Free Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia by Mariusz Szczygieł

1939.
    “So how are you doing?” the journalist Milena Jesenská asks a farmer near the town of Slaný.
    “I’ve gotten the potatoes planted, and the rye’s sown. We had a cold spring, but miraculously everything has come up, beautifully. I think I’ll cut down two of the old apple trees in the orchard and plant new ones. The duck already has young—go take a look at them, they’re like dandelion clocks. I must give that lilac bush a pruning so it won’t wither, to make the garden beautiful this year,” replies the farmer.
    “But how are you coping with the Germans?” asks Jesenská, refusing to give in.
    “Oh, whatever, they come by, and I get on with my work,” the farmer replies calmly.
    “Aren’t you at all afraid?”
    “Why should I be afraid?” he wonders sincerely, and suddenly retorts: “Besides, lady, a man can only die once. And if he dies a little sooner, he’s just dead for a little longer.”



PROOF OF LOVE

PART 1: ETERNITY LASTS FOR EIGHT YEARS
    Mrs. Kvítková the goose plucker plucked seventy-two geese in eight hours and went into the history books.
    At an academic conference in Brno, Minister of Information Václav Kopecký said that Europe’s highest mountain was Mount Elbrus, and defined the previously held view that it was Mont Blanc as “a relic of reactionary cosmopolitanism.”
    A definitive list was compiled of authors who would never be published again, including Dickens, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and several hundred others.
    The poet Michal Sedloň wrote that “nourishment” and “production” were now poetic words.
    The number of individual copies of books destroyed in the country during these years is estimated at twenty-seven million.
    As Prime Minister Antonín Zápotocký diagnosed the new age: “It’s impossible to live the old way—now life is better and happier!”
    In two years—at Stalin’s suggestion—the most eminent leaders will be condemned to the gallows.
    At the Zlatá Husa hotel on Wenceslas Square—where Andersen wrote his most famous fairytale about the idle rich,
The Princess and the Pea
—there hung a sign that said: “With the Soviet Union Forever.”
    Every day at midnight, at the end of its broadcast, Radio Prague played the Soviet national anthem.
    This is how the 1940s end and the ’50s begin in Czechoslovakia.
    As part of the celebrations for Joseph Stalin’s seventieth birthday held in December 1949, * the authorities decide that nine million of the country’s population of fourteen million citizens will sign birthday wishes for him.
    They manage to collect the signatures in four days. To mark the occasion, a decision is taken to erect the world’s largest statue of Stalin on a hill above the Vltava River in Prague.
    No sculptor can refuse to take part in the competition. Fifty-four artists are given nine months to design a statue. Thank God, the top Czechoslovak sculptor Ladislav Šaloun is lucky enough to be dead (as they say about this particular death in Prague). In order not to win, Karel Pokorný, regarded as Šaloun’s successor, draws the leader with his arms spread in a friendly gesture, making Stalin look like Christ.
    Most of the other artists make the same mistake. “Theyhave presented Stalin in an affected way,” says the panel of judges.
    Fifty-six-year-old Otakar Švec, son of a confectioner who specializes in sculptures made of sugar, is a frustrated sculptor.
    After a strong debut, when as a student he sculpted a motorcyclist and successfully captured movement in stone, he designed a statue of the father of the republic, T. G. Masaryk, and then a statue of Jan Hus. Both were destroyed by the fascists during the war. After the war, he designed a statue of Roosevelt, but never completed it, because the communists took power. Before the war, he used to exhibit his avant-garde sculptures in the West. He thought he would never get another commission.
    Now—so rumor has it—Otakar Švec throws together a model under the