Co je napsáno, to nesmyješ.
[What is written, you cannot wash away.]
— Czech proverb
The Czech writer, editor, and journalist Egon Hostovský was laid to rest in the B’nai Abraham Memorial Park, a picturesque cemetery in Union Township, New Jersey meticulously designed by the renowned Olmsted Brothers landscape architectural firm, but presently beleaguered by urban sprawl, with a Home Depot, a Target, a Chuck E. Cheese, a Panda Express, a Jollibee Chicken, and the din of traffic from U.S. Highway 22 all pressing in from the west, north, and east. Only the presence of a meandering branch of the Rahway River to the south has prevented a complete encirclement. Hostovský’s grave plaque, one of twenty-two thousand located there, is a modest one, in keeping with the cemetery’s park-like aesthetic, as well as the age-old Jewish conviction that everyone rots equally. “Life is known to be very difficult and very complicated,” Sigmund Freud once wrote his friend Wilhelm Fliess, “and, as we say in Vienna, many roads lead to the Central Cemetery.” Set against a solid granite base is a flat bronze marker, decorated with two Magen Davids and an inscription providing only the barest outline of Hostovský’s remarkable life — Egon Hostovsky, April 23, 1908 — May 7, 1973.
Born in the village of Hronov, in the bucolic Hradec Králové region of what was then the Habsburg Empire, and is now Czechia, Hostovský was forced into exile twice, first by the Nazis in 1939, and then by the Soviets in 1948 when he was obliged to seek asylum in Denmark, Norway, and then the United States, supporting himself as a writer, a Czech language teacher, and an editor at Radio Free Europe. He died in Montclair, New Jersey, where as it happens I myself once made my home, and found his eternal rest, his beit almin, in the modest burial plot at B’nai Abraham Memorial Park, thereby lending credence to the Galicia-born Austrian writer Joseph Roth’s mournful observation that “Eastern Jews have no home anywhere, but their graves may be found in every cemetery.”
There does exist one other monument to Hostovský, also quite modest, affixed to the wall of his childhood home in Hronov. Alongside a not-altogether-flattering bronze bas-relief portrait of the Czech writer are listed some of his representative works — although his masterpiece, Úkryt, or The Hideout, is inexplicably missing — and again a brief synopsis of his life:
Stezka podél cesty
Ghetto v nich
Ztracený stín
Případ profesora Kornera
Černá tlupa
Žhář
Dům bez pána
Kruh spravedlivých
Listy z vyhnanství
Cizinec hledá byt
Nezvěstný
Půlnoční pacient
Dobročinný večírek
Všeobecné spiknutíCesky spisovatel, ktery se narodil v tomto dome
23. dubne 1908
a zemrel
7. kvetna 1973
v Montclair Ve State New Jersey — USA[The Path along the Road
The Ghetto Inside Them
The Lost Shadow
The Case of Professor Korner
The Black Gang
The Arsonist
The House without a Master
The Circle of the Righteous
Letters from Exile
Stranger Seeks an Apartment
The Missing
The Midnight Patient
The Charity Party
The General ConspiracyA Czech writer who was born in this house
April 23, 1908
and died
May 7, 1973
in Montclair, New Jersey — USA]
Aside from this commemorative plaque, there are few remaining traces of Hostovský in his native land — some artifacts in the Hronov public library, a mention or two in exhibits on local authors in the Jiráskovo Muzeum. The once-prestigious Egon Hostovský Prize, established in 1974 and awarded to Czech literary luminaries like Ludvík Vaculík and Jáchym Topol, has not been given out since 1999. On the centenary of his birth, the Muzeum Náchodska published Egon Hostovský a rodný kraj, or Egon Hostovský and His Native Land, which is now rather hard to find, and a smattering of his works are still on the shelves of Prague’s Luxor bookshop — The House Without a Master, The Missing, and The Midnight Patient — but that’s about it.
Unless a writer manages to attain the status of national bard, like Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Shevchenko, Petőfi, Mácha, Prešeren, and the like, or otherwise enters into the literary pantheon, occupying a firm position in the popular consciousness, his posthumous literary fame is always going to be precarious. Hostovský, in life, was championed by no less a figure than Graham Greene, who relished his Czech counterpart’s “complex flavour of black humour, melodrama and despair,” and respected his “sombre stand for the values of trust in a world dominated by fear of the neighbour.” His novels were much in demand, often published in English translation before appearing in the Czech original, and his psychological Cold War thriller The Midnight Patient was (unfortunately pretty loosely) adapted by the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot as the 1957 screwball espionage comedy Les Espions (The Spies), starring Peter Ustinov and Curd Jürgens. Yet for all that, his works are now almost entirely out-of-print, commanding considerable prices on Amazon Marketplace, AbeBooks, and Alibris.
