(This is an English translation of an essay by Josef Jedlicka. Originally published in Czech in "Ceske typy" [Typical Czech heroes], Prague, 1992.)
Czech thinking spends most of its energies aiming to produce a harmonious concept of reality. Although the Czechs have always been surrounded by contradictions and often found themselves in the midst of tragedy, they have never been interested in extremes. A Titanic rebellion has always been just as alien to the Czechs as gloomy pessimism. Czech mutinies have always related to the unbearable contradictions of the world and Czech melancholy was always a nostalgia after a lost idyll. Even all Czech "heroic acts" have mostly been the result of despair over the wickedness of the world and they have rarely been agressive - they have mostly been akin to a ritual sacrifice - a token to pacify hostile forces. I think that only when people are arrogant and well off they make dramatic, tragic gestures: when they are in trouble, when they are poor and lonely, they look for redemption in consoling images of peace, comfort and pleasant human relations.
This is why "The Grandmother" by Bozena Nemcova is regarded as one of the greatest Czech works. The book was written at an extremely difficult time when the author´s human suffering had reached quite unbearable levels. Her son had died, she had left her husband, her friends had abandoned her, she was suffering from political persecution, she had absolutely no money - not even for a pair of shoes or for a candle... This is why the Czechs like her - they like her for not expressing her misery by complaining and accusing, but, they like her because, by using her self-preservation instinct, she transformed herself and created an idyllic image of her childhood.
We have known for a long time that Nemcova´s memories of her childhood in The Grandmother do not constitute an authentic account of those human lives and events which formed the author´s real childhood. Literary scholars have been studying the differences between the "truth" and the "fiction" of The Grandmother for decades. These differences are rather typical for literary creative work. All the real-life characters and stories, contained in The Grandmother, have been thoroughly investigated, so we probably now know everything about them that there is to know. All the meticulous research work by scholars like Vaclav Tille and Vaclav Cerny shows that the work of Bozena Nemcova has very little basis in reality. There is nothing in The Grandmother which would not be based on a childhood memory, but these memories are not present in the work as documentary facts, memories - as Salda has pointed out - are only one source of her fiction; daydreaming is the other source. The author has turned her memories into an idyll.
This has also been known for quite some time - that The Grandmother is a conscious and deliberate, sentimental idealisation of Czech country life in the first quarter of the 19th century. The creation of this idyllic image is what the critics and the public see as Nemcova´s artistic achievement.
We know from scholars such as Tille, Novotny and Cerny that the social position and the material existence of the Pankl family were extremely difficult indeed. Pankl, a groom at the local gentry´s estate, found it quite difficult to support his numerous family from his small pay. They lived in a crowded flat in the cellar under a barn and shared their living environment with other servants at the estate. The Grandmother lived in this poor and dark flat for a time and her presence probably lit up the unfriendly surroundings. The family mostly made its living as servants. Nemcova´s wider family had become urbanised. The Grandmother, Magdalena Novotna eventually died while staying with her working class daughter in Vienna.
Nemcova herself, as a result of marrying an official, joined the middle classes. It is well-known that she missed Prague: she wanted to return there both from the idyllic Chod region in the west of Bohemia (where her husband had been transferred) as well as from the primitively natural environment of Slovakia. Nemcova could have easily written idylls based on her personal experiences: she could have given the tenderness of human relations to the environment of servants at a country estate and could have written about heroes who managed to rise among the hierarchy of officials and intellectuals. She did hint at this possibility of development in her work The Castle and the Village (V zamku a v podzamci), but her main work took a different route.
Her Prosek family in The Grandmother stand socially between the gentry and the ordinary country people. The biedermeier features of the Old Whitening Place environment (where the Prosek family lives in the novel) are alien to the patriarchal idyll. These biedermeier features serve only as a motivation for a wide range of social contacts within the Prosek family - up as well as down on the social ladder - and as a nationally and morally unstable background for the Grandmother´s non-conformity. Only the arrival of the grandmother gives this small world in a rural valley the unambiguous features of a patriarchal order. If we consider that the fictional Grandmother is described as a poor craftswoman from the mountains, a soldier´s wife, while the real Magdalena Novotna was an orphan, pushed about in service from place to place, a destitute proletarian, running away from home before hunger and war, and towards the old age she was an unwelcome visitor in the families of her married daughters, the changes that Nemcova has made to the character are all the more conspicous: the characters have been moved to the area of rural, peasant life.
