The soul engineer

The soul engineer. Amusing to the old themes of life - women, destiny, dreams, working class, spies, love and death is a novel by Josef Škvorecký , in 1977 in the Czech exile publishing house Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto under the title Příběh inženýra lidských duší appeared and which Deuticke Verlag published in 1998 in German translation. The novel portrays the fate of people in Czechoslovakia from the years of the Protectorate, with a focus on from 1943 to the 1970s under communist rule and - parallel to this - after the Prague Spring in exile in Canada, where the narrator found refuge and the Provides narrative frame.

content

The title refers ironically to a request by Josef Stalin from 1932 that, in analogy to civil engineers, it is the writer's task in building socialism to produce suitable human souls: “And that's why I raise my glass to you, writers The engineers of the soul. ”The extensive novel of 764 pages comprises seven chapters divided into two books, each of which bears the title of an Anglo-American writer and the only exception is the Polish-born English writer Joseph Conrad . The division into two books has no effect on the structure and progression of the narration and only represents a pause.

The plot takes place on three levels in each of the chapters: The narrator Daniel Smiřický, who is also at the center of the action in Eine prima Saison und Feiglinge , went into exile in Canada after 1968, like the author, where he was a professor at the University of Toronto works for literature; he is a bachelor, over fifty years old, and a writer (level 1).

His memories and encounters with figures from the emigrant scene, but also his handling of literature, which he has to convey to young people, lead him back to his abandoned homeland again and again (level 2). A third level is formed by letters that the narrator received from friends in the course of his life.

Canadian exile

Smiřický tells about his life during a winter semester at the University of Toronto called "Edenvale". In Czechoslovakia it is the time of Charter 77 , about which a denigrating article in the party newspaper Rudé právo (Eng. "Red Law") circulates among the emigrants (p. 710). Right at the beginning he emphasizes that he is doing well in Canada, but with the qualification “frighteningly good in this wasteland” (p. 10). Time and again, life seems wonderful to him, because he has survived everything without being damaged. Now he lives in a country where, if he drives carefully, he will even get away without a ticket (p. 46). He holds out this until the end, when he finally only speaks of the wonderful appearance of life (p. 617). Because repeatedly from the window he sees the "omnipresent raven of Edenvale" strutting around, whose "Nevermore" or "Nevermore" from the seminar hours from Chapter 1 about Edgar Allan Poe and his poem The Raven from then on into spring in everyone there saw ravens take shape (pp. 171, 176, 235, 321 [in Kostelec], 363 [there], 645, 682).

His life takes place between university, excursions with the students of his literature seminar, to whom he gives full freedom as “prairie children” (p. 174), cultivating his love affair with Margitka, who also went into exile with her husband, and meeting the extensive Czech Emigrant community in their regular restaurant in Toronto. There are already different generations of emigrants there: those who left the country during the protectorate before the war , others who resigned after the communist seizure of power in 1948, and the last who went abroad after the failure of the “Prague Spring”. The anti-communist spokesmen were playing with the idea of assembling a National Liberation Army of the Czechoslovak people from the emigrants who were fit for military service , which should invade Czechoslovakia in an airborne operation (p. 326 ff.). At the same time, it can always be assumed that informers are watching everything everywhere and threatening individual exiles. Time and again, Smiřický has to reckon that his contacts with writers who have stayed in the Czechoslovak Republic will overhear him: for example, Ludvík Vaculík , Václav Havel or Bohumil Hrabal (p. 58). Or that he himself should be persuaded to publish again in Czechoslovakia or even to forward right-wing, anti-Semitic literature allegedly smuggled out of Czechoslovakia to the publishing house in exile for printing (pp. 507-523).

When he thinks of his literary seminars and his dealings with the students, he describes himself as a preacher rather than a teacher. An American of Arab descent, who lives in Canada because of his desertion before the Vietnam War and who shows himself to be completely permeated by Marxist-Leninist indoctrination, turns out to be the most difficult and rebellious among his students - for the professor of literature - from his undoctrinaire, "bourgeois" point of view Tending towards violent solutions, but still an “innocent socialist” (p. 680) - but followed the course attentively until the end as a third student with the two female students who were left at the end of the semester.

During the semester break at the beginning of spring, Smiřický takes a trip to Paris, disguised as a reading week in the Rocky Mountains, with his most eager and attentive student Irene Svensson. She is a daughter from a wealthy family who, after seducing him in the lowered front seat of her Cadillac , has become his lover and speaks in Paris of marrying him, who could be her father.

