Religious Movement in Czechoslovakia [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 109-119]

RELIGION IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA
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This is why it is also worth looking for evidence of religious "movement"
in the independent writing, painting, music and drama of Czechoslovakia,
although clearly we must treat such evidence differently than we would
the evidence of Velehrad or the religious practices of young people.
I want to mention briefly three examples out of many in Czech
writing in the last fifteen years in which something like a religious sensibility
seems to seep through. almost unbidden at times, as though the writer had
been caught by surprise, while he was at work. The first of these is a novella
by Egon Bondy called Mnisek-The Little Monk-about a pilgrimage to
Rome undertaken by an Irish monk in the Middle Ages. The monk is
shocked and disillusioned by the corruption he sees, but is rescued from
despair by a vision of the Virgin Mary. This conclusion is all the more
remarkable given that Bondy is a former Maoist. Again, Vaclav Havel's
Letters to Olga, written in prison in the early 1980s, ends with a series
of sixteen letters that, although couched in the language of phenomenology,
suggest a deeper structure of thought that is derived from the JudaeoChristian tradition. More than one Czech commentator on the Letters
has remarked, in effect, that Havel is a Christian malgre lui. Yet again,
Ivan Jirous, originally an art critic and some-time artistic director of The
Plastic People of the Universe, has written a cycle of poems called Ochranny
dohled, which literally means "protective surveillance," a very tight form
of parole sometimes tacked on at the end of prison sentences, but which
Jirous intended to refer to the sensation, explored in the poems, that God
is keeping a protective watch over him.
The final example is a rock Passion Play, with words by Vratislav
Brabenec and music by The Plastic People of the Universe, a popular
underground rock band that Brabenec played with from 1973 until 1982,
when he left Czechoslovakia. Brabenec was brought up a Catholic but
attended the protestant theological seminary in Prague in the 1960s, and
had already written, directed and performed in a jazz Passion Play in 1968.
In the Passion Play, Brabenec consciously tried to connect up with the
much older folk Passion plays that had a long tradition in Bohemia. He
lays great stress on the Old Testament antecedents, on the theme of
betrayal and sacrifice, and on the notion of predestination. Judas is not
a contemptible figure, but one who is merely doing what he has to, and
is therefore to be pitied. The crowds who call for Christ's crucifixion are
like football fans jeering a rival team, and Christ himself is presented as
an ordinary man who lives his faith rather than preaching it, and who suffers
for it.
The Passion Play was not intended as an allegory or a commentary
on the political situation, and it cannot even be said to reflect the religious
feelings of everyone in the band. But the intensity of the performance,
and the resonance that it evoked inside Czechoslovakia, where it was circulated in magnetizdat, (a neologism meaning "taped samizdat") point