MARXISM AND THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS : COMMUNISM IN INTERWAR CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND THE IDEA OF CENTRAL EUROPE

By Molly Pucci

Stanford University Press. 312 pages. $75. ISBN 978-1F-5036-4179-2

Reviewed by Jim Burns

To prevent any confusion, it’s first of all necessary to point out that the phrase “the Interpretation of Dreams” isn’t meant to refer to a Freudian link to Marxism. Freud’s name crops up once in connection with the Surrealists, who did have an interest in the kind of dreams that occur when we are asleep. And for a time they did proclaim their affinity with communism, though quickly switching from Stalinism to Trotskyism. What is meant here when the word “dreams” is used are dreams of a Central Europe united under the banner of communism, with possibly the Czechoslovakian example being a kind of guiding light towards that happy state of affairs.

Molly Pucci says that, at the 1921 Czech Unity Conference, “the Czechoslovak communist party offered a home to Czech, Slovak, German, Polish, Yiddish, Ruthenian, and Hungarian speakers from across the Republic”.  And she adds that for Bohumir Šmeral, the founder of the KSČ (Communist Party of Czechoslovakia), “a leading Austro-Marxist thinker who made his career in late-nineteenth century Hapsburg empire, the idea of Central Europe referred to the party’s multi-nationalism, unique in a country in which most political parties were divided by nation”. It perhaps needs to be pointed out that the Czechoslovak Republic had only been established following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of the First World War.

The end of that war had also brought “failed uprisings in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Slovakia, and these countries, together with Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, banned communist parties”. The KSĊ, “As the only communist party that could operate legally through the interwar years” played a “unique role in taking in refugees from communist parties banned in other countries of the region…..it offered a haven, base, and training ground…..in the multi-lingual KSĊ, communists from across the region could access, translate, and smuggle revolutionary texts into their own languages and coordinate protest campaigns, artistic collaborations, legal efforts, and intelligence operations across borders”. Referring to the “converts, believers, and unbridled enthusiasts” who helped pass radical political ideas across national borders, Pucci says that “A lot of time was spent dreaming about the socialist experiment in the East, while wondering what the world could (and would) look like after the catastrophe, death, and displacement of the Great War”. She also stresses that the “KSĊ’s use of the term ‘Central Europe’ came to encompass Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland, the Soviet Union and two small, stateless nations, the Jews and the Ruthenians”.

The KSĊ had “an eclectic ideology which absorbed thinkers, texts, and ideas” from a variety of sources, “German and French socialism; Austro-Marxism; Italian, French,  and Russian anarchism, and Leninism”. I’m not sure that everything on that list would have been acceptable to Moscow, certainly not when Stalin rose to prominence. And the “new socialist culture” that Pucci mentions, and which “involved collaboration across literature, the visual arts, poetry, photography, architecture, and theatre” would soon be subject to tight party control from the centre i.e. Moscow. An “eclectic ideology” was never going to be acceptable to the bureaucrats who laid down the rules about what could and could not be said, or written, or painted. But there was a period when Prague seemed relatively open to new ideas. Pucci says that “Gojko Nikoliš, a communist born and raised in Yugoslavia…..was nothing short of stunned walking the streets of Prague in 1934. The works of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were simply sold in bookstores. Politics were argued openly in cafés and on the streets. Views were bandied in public for which Yugoslavs would have been imprisoned. A dizzying plurality set the scene”.

A good example of a Prague intellectual was the anarchist Stanislav Kostka Neumann who, in an article, “Two types of Communists”, pointed to authoritarian and liberal socialists. They might be aiming for the same thing, but the authoritarians depended on mass violence and centralised state institutions. Life under them “would rely on brutal terror and, similar to  a factory or military barracks, destroy individual freedom”. Pucci describes Neumann as coming from “a nineteenth century intellectual tradition represented by Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Gorges Sorel, and Errico Malatesta”. However, he did eventually abandon his anti-Bolshevik ideas and became one of the founders of the KSČ and, in Pucci’s words, was  “one of the most avid and uncompromising advocates of communism in Czechoslovakia. It was necessary, he believed until his death in 1947, to support the Soviet Union – the only example of socialism in power, and the only in a position to unify the still-frustratingly discordant international left across national borders – at all costs”.

