Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (6 page)
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Authors: Peter Demetz
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Even in our century of suspicion, old romantic ideas about Lubossa have surprisingly survived, and the cultural policies of the Communist Party insisted that Dean Cosmas carefully preserved the oral traditions of the toiling masses. More independent scholars, who were averse to simplistic, linear, and strictly national ideas of transmitting narratives, were long unable to publish their arguments. After emigrating to West Germany in 1968, the Czech scholar Vladimír Karbusický, with great learning and astonishing tenacity, radically affected, if not destroyed, the ancient dreams about the simple folk and what they told the scribe Cosmas. Karbusický’s hypothesis, fully informed by international scholarship, does away with the strictly Czech qualities of the early stories and shows that they consist of wandering motifs well known from the sagas of other peoples. From the romantic debris a new image of Cosmas emerges—a cosmopolitan littérateur easily conversant with the literary canon of his time who takes his cue from the wandering singers, artists, “kitharists” (about whom he speaks himself), and
joculatores
gathered at the contemporary Prague court; the scene shifts from the wretched huts of the illiterate peasants to the court of duke and king, as a splendid place for transmitting what the poets recite; art combines with art, and Cosmas reflects the consciousness of the feudal elite.
joculatores
gathered at the contemporary Prague court; the scene shifts from the wretched huts of the illiterate peasants to the court of duke and king, as a splendid place for transmitting what the poets recite; art combines with art, and Cosmas reflects the consciousness of the feudal elite.
In such a view, even Lubossa and P
emysl are deprived of their strongly national character (after all, the plowman as ruler appears in the traditions of many societies, including that of Rome, Hungary, and the Goths); Cosmas particularly is seen to have strengthened and at the same time undermined fictive Lubossa by relating her narrative to that of the historical Mathilda of Toscana (1046-1115), a remarkable woman of his own time, who by her diplomatic negotiations between pope and emperor
adversely affected Czech dynastic interests, then allied to the emperor. Both Lubossa and Mathilda were women of extraordinary power, both of them ruled and judged, and both, provoking the male world by their energy and competence, invited courtly
Klatsch
and revealing anecdotes which gave a chance to men of lesser power to take their revenge; it is, indeed, difficult to ignore that, in the entire
Chronica Boëmorum,
they are the only women about whom Cosmas tells risqué stories. Disorderly Lubossa arguing a legal case from her unmade bed has her counterpart, and not only structurally, in Mathilda, who, at forty-four years of age, marries a seventeen-year-old duke and has great trouble, on her wedding night, in arousing the appetites of the suddenly impotent young man. Cosmas coyly regrets that he has to tell the story, and yet he comes up with a good deal of lip-smacking detail; for three nights, the newlyweds strive for happiness and the duke fears that a magic object has been hidden in the bed that makes it impossible for him to perform as the occasion warrants. The enraged Mathilda puts a stool on a table, takes off her nightgown, climbs up, shows herself all naked to the young man, and, as the learned dean says, “wiggled her ass like a goose who wanted to build a nest” (II,32), telling the duke to search her thoroughly for any hidden magic object. (The young man flees the scene.) The marriage was dissolved, historians tell us, only four years later.
