Canadian Slavonic Papers

GOGOL AND HASEK —TWO MASTERS OF POSHLOSTAuthor(s): Robert VlachSource: Études Slaves et Est-Européennes / Slavic and East-European Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3/4(Automne-Hiver/Autumn-Winter 1962), pp. 239-242Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41055899 .

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Slavic and East European Studies

to portray themselves - "heirs of the best Czechoslovak tradition." They do not struggle for "the soul of the nation " : on the contrary, they evade meet- ing it.

It has been said : "Whatever grows - cries not." And the soul of the Czech nation, alive in the Czech literature, "grows and cries not." It grows in the calm of the Czech fields, over the rooftops of old Prague, in the studies of silenced intellectuals - of those who "stayed faithful." It grew, and will continue to grow out of its own strength, out of its own genius.

1. Jaroslav Vlòek, "Dejiny ceské literatury," Vol. I, p. 24, Praha, 1951. 2. Albert Praiák, "Národ se bránil," p. 19, Praha, 1946. 3. Jaroslav Vlöek, "Dejiny êeské literatury, p. 42, Praha, 1951. 4. Ibidem, p. 58. 5. R. W. Seton-Watson, "History of the Czechs and Slovaks, p. 62, London, 1943. 6. Jaroslav Vlöek, "Dejiny éeské literatury," p. 147, Vol. I, Praha, 1951. 7. Ibidem, d. 154. 8. Ibidem, p. 179-180. 9. Albert Praiák. "Národ se bránil" p. 31, Praha, 1946.

10. Jaroslav Vlöek, Dejiny âeské literatury," Vol. I, p. 280, Praha, 1951. 11. Albert Praiák, "Národ se bránil," p. 33, Praha, 1946. 12. Hanus Jelinek, « La littérature tchèque contemporaine*, rans, lyii. 13. Albert Praiák, "Národ se bránil," p. 230, Praha, 1946. 14. HanuS Jelinek, « La littérature tchèque contemporaine*, Pans, 1911. 15. "Our Voices," Weekly, October, 1961, Toronto.

GOGOL AND HASEK - TWO MASTERS OF POSHLOST

by Robert Vlach

Two noteworthy definitions of poshlosf were proposed by two prominent Russian hommes de lettres, Prince D. S. Mirskij and Vladimir Nabokov. Mirskij, in his History of Russian Literature, presents the following one : Poshlosf is "a self-satisfied inferiority, moral and spiritual V For Nabokov, in his Nicolai Gogol, the expression means "not only the obviously trashy, but also the falsely beautiful, falsely important, falsely clever, falsely attractive2." Neither Gogol, nor Hasek had ever named it by its name, but they embodied it, in its acme, in their masterpieces. In Dead Souls (as well as in the Inspector General or the Overcoat) and in the Good Soldier Schweik we find the same magnificent, universal, exasperating trashiness, even though one author dis- covered it in Russia, in the Thirties of the XlXth century, and the other in the Hapsburg Empire some 80 years later. It is only of peripheral importance that Hasek, who spoke Russian years before his Anabasis in Russia, knew and liked Gogol's work : his fate was to discover and struggle quixotically with his native poshlosf. Even without Gogol he would have become an ex- ponent of his quality, for the Czech-Austrian poshlosf, splendid and formidable, did not owe its existence to any outside source.

Gogol and Hasek, however, have much more in common than their source of inspiration. One is tempted to conclude from their works that poshlosf at the stage witnessed by them, cannot be treated in a different way. Moreover it cannot be dealt with without exacting a gruesome revenge on the author.

Neither Gogol, nor Hasek (who likewise made his entry into literature with bad poetry) was able to bring his greatest work to an end. For almost eleven

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Etudes Slaves et Est-Européennes

years, Gogol had been attempting in vain to transform his Ciòkov into a human being, when, to his surprise, he learned from his critics that he hardly could be considered as such. In order to humanize him, he began to dream of a drama in which redemption would follow sin, a new Divine Comedy. Hasek never embraced such an illusion. He was one with Schweik : either his own adventures became those of his hero, or he took inspiration from him. One example is typical : his pre-war version of Schweik is based on a real story, overheard in a tavern, of a man who avoided military service by playing the fool3; on May 25, 1915, Hasek was declared "mentally inferior" by the Austrian military authorities and exempted from duty. He hated Schweik, but (vas compelled to go on and on with him, in a sadistitc and at the same time masochistic furor. No one knows when he would have been capable of freeing himself from his protagonist, if ever, had he not drunk himself to death.