Vaclav Cerny thinks that the reason for this change is primarily artistic. He is of the opinion that Nemcova had set out to "create typical characters" and provides convincing evidence that the people from Nemcova´s childhood had indeed been transformed by her fictional changes into typical characters. Cerny regards as self evident that Nemcova´s characters are typical for a Czech village. And yet it was not self evident, automatic, that Nemcova should have chosen a village environment for the setting of her work. Let us take Macha, for instance - just as Nemcova, Macha was a person from an urban environment. Macha is not interested in folklore characteristics and is not trying to understand the country people. This is probably because Macha´s topic is a human metaphysical drama which results in irreconcilable conflict. But Nemcova was the author of idylls.
And just as Macha was immediately rejected by the public and by the critics because his work was tragic, Nemcova´s The Grandmother was immediately accepted exactly because it was an idyll.
The Czechs simply like harmonising images of reality. But if such an idyll was to come into being, Nemcova had to transform her experience from the servants quarters at a country estate into a harmonic image of village life. This is probably the only possible way in Bohemia how to create an idyllic image of the world.
In this sense the approach of Bozena Nemcova is typical for Czech thinking. A desire for an idyll amongst the Czechs is always a palliative for troubles and difficulties brought to us by life. An idyll is usually a mirror image of real life. The main topic of the idyll is what we miss in real life. An idyll is not an image of the world as it should be, but it is a projection of our desire. You can easily judge from The Grandmother what the Czech intellectuals in the middle of the 19th century desired and what we have been desiring for more than a hundred years when using Nemcova´s The Grandmother as a consolation in bad times.
The real-life predicament of the characters which served as models for the fictional characters in The Grandmother are not just "untypical", as Cerny says, but their main problem is that they cannot fulfill the role that they must play in an idyll. Viktorka, who in real life went from village to village as a beggar until she died at the age of 76, is a sad character and a topic for a socially critical piece of fiction. The young countess Hortensie, a German woman from the Baltics, married to a member of a militant German patriotic organisation and who congregates with Grillparzer and the Bavarian king Ludwig - which was what she was like in real life - cannot become the subject of the Grandmother´s prudent and wise care. And the same applies to all the other fictional characters in The Grandmother.
The Czech society at the beginning of the 19th century suffered primarily from lack of contact with its own aristocracy. All attempts at liberal, enlightened reform failed because the educated classes - the aristocracy - were simply not interested in these efforts in Bohemia. In France it was enough only for the social position of the aristocracy to change and the exchange of cultural values could immediately start. In Bohemia, a liberal count or prince was isolated from the culture of his own country by the fact that he was a foreigner and could not even speak Czech.
By creating her Country Princess as an enlightened and a humane lady Nemcova conformed to a more or less usual Romantic stereotype. But by allowing this enlightened and humane lady to enter into repeated and active contact with the Grandmother, Nemcova has fulfilled the ancient Czech fairytale desire for a nobility with which it would be possible even to communicate. This desire is in no way limited only to Nemcova´s times. It goes through the whole modern Czech history as a statehood ideal. Only exceptionally did the Czechs enjoy a government which would be capable of identifying with the ordinary people. Thus, such a notion is, for most Czechs, still like something from a fairy tale. The Czechs still yearn for that motive of a noble-minded lady who shows kindness and is interested in the life of her subjects. This is a major, consoling, idyllic theme for the Czechs - because they have experienced so rarely that their rulers should be noble-minded, educated, compassionate and helpful.
It is for the same reason why even today the Czechs are moved when they read that a wise, thoughtful and an independent-minded person is esteemed and surrounded with affection. This is exactly because it Bohemia this has happened so rarely.
If our premise is correct - that the Grandmother is an idyllic work and that by creating such an idyll, the work substitutes what is missing in real life by a daydream - than The Grandmother constitutes convincing evidence not only that Nemcova´s life was miserable, but also that our own life, the life of the Czechs is deeply flawed.
Because what Nemcova´s The Grandmother depicts as a fairy tale idyll is, in the final instance, nothing more than ordinary, decent and heplful social life, governed by sensible rules.
It is maybe quite understandable that this novel was written as an expression of anguish felt by a lonely woman more than a hundred years ago.
But if The Grandmother still fulfills the need of the Czechs for a harmonious life, then there is something wrong.
Things would be in order - permit me this blasphemy - if we no longer understood Nemcova´s idyll.