emysl are deprived of their strongly national character (after all, the plowman as ruler appears in the traditions of many societies, including that of Rome, Hungary, and the Goths); Cosmas particularly is seen to have strengthened and at the same time undermined fictive Lubossa by relating her narrative to that of the historical Mathilda of Toscana (1046-1115), a remarkable woman of his own time, who by her diplomatic negotiations between pope and emperoradversely affected Czech dynastic interests, then allied to the emperor. Both Lubossa and Mathilda were women of extraordinary power, both of them ruled and judged, and both, provoking the male world by their energy and competence, invited courtly
Klatsch
and revealing anecdotes which gave a chance to men of lesser power to take their revenge; it is, indeed, difficult to ignore that, in the entire
Chronica Boëmorum,
they are the only women about whom Cosmas tells risqué stories. Disorderly Lubossa arguing a legal case from her unmade bed has her counterpart, and not only structurally, in Mathilda, who, at forty-four years of age, marries a seventeen-year-old duke and has great trouble, on her wedding night, in arousing the appetites of the suddenly impotent young man. Cosmas coyly regrets that he has to tell the story, and yet he comes up with a good deal of lip-smacking detail; for three nights, the newlyweds strive for happiness and the duke fears that a magic object has been hidden in the bed that makes it impossible for him to perform as the occasion warrants. The enraged Mathilda puts a stool on a table, takes off her nightgown, climbs up, shows herself all naked to the young man, and, as the learned dean says, “wiggled her ass like a goose who wanted to build a nest” (II,32), telling the duke to search her thoroughly for any hidden magic object. (The young man flees the scene.) The marriage was dissolved, historians tell us, only four years later.
In his radical reinterpretation of Cosmas as a writer preserving the poems and narratives of artists, restlessly traveling all over Europe from court to court in search of noble patrons, Karbusický delivers a blow to sentimental traditionalists, including those of the Stalinist
nomenklatura,
but he also suggests the productive idea that it is much more important to know what happens to Libussa (to use her traditional English name) in the rich historiographic and artistic material that came after Cosmas than to ask whether there was ever a real person of her name. Her life in history and the arts, to which different nations in different circumstances contributed, should be more important than the shadow of the
phitonissa,
if there ever was one. Yet intellectual tradition is highly selective, as Karbusický’s more conservative colleague František Graus has shown; it forgets, and remembers, whatever it needs. After Cosmas, Libussa asserted her fundamental place as mother of the P
emyslids in the castle of Prague and, as the dynasty died out, assumed a more independent position. The line between the myth and the historical events was increasingly blurred. She was lifted from myth into history; the fourteenth-century Italian Franciscan Giovanni dei Marignolli, who was called to Prague in 1355 (after fourteen years in the Far East) by the Emperor Charles IV to write a world
history for him, actually related her to Eliška, of the P
emyslids, that is, to the emperor’s mother; in other chronicles, e.g., that of the so-called Dalimil, who wrote earlier in the fourteenth century (c. 1315), she became clearly a woman of the times, keeping her head high at the council of Czech nobility (because Dalimil wanted to stress the importance of Czech barons) and speaking up against the foreigners, Germans, who were flooding the land.
nomenklatura,
but he also suggests the productive idea that it is much more important to know what happens to Libussa (to use her traditional English name) in the rich historiographic and artistic material that came after Cosmas than to ask whether there was ever a real person of her name. Her life in history and the arts, to which different nations in different circumstances contributed, should be more important than the shadow of the
phitonissa,
if there ever was one. Yet intellectual tradition is highly selective, as Karbusický’s more conservative colleague František Graus has shown; it forgets, and remembers, whatever it needs. After Cosmas, Libussa asserted her fundamental place as mother of the P
emyslids in the castle of Prague and, as the dynasty died out, assumed a more independent position. The line between the myth and the historical events was increasingly blurred. She was lifted from myth into history; the fourteenth-century Italian Franciscan Giovanni dei Marignolli, who was called to Prague in 1355 (after fourteen years in the Far East) by the Emperor Charles IV to write a worldhistory for him, actually related her to Eliška, of the P
emyslids, that is, to the emperor’s mother; in other chronicles, e.g., that of the so-called Dalimil, who wrote earlier in the fourteenth century (c. 1315), she became clearly a woman of the times, keeping her head high at the council of Czech nobility (because Dalimil wanted to stress the importance of Czech barons) and speaking up against the foreigners, Germans, who were flooding the land.The Renaissance and the Baroque age revived interest in wondrous women of magic powers. The Czech Catholic chronicler Hájek of Libo
any, an imaginative sixteenth-century master of poetic inventions, in his own way completed Libussa’s historicization by defining abstruse chronologies, and he also followed Dalimil’s narrative in offering melodramatic and gory detail about the “Maidens’ War,” fighting body to body, blood and treachery, eros and thanatos (Cosmos had written about the ancient love game [
ludus
] of Whitsuntide, using the metaphors of war for wooing and submitting). Hájek is responsible for bringing Libussa closer to Czech and German readers of his age (his book was published in 1541) and of successive centuries. His popular book was adorned with expressive woodcuts, and its translation into German, for the first time as early as 1596, gave Libussa an important place in the Central European imagination. In Dresden, a German play about her was staged in 1666, and Italian opera in Prague, performing mostly for aristocratic audiences, provided La
Libussa
(1703). Czech rationalists, however, were definitely not enchanted by her or her forebears, and they tried to explain away her myth by the discourse of reason; while Gelasius Dobner, a scholarly Prague abbé, succeeded in totally discrediting Ur-father Czech, he could not prevent Libussa, surviving the myth and the dynasty, from attracting more attention to herself. She was loved by Czech and German romantics; the Czechs were eager for greatness to compete with German history, and the Germans were charmed by the Bohemian forests and their secrets. In Germany, Johann Gottfried Herder wrote a ballad on Pfemysl (1779), which was followed by J. K. A. Musäus’s finely wrought and sophisticated rococo fairy tales (1782-86), which spread Libussa’s fame among imaginative German and Austrian readers of the 1820s and 1830s. In Bohemia, an old narrative entitled “Libussa’s Judgment,” in ancient Czech, conveniently emerged in 1818 to provide patriots with a fragment of the epics long missing from Czech literary tradition (unfortunately, these fragments were an ingenious fake).
any, an imaginative sixteenth-century master of poetic inventions, in his own way completed Libussa’s historicization by defining abstruse chronologies, and he also followed Dalimil’s narrative in offering melodramatic and gory detail about the “Maidens’ War,” fighting body to body, blood and treachery, eros and thanatos (Cosmos had written about the ancient love game [ludus
] of Whitsuntide, using the metaphors of war for wooing and submitting). Hájek is responsible for bringing Libussa closer to Czech and German readers of his age (his book was published in 1541) and of successive centuries. His popular book was adorned with expressive woodcuts, and its translation into German, for the first time as early as 1596, gave Libussa an important place in the Central European imagination. In Dresden, a German play about her was staged in 1666, and Italian opera in Prague, performing mostly for aristocratic audiences, provided La
Libussa
(1703). Czech rationalists, however, were definitely not enchanted by her or her forebears, and they tried to explain away her myth by the discourse of reason; while Gelasius Dobner, a scholarly Prague abbé, succeeded in totally discrediting Ur-father Czech, he could not prevent Libussa, surviving the myth and the dynasty, from attracting more attention to herself. She was loved by Czech and German romantics; the Czechs were eager for greatness to compete with German history, and the Germans were charmed by the Bohemian forests and their secrets. In Germany, Johann Gottfried Herder wrote a ballad on Pfemysl (1779), which was followed by J. K. A. Musäus’s finely wrought and sophisticated rococo fairy tales (1782-86), which spread Libussa’s fame among imaginative German and Austrian readers of the 1820s and 1830s. In Bohemia, an old narrative entitled “Libussa’s Judgment,” in ancient Czech, conveniently emerged in 1818 to provide patriots with a fragment of the epics long missing from Czech literary tradition (unfortunately, these fragments were an ingenious fake).
It would be easy to say that the Great German romantic poet Clemens Brentano experienced Prague through the visions of Libussa when he
wrote his “romantic historical” play about the origins of the city, but the workings of his imagination were not so simple. In 1810 he went from Frankfurt, his home, to Bukovany, a Bohemian estate owned by his brother, but he felt ill at ease there. Bukovany was not Arcadia, and the “ugly” Czech peasants were ready “to steal the wheels off the carts.” Frustrated, he went to Prague and took long walks under the stars, trying to bring order to the “conglomerate” of Bohemian and Prague images in his mind. He had seen Bohemian glass merchants at fairs in Frankfurt, had heard about the many students at the old university, and had learned of the true “Kabbalah,” studied in the Jewish Town more energetically than elsewhere. He had also read about the death of St. Nepomuk, statues of whom he had encountered “on all the bridges of Catholic Germany,” about the Hussites and the beginnings of the Thirty Years’ War, and he was, being a true lyrical poet, oddly affected by the spectral sounds of the word
“Hradschin.”
