Is This Youth? “Wonderful Years Down the Drain”

https://palityka.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/125813_original.pngThis review was prepared within the joint project “Book Review” of the Political Sphere Institute (https://palityka.org/) and the Center for European Studies (http://eurocenter.by/) in Minsk.

Michal Viewegh.

Wonderful Years Down the Drain.

Translated from Czech by Siarhei Smatrychenka. – Minsk, I.

P.

Logvinov, 2013. – 299 pp. – Czech Collection.

Review prepared by Alesia Sierada.

Acquaintance with the works of contemporary East European writers, and in Belarusian at that (which also draws us into a specific sociocultural context), is in fact a very important and serious matter that goes far beyond purely philological amusement.

Polish or Lithuanian literature, and especially Czech literature of the second half of the twentieth century, describes times and problems through which we, Belarusians, may perhaps one day have to pass.

Radical social transformations, repeated changes of reference points, and after all this, an attempt to make sense of oneself, one’s actions and position at every moment in time, without losing one’s mind in the process… How do the characters and writers manage this, and would we ourselves manage it?

The publishing series “Czech Collection,” notable for the quality of its translation work and its orientation toward the contemporary, partly gives us answers to these questions.

The series was founded in 2006; its curator is the well-known Belarusian philologist and translator Siarhei Smatrychenka, and the series has already published books by Hana Andronikova, Antonín Bajaja, Jáchym Topol, Jaroslav Rudiš, Václav Havel, Egon Bondy and others.

In addition to Smatrychenka himself, translations were done by Veranika Bialkovich, Maryia Martysievich, and Max Shchur. The years 2012-2013 were the most productive for the project: four books were presented (as many as had been published in the series before), and one of them is precisely Wonderful Years, famous in its homeland.

In terms of its artistic task, Wonderful Years Down the Drain can be placed between the traditional “literature of scars” of post-socialist countries and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X.

It is an ironic reflection on the harshness and absurdity of a socialist system long gone (in the territories described).

On the other hand, it is a portrait of a generation that was raised in a time of change, observed the permanent destruction of social values, and now is in no great hurry to define new ones for itself.

Despite the vividness of the characters, which largely comes from the autobiographical nature of the book, the main character is still the era itself, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s.

This is expressed through numerous coincidences and explicit metaphors, apparently deliberately not too refined.

To begin with, the main character, Kvido, is born literally beneath the stage of the cult theatre “Na Zábradlí,” a unique place in terms of cultural influence, where Václav Havel began his career as a playwright.

What is on the programme?

Of course, Waiting for Godot!

Incidentally, such straightforward symbolism also becomes an object of the author’s self-irony: it cannot be that everything happened exactly like that, yet reality at certain moments really does resemble a rather foolish play, if not that very theatre of the absurd.

And in Viewegh’s peculiar artistic world, the symbol of a change in the political system is three parrots that always fly away from the Prague apartment precisely at such a moment.

The main virtue of the work is a subtle sense of distance, the irony with which the author slightly estranges himself from his own experience in order to show us a genuinely multidimensional picture of the social events of that time.

Thanks to this, the novel moves away from the usual exposure of socialism’s flaws and acquires a new dimension of depth (here one may also recall the far from simple Good Bye, Lenin!).

The sly, “slightly sideways” view of the characters and events is further emphasized through the figure of the editor-censor, who supposedly reads Kvido’s draft novel and gives him advice.

In real life, a writer would hardly listen to such advice with such naivety: most likely this is a projection of a dialogue with an internal censor, and, more broadly, with the author’s conscience.

If one were to remove from Kvido’s novel everything that does not correspond to current politics, the author’s present state of mind, or the prototypes’ ideas about themselves, such a novel would simply fall apart.

But the same thing happens to human consciousness, which permanently undergoes a reassessment of values.

Such an unsuccessful transition can literally destroy a personality, as shown through the figure of Kvido’s father, who always tries to be fair, to do everything in the best possible way, not to come into conflict with anyone, and in the end truly loses his mind.

Here we might perhaps remark to the author that madness is not a particularly original solution to such a problem from a literary point of view.

Yet reality itself might perhaps argue with us here, if only we had reliable statistics on the level of mental health during similar periods of social upheaval.

Ultimately, the novel Wonderful Years Down the Drain is about how time changes people, and about how, under any circumstances, they remain themselves.

Kvido’s mother never gets used to dogs, his father, after making several more career zigzags, ends up in exactly the position he had eyed at the beginning, and Kvido himself becomes a professional writer, which he considered himself to be, according to his own words, even from the times preceding his birth, linking his fate with a woman he has known since kindergarten.

So what were all these trials for, trials that the characters, like their prototypes, had to overcome with difficulty and loss?

Allow me a provocative thought of my own: the title of the book, together with its pathos, may be very close in spirit to those born in Belarus in the 1980s, at least in terms of the dynamics of how personal destinies overlap with historical events and changes in the atmosphere of society.

Will there be such books about our generation as well?

Whether the time in which we now live will ever take shape as a “cultural epoch,” or will remain an in-between time lived in painful waiting for Godot, depends on this.