Memories of life in Czechoslovakia

The narrator calls himself a “living stream of consciousness ” (p. 387), for which “the association is the essence of all things” because for him it is omnipotent and omnipresent (p. 143). In view of the flat land around the university or Lake Ontario and the Toronto skyline , the narrator feels slightly transported to Prague in his seminars when he looks out the window . He escapes from the duties for which he is paid, "to the opulent memories" for which he lives (p. 231). Because if he listens to his students giving presentations on the novels they have examined and if he becomes aware that what they have read remains on the surface of their perception and hardly touches them in their own realities of life and their states of mind, then he becomes aware of both his age and the state of mind also his wealth of experience, which he gained in his life in Czechoslovakia and which gives him the aura of a man “who lived in police dictatorships and was active in the resistance during the war” (p. 20).

The core of his memories is his “total commitment” to forced labor in the Kostelec Messerschmitt factories during the last two years of the war. Following the example of his friend Přema, a glowing youthful patriot with a Masaryk hat on his head, who blew up a gasoline depot of the German occupation troops in Kostelec, he would like to commit an act of sabotage during the manufacture of important parts for the Messerschmitt Bf 109 , so that the aircraft's on-board weapon system is paralyzed. He wants to impress his colleague Nadja, who is involved in the production of rejects. However, it is discovered by the Czech master, who does not report it, but tries to repair the damage. Without the young Smiřický realizing what was going on, he notices that the German operations manager is not doing anything against him. Only after the war did he find out that both his foreman and the German works manager had worked for the Americans. Both die after the war, one as a supposed collaborator in police custody, the other being executed as a western spy in the communist regime.

More important than anything else, including his fear of death - ultimately superfluous - of being arrested by the Gestapo , is his dealings with Nadja. She is engaged, but at work in the factory has been with Danny (ie the narrator) for so long that they begin to love each other. She comes from very poor circumstances outside of the country, is very thin and always hungry and wears clothes that are much too heavy. Danny takes her home, where she gets plenty to eat and drink. He is fascinated by her glowing, dark eyes and her large, wide mouth. Eventually she got tuberculosis and died shortly after the war.

During the transition period until the communists took over political power in 1948, the narrator was at the university in Prague, even sympathizing with Marxism in his faculty , but when he visited Kostelec he took an action against his friend Přema at his request assisted the Russian occupiers. There he has to watch as his father, a well-known Czech patriot, is arrested and taken away.

Letters from childhood friends

The novel begins and ends with a letter from Lojza to his friend "Dan". He is a worker and a farmer. His first letter comes from Karlsbad , where he is taking a cure because of shadows on his lungs. He feels indebted to the Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich , because he lets workers in a place where otherwise only rich people can be found. He is brought to the German Reich to work as a foreign worker , which means that he does not feel put in a predicament. His initially very helpless letters are getting longer and longer and show how he was able to adapt and educate himself under communist rule in such a way that he regards his life and that of his family as a successful one, even if he took over his farm, into which he married , which Jednotné zemědělské družstvo (Czechoslovakian version of the agricultural production cooperative ) initially did not convince.

Another friend, Jan, wrote him letters about his work as a writer and poet in Czechoslovakia. With his efforts for honesty, he gets into ongoing arguments about the demands of socialist realism , although he sees himself in the service of socialism as a just cause. Eventually he is arrested while delivering a manuscript of a deceased poet to the Canadian embassy cultural attaché for printing in Toronto. From a letter from another friend, the narrator learns that Jan suffered a stroke and his wife was dragged by the hair over the pavement by the police.

Vratislav, or Vrát'a for short, who, like the narrator, comes from Kostelec and keeps him fully up to date on all happenings there, joins the communist party in 1948 and tries as a workers' writer to help build socialism. For instruction and better orientation he is seconded to work in the Kladno coal mine . He describes himself as a playwright, describes his increasing difficulties with the functionaries and official communism and, in view of the risks he has taken, jokingly apostrophizes the narrator who has gone into exile as a “fine piss behind the wide ocean” (p. 682). He himself finally emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany, joined the Association of German Writers, but had problems adapting to the guidelines for writing scripts that were controlled by market research . He writes his last letter from a clinic where he was admitted to have a heart attack.

Another letter writer is Daniel's daring childhood friend Přema, whose life after fleeing from Czechoslovakia leads via the Foreign Legion to Australia, then back to his old mother in Czechoslovakia, to whose living conditions and requirements he can no longer adapt, so he can returns to Australia again. There he dies in a catastrophe, so that the narrator receives a letter addressed to him back.

