. Both campaigns were received by international media outlets sympathetically for months before and weeks after the refenda occured. Both nations received sustained favourable publicity that it would not have received otherwise. Given the cost of undertaking such a thing, positive international “outcomes” were undoubted priority items in the documents supporting those PR initiatives. Positive outcomes would include boosting interest in, trade with, and tourism to, both countries - plus many other “soft power” benefits as well.
International approval and positive perception matters a lot to most countries, particularly “small ones” who need international trade and tourism like Australia, New Zealand and new Czechia and/or the old Czech Republic.
It would appear this doesn’t matter to the current Czech government. Instead, it issued a decree, on the recommendation of "experts", in crap English, supported by mad looking people on Skype with funny accents. All this was later edited and portrayed as a joke item in the UK TV news, if not many other nations' TV News programmes. This sort of thing makes the place seem like a banana republic and damages a country’s reputation. No-one outside new Czechia knew or cared that its president is a drunk prone to making unfortunate remarks in public or its Prime Minister appears to have a personal financial stake in many aspects of the nation's economy. Now, the world will remember the place negatively as somewhere with a joke name they can't quite remember.

The less-than-convincing PR campaign surrounding the less-than-convincing case for a name change makes it difficult not to conclude the timing of this announcement is a deliberate attempt to distract attention away from mounting discontent in “Czechia/Chechia /Chechnya/Chiquita Republic. The activities of its president and prime minister remain an international scandal waiting to happen.

Further, it is difficult how the world beyond the soon-to-be-forgotten new Czechia will retain any recollection of the name change beyond a vague notion of that Czechia and its people remain as they always were, part of a far-away, camp, unhappy and confusing part of Ruritania.

Ruritania comes to London on 12 May

Tomáš Zmeškal

Londoners are in for a real Ruritanian treat on 12 May when authors Tomáš Zmeškal and Hamid Ismailov are to be found in conversation with Ruritanian revisionist theorist, Misha Glenny.

Tomáš Zmeškal’s debut novel "Love Letter in Cuneiform" is a family saga - a story of marriage, love and destiny set in Czechoslovakia between the 1940s and 1990s. Josef meets his wife, Květa, before the WWII at a public lecture and she marries him instead of their mutual friend Hynek. But when her husband is arrested and unlawfully imprisoned, Květa gives herself to Hynek in return for help and advice. Exploring what is not spoken, what cannot be said and the repercussions of silence, Zmeškal's tale, told as a mosaic of events, exposes the larger, ongoing struggle of post communist Eastern Europe to come to terms with suffering when catharsis is denied. 

Hamid Ismailov’s latest book The Dead Lake, long-listed for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is a haunting Russian tale about environmental legacy of the Cold War. It tells a story of a gifted violinist Yerzhan growing up on the Kazakh steppes, the Soviet test ground for atomic weapons. Yerzhan falls in love with the neighbour’s daughter and to impress her, he dives into a forbidden lake. Its radioactive water stops his growth and he becomes trapped in a boy’s body while the girl he loves grows into a beautiful woman. Drawing attention to atomic tests taking place between 1945 and 1989 in Kazakhstan, Ismailov creates a parable of modern arms race impacting on people’s lives and tradition.

Full details can be found here

Imre Kertesz - RIP

The 2002 Nobel Literature Prize winner died this morning aged 86 at his home in Budapest. He had been ill for some time. One of Europe's best stylists in the novella form, his work drew on his own experiences as a teenage Holocaust survivor and beyond.

Written between 1960 and 1973, his first novella "Fateless" was rejected for publication at first by Communist censors and was finally released in 1975, but was largely ignored in Hungary despite the  500,000 Hungarian Jews being killed by the Nazis.

It would be fair to say that Kertesz had a tempestuous relationship with the Hungarian state both before and after the regime changes in 1989. He was a noted critic of the current administration. However, his talent was not limited to painful descriptions of murder. His novella "Union Jack" set during the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and featuring the flag of the Her Majesty's Ambassador's car right at the end of the narrative is one of the finest and funniest satires to emerge from central Europe. Your correspondent will read some of that novella this evening.