There is some hope, however, for a Hostovský renaissance. In 2017, the Pushkin Press reissued the aforementioned The Hideout, written during the Second World War, which tells the story of a Czech engineer stranded in occupied France, and his final, heroic act of sacrifice. And this year, the Prague-based Twisted Spoon Press released The Arsonist (Žhář) in a softcover edition, only about 30 years after the English-language hardcover edition appeared. The Arsonist was acclaimed in its day, earning its author the Czechoslovak State Prize for Literature in 1936, and it remains a haunting work in our own era, with its memorable depiction of the mayhem that ensues when a small border town in eastern Bohemia is threatened by a mysterious arsonist. We encounter the humble citizens of Zbečnov, who find themselves
living a great moment just then, one giving birth to the new word »fear.« Such a birth is always a moment of magical fraternity that is, alas, all too short, for the bonds of anxiety are scarcely stronger than the strands of a spider’s web. Yet it is for these ephemeral moments that adventurous children (both large and small) love new words of horror.
(The Twisted Spoon Press has elected, charmingly to my mind, to retain the traditional use of Czech inward-facing guillemets instead of quotation marks in the text.) Hostovský grasped, like few other authors, the frisson that comes with fear, horror, and “unknown quantities and our own latent participation in them.” I cannot help but think of Vladimir Putin’s somewhat garbled but ultimately accurate characterization of Russian society:
You know, when everything with us is calm, measured, and stable, we get bored. Stagnation. We want action. As soon as the action starts, everything starts whistling past our temples: both seconds and bullets. Unfortunately, bullets are also whistling now. Yes, we are scared, “horror-horror.” Well, “horror.” But not “horror-horror-horror.”
In works like The Arsonist and The Hideout, Hostovský joined the likes of Irène Nemirovsky, Hans Fallada, and Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, writers who were somehow able to document their own nightmarish era as if they had the benefit of hindsight while furnishing profound lessons for posterity.
It is thanks to The Arsonist, we might note in passing, that Hostovský survived the Holocaust. He was on a lecture tour of the Low Countries after his prize-winning novel was translated into Flemish when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, thus enabling him to make his way to France, then Portugal, and then the United States, while the rest of his family perished at Terezín and Auschwitz. In an interview, late in life, he wondered aloud: “Who knows, perhaps the very fact of my exile and the irreparable loss of my original roots, of my native land, inspired me to do the kind of work which can only be done in exile.” Yet Hostovský, unlike his fellow wartime exiles Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Hermann Broch, and Johannes Urzidil, was writing in a more obscure language, and exploring the uncomfortable themes of “oppressive governments and institutions, being policed in various ways, being oppressed by technology, alienation, forced conformity — all [of which] contribute to this feeling of meaninglessness,” as Bronislava Volková summarized his ethos in her 2021 study Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought: Twentieth-Century Central Europe and Migration to America.
Hostovský, for his part, put it this way:
During my lifetime I have witnessed activities of great personalities, and I have been touched by great historical events. I am able to talk about Josef Stalin and Billy Graham; I saw in person Nikita Kruschev shoulder to shoulder with President Eisenhower, and I saw and even heard Elvis Presley; I can talk about the astronauts and the Beatles, about war in South Asia and the remarriage of Elizabeth Taylor. Haunted by all these experiences, I have been trying, independently of psychiatrists, to find a key to our troubled times and to build in my literature a place of spiritual security for myself and my readers.
It is that selfsame place of “spiritual security,” safe from the decay wrought by “modernist man-gods,” that we are still seeking today. Thankfully we have Egon Hostovský to serve as a guide. Recall the words of Rainer Maria Rilke:
History is the list of those who appeared too early. Again and again, a person awakens in the crowd whose origins are elsewhere … The future speaks recklessly through them, their time does not know how — and in its hesitation fails — to appreciate them. They succumb to the indecision of their time. They die like an abandoned general or like a precocious spring day whose urging the inert earth cannot grasp. But centuries later, when their statues are no longer wreathed and their graves are forgotten and overgrown somewhere — then the next one awakens and approaches and walks among their grandchildren as a contemporary.
As we gradually rediscover Hostovský’s lost novels, we are afforded the opportunity to greet him and walk with him, as if he were our contemporary, learning from him the art of spiritual survival in an alienating and increasingly absurd modern world.
READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:
A Monumental Error: On the Potential Return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece