Berlin after A-Tumblin' Down

December 5, 2023 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This November I finally returned to Wittenberg after four years away—which is a long time for me, since I’ve taught a course on Luther’s theology in Wittenberg every November since 2009. The reason I didn’t make it here in the interval is too obvious to state. It felt like a homecoming, and I enjoyed it hugely.

But it wasn’t till I got here—and took one of my free days for a day trip to Berlin—that I realized something else. Between my last visit in 2019, and this visit in 2023, I wrote, edited, and published my first novel, A-Tumblin’ Down. Both East Germany and Berlin are essential to the story. Yet in that entire process, I didn’t so much as set foot here…

Slovakia Nonfiction Grab Bag

October 26, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

While my main project lo these many years has been to read and review Slovak novels in English, the fact is that I have also read no small amount of nonfiction about Slovakia and (to a lesser extent) by Slovaks. Sorting out the history of the nation we now call the Republic of Slovakia was in fact one of the great delights of working on my memoir. It turns out Slovakia’s history is a good window into the whole history of Europe, and to a whole range of political and economic questions.

So, for those of you out there who’d like to know more—all six of you—here’s a handful of books worth noting…

The New Samizdat

July 20, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Russian samizdat and photo negatives of unofficial literature in the USSR. Moscow.

Samizdat is a sexy word borrowed from Russian, as its foreign-to-English consonant cluster zd unmistakably signals. But its literal translation renders a very unsexy, even dopey, notion in the anglophone world: self-publishing.

I can hear your cringe. “Self-publishing” is a polite euphemism for “vanity publishing,” which means 1) you are such a terrible writer you couldn’t persuade even the newest, poorest, most-desperate-to-prove-herself New York literary agent to shop your manuscript around, and therefore 2) you shelled out several thousand bucks to a parasitic scammer who feeds off fragile egos and probably has a brother in the bail bond business, with the result that 3) you can hold your own hardcover, yes, but with such unbelievably lousy cover art and an unforgivable font, not to mention the too-thick, stark-white, badly laid-out pages within, that only your mom and a handful of friends highly susceptible to guilt trips are going to buy it. But they sure aren’t gonna read it. (Well, maybe your mom will.)

The funny thing is, the samizdat’s endearing virtue was precisely its shoddy production quality…

The Bitter Price of Making the World a Better Place

February 4, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Rosemary Kavan, Love and Freedom: My Unexpected Life in Prague (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 278 pp. Originally published as Freedom at a Price: An Englishwoman’s Life in Czechoslovakia (London: Verso, 1985).

In reading Janko Jesenský’s The Democrats, I found myself as intrigued as anything by the book’s translator, Jean Rosemary Edwards, also known as Rosemary Kavan (or, in Czech, Rosemary Kavanová). I’d found out a little about her—she married Czech Communist Pavel Kavan, lived in Czechoslovakia during the communist rise to power, enjoyed a short stay with him working at the embassy in London, and then returned to Prague only for Pavel to be arrested—like countless other true-believer communists—by his own party and country on trumped-up charges of treason. Pavel was released sooner than his sentenced twenty-five years, but his health was destroyed and he died in the late 1950s. Rosemary stuck it out in Prague until her older son Jan Kavan’s liberal activism in the Prague Spring, and her support of it, threatened her own liberty and life. She escaped Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s and stayed away until her death of cancer in 1981.

This memoir of her life, finished shortly before her death and published by her aforementioned son, fills in much of those details, not least of all the extremely difficult marriage she had with Pavel. Confusing their chemistry with love (hardly an original mistake) and his ideological passion for the whole human race with the ability to love well and attentively a single person, she stuck by her man, his short temper, inconsiderateness, neglect, and occasional violence notwithstanding. The communist commitment to ending the exploitation of man by man rarely noticed the problem of the exploitation of woman by man…