Jaroslav Seifert

Jaroslav Seifert: The Poet Prague Would Not Give Up

When the Swedish Academy announced its Nobel Prize in Literature in 1984, the laureate was too ill to travel to Stockholm; his daughter went in his place. He was eighty-three, had been expelled from the literary establishment of his own country, and had signed a document the state regarded as sedition. Jaroslav Seifert had outlasted an empire, a republic, an occupation, a Stalinist purge and a Soviet invasion, and had gone on writing lyric poetry through all of it.

Žižkov, 1901

Seifert was born on 23 September 1901 in Žižkov, a suburb of Prague then still inside Austria-Hungary. He would spend his life within reach of that city and would return to it in his work again and again, until Prague became less a setting in his poetry than a permanent interlocutor. He was twenty when his first collection, *Město v slzách*, appeared in 1921 — the same year the Czechoslovak Republic was barely three years old and its young writers were deciding what a new nation's literature ought to sound like.

Devětsil and the Avant-Garde

Seifert's answer was to help invent it. He was one of the founders of the journal *Devětsil*, and through the 1920s he stood at the centre of the Czechoslovak artistic avant-garde — a movement of young poets, painters and theorists who wanted art stripped of nineteenth-century solemnity and rewired for a century of radio, cinema and electric light. The collections came fast: *Samá láska* in 1923, *Na vlnách TSF* in 1925 — a title borrowed from wireless telegraphy, which tells you most of what the movement thought poetry should be doing — and *Básně* in 1929.

The avant-garde was, in that decade, inseparable from the political left. Seifert was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He edited its newspapers — *Rovnost*, *Sršatec*, *Reflektor* — and worked for a communist publishing house. Poetry and party work were, for a time, the same vocation.

The Break, March 1929

That ended early and decisively. In March 1929 Seifert and six other writers signed a manifesto protesting what they saw as Bolshevised, Stalinist-influenced tendencies in the party's new leadership, and left the party. It was a remarkable act of timing. Most Western intellectuals who broke with Stalinism did so in 1939, or 1956, or 1968; Seifert did it in 1929, when the evidence was thin and the cost was immediate expulsion from the movement that had given him his readers, his editors and his livelihood.

He made a living instead in the social-democratic and trade union press through the 1930s and 1940s, writing journalism to pay for the poems. *Ruce Venušiny* appeared in 1936, the year he received the first of three state prizes for poetry. *Kamenný most* followed in 1944, published in a Prague under German occupation.

The Poet of the City

In 1949 Seifert stopped working as a journalist altogether and devoted himself entirely to literature — a decision taken, it is worth noting, in the year after the communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia, when the press had ceased to be a place where a man of his history could work honestly.

What followed was the long central body of the work, much of it circling the same subject. *Praha a Věnec sonetů* came in 1956 and was later translated into English by Jan Křesadlo; *Kniha o Praze* in 1968. Edward Osers became his principal English translator, the man through whom most non-Czech readers would eventually meet him. A second state prize came in 1955 and a third in 1968, and in 1967 the state named him a National Artist — the highest cultural honour it had to give.

Chairman, Then Dissident

The honours did not buy him. From 1968 to 1970 Seifert served as chairman of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union, an office that spanned exactly the collapse of the Prague Spring and the imposition of what the regime called normalisation. Then, in 1977, at seventy-five, he signed Charter 77, the declaration by which several hundred Czechoslovak citizens publicly opposed their own government's conduct. It was the second time in his life he had put his name to a document that cost him everything the establishment could withdraw.

He kept writing regardless. *Deštník z Picadilly* appeared in 1979, and *Všecky krásy světa* — "All the Beauties of the World" — in 1979 and 1981.

Stockholm, in Absentia

The 1984 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Seifert "for his poetry which endowed with freshness, sensuality and rich inventiveness provides a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man." The citation reads almost as a description of the man rather than the verse: sixty-three years of publication across four political systems, none of which had managed to make him write what it wanted. His health prevented him from attending the ceremony, and his daughter accepted on his behalf.

A Funeral Under Surveillance

Seifert died on 10 January 1986, aged eighty-four, and was buried in the family tomb at Kralupy nad Vltavou. The state security service turned out in force at the funeral, watching the mourners and moving to suppress any expression of dissent among them — a final, unintended tribute. Even dead, the lyric poet of Prague was considered a political risk.