Both novels can be covered by the description of Dead Souls given by René Wellek : "A comic epic, a gallery of portraits, a loosely assembled travel story with little psychology, no tragic conflict, no debates concerning God and immortality4." If Deal Souls should be put on the stage as Schweik was so many times by Erwin Piscator with all the characters except Schweik, represented by puppets, it would also be fully justified. There are no positive characters in either novel. They simply do not live : poshlosf emptied them of all human content. They are caricatures, grotesques, but these traits only mask an immense, limitless, pure tragedy.

Poshlosf seems to have imposed upon both authors many identical artistic means, but there can be no doubt that Gogol was a much greater artist than Hasek. (He also had more time to give to his writing.) Poshlosf does not favor plots. It permits one to see men only as caricatures. It makes laughter turn to tears of despair. It does not tolerate any system : its currents are those of hazard. People (or rather shadows) appear, perform something meaning- less, promise something never fulfilled, then disappear. There is, significantly enough, no place for women. Poshlosf favors "an utter vulgarity of ... grotesque nicknames ... in order to disclose the mentality of those who used them." This is said by Nabokov for Gogol 5, but none of his names can, in this regard, beat Schweik himself.

It is understandable that both Dead Souls and the Good Soldier Schweik have been given the most divergent interpretations. The case of Dead Souls is widely known so that it hardly needs further elaboration. For Belinskij, the novel was a purely Russian national work, drawn from the depth of the nation's life, ruthlessly revealing its reality. In other terms, so dear to Soviet critics, it was a socialist realistic satire. Thus Gogol was proclaimed the founder of the Russian realist movement. At the other extreme, Merezkovskij, Rozanov, Olga Fors and Belyj considered Gogol a symbolist. A reconciliation between these two views has been proposed for many years with solutions shifting slightly from author to author. Similarly Hasek's Schweik has not yet obtained a stable place.

In foreign countries, this is not the case. Schweik is accepted as a kind of Sancho Panza. His name is often mentioned in relation to such characters as Hamlet, Don Juan, Faust and Oblomov, according to the critic's preferences.

The novel has been translated into many languages and, frequently dramatized (by Brecht among others) and filmed. No other Czech work has achieved comparable success. Despite this fact, its existence was ignored in the official literature in Czechoslovakia between the two World Wars, bchweik was condemned in its homeland on aesthetic grounds : the novel was poorly

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Slavic and East European Studies

written, artless, and vulgar. In non-literary terms, Schweik was branded as a scandalous slander against the Czech nation. Even today, a Czech hearing Schweik's name from the mouth of a foreigner immediately and instinctively stiffens and is either ashamed or suspects a deliberate offense 6.

Published in 1920-1923, Schweik unveiled all the formidable pos tilos f of the Austrian military machinery and by this of the whole monarchy. But for this latter he would be gaily pardoned by the Czechs. The novel also brought to light the no less formidable poshlost' of a newformed, smali- bourgeois State, with its not-yet-learned democracy, its self-glorification not only in the remote, but also in the very recent past and its heroic revolutionary legends in particular. You are not Hussites but "Schweiks" was the challenge Hasek threw in the face of his countrymen, and he knew what he was saying, being one of them, being himself a "Schweik". Hasek's few, and of course, oppositionist admirers made things still worse. In a collection of essays published in 1928 one of the best catholic writers Jaroslav Durych found "Schweik" to be "the embodiment and the monument of the (Czech) nation" and "a mirror from which the whole nation will learn V Unfortunately for the Czechs, these heretical words proved to be prophetic during the German occupation, 1939- 45, years which have witnessed Schweik's resurrection in practical life on a nation-wide scale. The fact speaks for itself that, when Czech Communists wish to express their supreme disdain of the émigrés their Czech souls forget what is written on Schweik in their literary textbooks and they write a satire "Schweik in Exile;" the free Czechs, of course, retaliate with "Schweik in the Communist Paradise."

Who is Schweik ? According to American critics, he is either, as William E. Harkins proposes, "an apparently naive person whose simplicity protects him and helps him escape the hardships and responsibilities of life in the Austrian army during the First World War 8 " or a "fat dogcatcher from the Prague area," "a coward and shirk who assumes the innocence and stupidity of an idiot to disarm railing officers, a happy-go-lucky skeptic as to war and military glory, and endless talker and coarse jester" - as René Wellek patriot- ically sees him 9.

For the Czech Communists, because he was accepted in the Soviet Union, Schweik became a positive hero, illustrating "the rascality, barbarity and non- sense of the imperialist war," a man "of common, realistic sense and opinions based upon his experience of daily life 10."