The Una keeps on rolling quietly - Irish Times Review

"The majestic Una river becomes a metaphor for life – and death – in this delicate, haunting novel by a veteran of the Bosnian war', wrotes Eileen Battersby in her review of Quietly Flows The Una by Faruk Sehic. 

"Faruk Sehic is a Bosniak veteran of the Bosnian war of the 1990s (“the Serbs and Croats tried to persuade me to write ‘Bosnian Muslim’ because Yugoslavs didn’t really exist, they said”), and he has accepted that he has become two people. One is the boy who loved exploring the natural world of the Una, which dominates homeland and narrative. Sehic’s other, lesser self is the soldier who went to war and knew that “tomorrow we would be burning houses and killing people with the same names as us”. These personalities unite in the telling of this autobiographical novel."

Rivertrain blog's ecstatic review begins: "This is an extraordinary book by the Bosnian writer Faruk Šehić . The language is lyrical and poetic. The writing cannot be categorized, it escapes all definitions, one form metamorphosing into another, just like the river that is the central character and forms the constant, a paradoxical constant, for even as it is always there, a presence that is both reliable and loved, its nature is shifting and protean".

The author himself will attending a launch hosted by the EBRD tomorrow evening for which registration is required. The event provides an excellent opportunity to discover the importance of metaphor in South-eastern Ruritania.

Faruk Šehić – Quiet Flows the Una
Translated by Will Firth
Published by Istros Books
ISBN 978 1908 236 494 

Today is the first anniversary of the death of Peter Pišťanek

Peter committed suicide. There is a plan to celebrate what would have been his 56th birthday in London on 28 April. The Ruritanian will post more details when they become available.

Below is the obituary written by his British Publisher, Donald Rayfield.

Peter Pišt'anek, the most brilliant of modern Slovak novelists, has died on Sunday 22^nd March, before his 55^th birthday, in a Bratislava hospital, after taking an overdose. Born in 1960, he was first known to the public as a  drummer in a rock group (a life he portrayed uproariously in his novella "The Musicians"). Even before the fall of communism his exposure of the underbelly of Slovak life and his satire of Slovak national pretensions (which he called ‘narcissism’) caused a stir. His real genius became manifest in the novel "Rivers of Babylon" of 1991, which with "The Wooden Village" and "The End of Freddy" became a trilogy, following the transformation of a ruthless village thug first into Slovak ‘businessman of the year’ and then into a Russian oil oligarch. (These three novels were translated into English by Peter Petro and published by the Garnett Press in 2007 and 2008, the first of them ending quite high up the Independent Foreign Fiction Long List.) Pišt'anek’s plotting had the ingenuity of Quentin Tarantino, the irony of Evelyn Waugh and, at times, the obscenity of Henry Miller. Yet his novellas could express sympathy for the underdog, such as the hero of the eponymous "Young Dônč". His language exploited to the full the rich mix of Bratislava Slovak, with its undertones of Viennese German, of Hungarian and of Gypsy. At the same time, uniquely among Slovaks, Pišt'anek took pride in his ability to write in Czech: the Prague scenes of The End of Freddy switch to Czech.

            Rivers of Babylon has now been translated into several European and Asian languages; Pišt'anek recently published a new novel, The Hostage, which was to be filmed. He seemed at the threshold of international recognition. But despite psychotherapy and a happy remarriage, the depression that periodically plagued him, returned.

            Peter Pišt'anek took delight in provoking authority: his "Tales about Vlad" were a thorn in the flesh of Vladimír Mečiar, the Slovak prime minister. For all his dark satire and knowledge of the worst of human nature, however, Peter Pišt'anek was a kind, reticent and considerate man, with an uproarious sense of humour. He was an expert on many things, for instance brandy and whisky, having visited all the distilleries of the Highlands and Islands. He had an endearing resemblance to Uncle Fester of the Addams family, and those who had dealings with him — whether as friends, translators or publishers — felt both admiration and a desire to look after him, a feeling which we now know we expressed inadequately.