To him, Prague was “strangely dark,” “adventurously crammed full,” “inaccessibly girded,” “bridged over and armored”; the intimation of claustrophobia is difficult to ignore. It was the image of Libussa, found in the chronicle of that old (if dubious) storyteller Hájek of Libo
any, that fortunately brought serenity, light, and clarity to his mind and prompted him to study the Bohemian past more systematically, in the writings of “lively” Cosmas, whose irony and elegant Latin he admired, and, he claimed, in conversations with the Czech philologist Josef Dobrovský, whose books he bought for his own library. One fine evening in the early spring of 1812 he went up the Pet
n Hill, looked over the churches and the river, suddenly felt deeply moved by the vision of Libussa and her city emerging from the forest, and resolved to celebrate her and her prophecy in a play, or rather in an entire series of plays, reaching deeply into the past. He was ready to yield to an image of a magic Prague of his own making, and yet in his notes he continued to see the realities of the provincial Biedermeier town of his time, and she, “the modern,” responded to him, the “modem” traveler. People made small talk about the theater, which he abhorred; the many minor civil servants were hardly like P
emysl; and though he toyed with the notion that a few of the Czech girls and women he saw in the street were reminiscent of Libussa and her maidens, his lasting and unfortunate impression was of a Prague mannequin in a millinery shop, “affected, stiff, cold, and ugly.”
wrote his “romantic historical” play about the origins of the city, but the workings of his imagination were not so simple. In 1810 he went from Frankfurt, his home, to Bukovany, a Bohemian estate owned by his brother, but he felt ill at ease there. Bukovany was not Arcadia, and the “ugly” Czech peasants were ready “to steal the wheels off the carts.” Frustrated, he went to Prague and took long walks under the stars, trying to bring order to the “conglomerate” of Bohemian and Prague images in his mind. He had seen Bohemian glass merchants at fairs in Frankfurt, had heard about the many students at the old university, and had learned of the true “Kabbalah,” studied in the Jewish Town more energetically than elsewhere. He had also read about the death of St. Nepomuk, statues of whom he had encountered “on all the bridges of Catholic Germany,” about the Hussites and the beginnings of the Thirty Years’ War, and he was, being a true lyrical poet, oddly affected by the spectral sounds of the word
“Hradschin.”
To him, Prague was “strangely dark,” “adventurously crammed full,” “inaccessibly girded,” “bridged over and armored”; the intimation of claustrophobia is difficult to ignore. It was the image of Libussa, found in the chronicle of that old (if dubious) storyteller Hájek of Libo
any, that fortunately brought serenity, light, and clarity to his mind and prompted him to study the Bohemian past more systematically, in the writings of “lively” Cosmas, whose irony and elegant Latin he admired, and, he claimed, in conversations with the Czech philologist Josef Dobrovský, whose books he bought for his own library. One fine evening in the early spring of 1812 he went up the Petn Hill, looked over the churches and the river, suddenly felt deeply moved by the vision of Libussa and her city emerging from the forest, and resolved to celebrate her and her prophecy in a play, or rather in an entire series of plays, reaching deeply into the past. He was ready to yield to an image of a magic Prague of his own making, and yet in his notes he continued to see the realities of the provincial Biedermeier town of his time, and she, “the modern,” responded to him, the “modem” traveler. People made small talk about the theater, which he abhorred; the many minor civil servants were hardly like Pemysl; and though he toyed with the notion that a few of the Czech girls and women he saw in the street were reminiscent of Libussa and her maidens, his lasting and unfortunate impression was of a Prague mannequin in a millinery shop, “affected, stiff, cold, and ugly.”Other books
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