F. X. Salda, the greatest Czech critic, found Hasek's novel "sorrowful to death : for here, an individual struggles with an enormous power, which has no superior - with the war ... He struggles with the mean, insidious weapons which were imposed on him : he struggles as slaves always do "." In other words, he is a democratic Konrad Wallenrod. Salda, of course, put his finger on the Czech national wound : the Czechs were reduced then, as during World War Two, and as at the present time, to the weapons of slaves. But more than that : they have got used to these weapons and have since fallen back upon them even when they had free choice. They will be ashamed of Schweik as long as they manage to redeem themselves in their own conscience.

It is another story, that Hasek did not make this cruel diagnosis in order to heal them. His own despair, similar to Gogol's, limited him to diagnosing the condition. The process was not without delight for him. He never tried to overcome his nature, as Gogol did. One surely can pity Hasek as a sick man. With Akakij AkakijeviC, the hero of the Overcoat and some practical jokes of Gogol's in mind, one again cannot avoid making a parallel. Salda

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felt in Hasek "a sort of devilishly calm and calculated wrath 12." Berdiaev called Gogol the least human of Russian writers.

Poshlosf, which both Gogol and Hasek reflected so brilliantly and fully, seems to take possession of the hero as well as, through him, of the author. They were masters of poshlosf in their works, but in life they became its victims. Both were a kind of poètes maudits and their tragedy - religious aberration leading to folly in one case, death from alcohol in the other - has the same source : because of poshlosf, which they were able to discern more sharply than anyone else, they detested men.

NOTES

1. (1926) cf. n. ed. (New York, Vintage books, 1958), p. 158. 2. (1944) Corrected ed. (New York, New Directions, 1961), p. 70. 3. Vaclav Menger: Jaroslav HaSek 2nd. ed. (Praha, 1935), p. 238. 4. Introduction by René Wellek (New York, Rinehart, 1960), p. V. 5. Supra, note 2, p. 86. 6. A recent example of the necessity of a defensive explaining see the parenthesis in "The

First World War and Czech Literature" by Georges Skvor, Slavic and East-European Studies, (1960), p. 162.

7. Salduv zápisník, I, (1928-1929), p. 16-17. 8. William E. Harkins. Anthology of Czech Literature, (New York), p. 175. 9. Columbia Dictionary of modern European Literature. (New York, Columbia university

Press), p. 367. 10. Jaroslav Kunc : Slovnik soudobych ¿eskych spisovatelu, (Praha, 1945), II, pp. 210-211. 11. Salduv zápisník. I, pp. 16-17. 12. Salduv zápisník, I, p. 74.

UN DEMI-SIÈCLE DE TRAVAIL LITTÉRAIRE DU PROFESSEUR L'ABBÉ KAMIL KANTAK

La Section polonaise du Département d'Etudes Slaves à l'Université de Montréal a célébré au mois de décembre 1962 le cinquante-cinquième anni- versaire de l'activité scientifique et littéraire ainsi que le quatre-vingt-unième anniversaire de naissance d'un des plus actifs et illustres représentants ecclésiastiques de la culture polonaise à l'étranger, de celui qui sans aucun doute est le doyen des littérateurs catholiques polonais. Le professeur Kantak est bien connu des milliers d'intellectuels polonais, dissipés après la dernière guerre mondiale à travers presque tous les pays de l'hémisphère occidental.

Monsieur l'abbé Kantak est né en 1881 à Lubonia, village situé dans la partie occidentale de la Pologne, appelé « Wielkopolska ».

Pendant ses études secondaires le jeune Kantak se fait remarquer par son intelligence et son talent littéraire (il écrivait déjà à cette époque des poésies en polonais et en latin). Après les études au Grand Séminaire de son diocèse, il entre à l'Université de Fribourg-en-Brisgau, où il obtint en 1909 son doctorat après avoir présenté la thèse sur les Bénédictins polonais de Bydgoszcz.

Dès son retour en Pologne, c'est-à-dire dans les provinces occupées alors par les Allemands, l'abbé Kantak continue ses recherches comme archiviste de l'archidiocèse de Gniezno, dans le domaine de l'histoire des ordres religieux en Pologne, et publie sa magna opus : Les Origines des Franciscains en Pologne, qui lui a valu plus tard la chaire de l'histoire de l'Eglise au Grand Séminaire de Pinsk (en Pologne, déjà indépendante, après le Traité de Versailles). Avant sa nomination et durant sa carrière de professeur du Grand

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