There were early signs that the open stance of the KSČ to differing views was not in keeping with Comintern policies. In 1924, Josef Bubnik, “head of the KSČ’s large and influential Prague office, had called for a vote in the party to overturn unpopular Comintern directives”. He was described by Zinoviev as “an enemy within the walls” when he set up an independent communist party, and Stalin raged that he wanted “the ideological destruction of our opposition”. The increasing dogmatism of the Bolsheviks alienated many Czechs, particularly those who might be described as middle-class intellectuals: “Jaroslav Kallah, a professor of law and legal philosophy, argued that Marxism had been transformed from a scientific method for understanding society into a rigid, quasi-religious belief system”. It was destined to become even more restrictive when Klement Gottwald took over as leader of the KSČ in 1928. Jumping ahead a little, Josef Guttman, a one-time close associate of Gottwald, was expelled from the party when he criticised the policies of the German Communist Party which, he believed, had led to the Nazi seizure of power.  

Switching from the political to the cultural aspects of Czechoslovak communism, it’s interesting to read what the “manifesto of the Czech leftist avant-garde group Devétsil” had to say : “Poets and thinkers stand shoulder to shoulder with revolutionary soldiers….Before all creative human work today stands the immense task of building the world anew”. Pucci adds: “For the young writers, poets, artists, caricaturists, dancers, architects, and theatre directors who joined Devétsil after the Great War, the Russian revolution was an inspiration, a pretext, and an excuse to rethink the bounds of art, politics, expression, life and – most importantly – poetry”.

With regard to poetry, many years ago I met an elderly Czech man who, I gathered, had been in Paris when the Russians moved into Prague in 1968. He decided not to return home and somehow ended up in Manchester. He was a well-educated and well-read man, who spoke several languages, and self-produced a couple of pamphlets of translations from Czech poets. The poets included some that Pucci mentions, in particular Vitéslav Nezval, who is referred to several times by Pucci. He’s also prominently highlighted in Derek Sayer’s Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century : A Surrealist History (Princeton University Press, 2013). Pucci only mentions the Czech surrealists in passing, but they had connections with André Breton and the surrealists in Paris who had, for a time, allied themselves with the French Communist Party, though they later mostly switched their allegiance to Trotsky. Nezval founded the Czech surrealist group in 1934, but he had joined the KSČ in1924 and remained a member until his death in 1958.

An interesting writer who, according to Pucci, “remains largely unnoticed in studies of the avant-garde and the KSČ, likely because he started and ended his career on the periphery of both”, is Jiri Weil. He is probably best known for the novels he wrote about the Holocaust which were translated into English, but earlier he had written Moscow Border, a novel published in 1937 and “one of the first accounts of the early years of the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union, written after Weil had lived and worked in the USSR”. As far as I know this book has never been published in an English-language edition, and it would seem that its contents did not accord to what the Communist Party expected of writers. Pucci comments : “It was as savagely attacked by the KSČ press as it was vociferously praised by the Trotskyite circles in Czechoslovakia……Weil hid the sequel he had written, The Wooden Spoon, for decades. In 1950 he was expelled from the Czechoslovak Writers Union for not having burned it”. The Wooden Spoon was not published in Czechoslovakia until 1992. There is an amusing story about Weil pointing to a photograph of Klement Gottwald which, when taken in 1929, showed Weil by his side. Years later he had been airbrushed out of it.

“Stamped with the name anti-fascism in the early 1930s, the idea of a communist Central Europe unified activists across Germany, the USSR, and the small states in between : Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia. The anti-fascist Popular Front emerged in this way from grassroots activism, local intellectual traditions, and an evident threat common to many. It was anti-fascism that drew thousands of Central Europeans, including over 2,000 Czechoslovaks, to the faraway battlefields of Spain during the civil war. And it was anti-fascism that stood at the heart of artistic collaborations in Czechoslovakia, such as The Anthology of Antifascist Artists and For Spain, across the fields of caricature, poetry, prose, music, and theatre; a multiplicity of voices and aesthetic style to counter the fascist drive to homogenize culture”.

I think it could be argued that the Popular Front was largely an idea born in Moscow and, while having a genuine purpose and supported as such by many who were prepared to lay down their lives for it, was only likely to last as long as the Soviet Union wanted it to. The 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact surely made that clear. But this is a contentious subject for discussion and others may disagree with me.

One other provocative idea that Pucci puts forward relates  to KSČ policy : “The KSČ’s idea of Central Europe was geographically if not ideationally, a reproduction of the lost world of the Habsburg empire. And beneath the strong and obligatory rhetoric of a break with the past, the KSČ campaigned for the return of Habsburg laws and norms that had been removed from the constitution and legal system of the First Czechoslovak Republic”.

An interesting theory but somehow I can’t see it as practical once Gottwald, a Stalinist, became head of the KSČ, and certainly not after the 1948 coup that led to the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia.

Marxism and the Interpretation of Dreams is a book that deserves to be read. I haven’t been able to do much more than skate over its surface, and it’s packed with information about events and personalities. It has notes, a bibliography, and is a scholarly work that eschews academic jargon, and is clear and direct in what it has to say.