Donald Rayfield

Three Faces of an Angel - Jiří Pehe book review

This gripping and at times horrific saga detailing the lives of three generations of a German-Czech-Jewish family is very definitely a text for those with a strong interest in 20the century history. It is also raises a number of questions about politics, identity and religion. As you might expect, the novel contains tragic episodes beginning in Prague before 1914 and ending on the morning of 9/11 in a café next to the World Trade Centre. 

The triumphant final section of the book will be of particular delight to students of intellectual masturbation. The author, a political scientist, gives voice to his monstrous character, Alex, in a bruising and well argued critique of the notions of "Cold War Studies" morphing into "Globalisation" and then "post-colonialism" as practised by "best selling author-academics" in the 1970s and 1980s. Fortunately, those notions are now airbrushed from intellectual history but the bastard child they inspired is the wickedly funny notion of "the Globalization of postmodernism". 

Added to this is the frequent appearance of the angel, Ariel. Not as well known as Michael or Gabriel or in Jewish or Christian sacred texts, he is a very disturbing presence, sometimes benign, at other times downright homicidal.

Václav Havel described the original Czech text as “remarkable”, Ivan Klíma wrote that is was “one of the most outstanding novels written in the Czech lands since 1989. A truly Central European novel with a universal message”. However unlikely, it was in fact Tomáš Halík who summed up the novel best as “an unusual and powerful novel about the 20^th century, the Holocaust in particular, but also about God”. Halík being a Jesuit priest, academic sociologist and winner of the Templeton Prize in 2014 might be the best judge of nuance in this case but not all.

With scenes of the Holocaust, fighting in Siberia and a particularly sensitive description of mental illness, this book is not for the faint-hearted. It is however, a major contribution to understanding the twentieth century experience west of France and north of the Mediterranean. It is funny, scary and thought provoking - Ruritanian Gothic with angels thrown in. Liberating! 

 

Kytice fan Helen Oyeyemi speaks about Prague

The Ruritanian was distracted on 2 March when the Lenny Letter arrived however, no worry, we received a reminder that Helen Oyeyemi had been interviewed about traveling away from and then finding a home in Prague and even making an effort with the Czech language. Read all here

Helen revealed her love of Susan Reynold's translation of Erben's Kytice in 2014 in the New York Times. When asked what was the best book she had read lately, the answer was "I don’t really know how to describe these stories, except that most of them are profoundly strange, with outcomes that you shrink from rather than anticipate, and so you simply pause from time to time to make peace with your goose bumps. The very particular rhythm of the verse contributes to its effect, which makes the translation all the more impressive."

Ever since, the Jantar team have held a soft spot for Helen Oyeyemi and eagerly look forward to her new collection of short stories, "What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours". Who knows what surprises are in store there...

Book Launch of QUIET FLOWS THE UNA on 31 March 2016

Book Launch of QUIET FLOWS THE UNA
“A meditation on the beauty of nature and the cruelty of war.”
Bosnian Author Faruk Šehić on his Prize-Winning Novel

Join us for a conversation with the author, chaired by Larry Sherwin
Thursday, 31st March at 18:00
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
1 Exchange Square, London EC2A 2JN (nearest tube: Liverpool Street)
Registration necessary

Bosnian writer Faruk Šehić is our special guest for a discussion of his latest book Quiet Flows the Una – the story of a man trying to overcome the personal trauma cause by the war in his country between 1992 and 1995. The novel has won the EU Prize for Literature, as well as the Meša Selimovič Prize for the best novel published in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro & Croatia.

Faruk Šehić is a veteran of the conflict and an engaging speaker. His work is a poetic, witty and wistful mediation on the beauty of nature and the cruelty of war.

Join us at 18.00 in the auditorium for a discussion and Q&A session, after which there will be a drinks reception, book sale and signing.

Book launch and sneak preview - Josef Jedlička's "Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life"

 

Fans of Ruritanian translation rejoice at the news that Alex Zucker's translation of Josef Jedlička's "Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life" will be launched at the Waterstones bookshop in Piccadilly on 14 April at 7pm.

A sneak preview of the text can be viewed courtesy of B O D Y