Reba or Rebina, who later also called herself Rebekka, is the only female letter writer. She comes from a Jewish branch of Daniel's father's family and played with the narrator as a girl. She is deported to a concentration camp, loses all relatives, but survived the "horror of Auschwitz" (p. 613) and had a son immediately after her return. With him, whose father is missing, she emigrates to a kibbutz in Israel . Her son married, went to the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and was killed in a suicide bombing with his wife in a café. She will no longer be able to feel at home in Israel, writes Kostelec as her home, and most likely wishes she had "flown through the chimney". If he was still alive, Daniel should write to her because she had no one else but him.

reception

The literary scholar Jiří Holý writes that in the Czech anti-communist exile many were disappointed by Škvorecký's prose, which broke out of “socialist literature”. As in the communist regime, he was accused of “pornography” and “vulgarity”. His language, based on colloquial Czech and slang, and the allegedly apolitical character of the texts have met with criticism and rejection.

In the meantime, he was awarded the Central European Angelus Literature Prize in Poland on December 6, 2009 for the “ soul engineer ” and the reading pleasure he provided .

In an Austrian criticism by the literary scholar Walter Straub in 1999, the author was accused of having imitated the style of great novelists by dividing the novel into two "books", which he wrote in the headings with the names of his "literary household gods (and subjects of instruction), from Poe to Twain to Lovecraft ”. Above all, he finds the passages of the Canadian exile often lengthy, sees in the narrator the tendency towards the professorial and in the rippling irony that does not allow itself a respite, sated.

Sigrid Löffler , on the other hand, underlined in Die Zeit : “Only in literature can all these political entanglements and disillusions from two dictatorships, together with the associated fauna of fanatics, informers and torturers, followers and rebels, nomads and nestlings; only in Josef Škvorecký's skeptical 'Roman improvisations' (his definition) does the bitter experience of a lifetime crystallize in relation to the Bohemian chronicle of the second half of this century. "

Jana Halamickova stated in 2006 on Südwestrundfunk that Škvorecký's novels had been translated into over twenty languages ​​and had received numerous literary prizes. In Germany, however, his reception was neglected. That is amazing, because his prose is spiced with irony, wit and humor, it is exciting, entertaining and easy to read. His hometown Náchod - a model for the literary Kostelec - has meanwhile honored him with a museum. Every year in May, a Škvorecký festival is held in the town for a week. However, the author is not thinking of returning to his native country. His alter ego , Danny Smiřický, gives an account of this in the novel ' The Soul Engineer ': “Every return is just an illusion. You cannot step into the same river twice. Because I know, I don't suffer from nostalgia. However, I keep coming back. According to Kostelec. But in a way in which I can return from Canada as well as from Prague. In Canada I am surrounded by all kinds of comfort, in the security of a decadent, non-police-state democracy. As I fall asleep, I realize: How wonderful life is when everything loses its meaning and when one begins to live only for life ”(in the novel p. 713).

expenditure

• Josef Škovorecký: Přiběn inženýra lidských duši (Spisy; vol. 16). Prague 1998, ISBN 80-237-3547-0 .
• Josef Škovorecký: The soul engineer . Amusing on the old themes of life; Women, fate, dreams, working class, informers, love and death . ("Přiběn inženýra lidských duši"). Deuticke Verlag, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-216-30397-7 (translated by Marcela Euler).
• Josef Škovorecký: The soul engineer . A novel about women, love, death and spies (“Přiběn inženýra lidských duši”). Piper Taschenbuchverlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-492-23013-X (translated by Marcela Euler).

Awards

In 1985 the city of Toronto awarded him the Toronto Book Awards for his English version of The Soul Engineer .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. Frank Westermann: Engineers of the soul. Writers under Stalin - A journey of exploration . Christoph Links Published by Berlin 2003; ISBN 978-3-86153-304-7 .
2. ↑ The basis is the edition: The Soul Engineer. Amusing on the old themes of life - women, fate, dreams, working class, informers, love and death , Deuticke: Vienna-Munich 1998; ISBN 3-216-30397-7 .
3. ↑ This alludes to events in the environment of the publishing house "Sixty-Eight Publishers", which was managed by Škvorecký's wife Zdena Salivarová until 1993.
4. ↑ In Kostelec, as in other novels, Náchod , Škvorecký's hometown, is easy to recognize.
5. ↑ This accusation is addressed in the novel on p. 453 when he wants to perform a small operetta on the 20th anniversary of the liberation in 1945 in Kostelec. - In the novel itself, the author contributed to this assessment through his description of the conversations between the workers during work breaks in the "shit house" of the Messerschmitt works. Or on p. 714, where he has a Miloš say: “And when you breathe out your soul, it must be the greatest pleasure in human life. Much more intense than if only shit or semen comes out of you ... "
6. ↑ See Jirí Holý on Škvorecký .
7. ↑ See Angelus Prize for Škvorecký's “Soul Engineer” ( memento of the original from March 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
8. ↑ See Škvorecký's rippling irony  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ^ Sigrid Löffler on Škvorecký's novel
10. ↑ See From cowards, informers and soul engineers ( RTF ; 55 kB)