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

and the architects build a series of models of the monument in clay. First, three feet high, then ten.
    The Party and the government have their eye on Švec. The record of comments made about him at a meeting between the authorities and the artist on January 4, 1951, fills twelve typewritten pages.
    The figure of Stalin isn’t towering over the rest of the monument! Prime Minister Zápotocký says that it should already be plain to see in the clay models that this is a monument to Stalin—a courageous man. “Now that he’s getting down to work, perhaps the artist is starting to be afraid of his own ideas,” he adds.
    Zápotocký and eight of his ministers discuss whether to lower the figures behind Stalin, or raise the leader on an extra pedestal.
    The monument must not look like a sarcophagus from afar!
    The figures behind Stalin are too decorative.
    Can’t the artist take a more profound approach to his work?
    Why does he refuse to make more clay models and show them to the authorities?
    Finally, the prime minister concludes that Otakar Švec is indeed afraid of his own monument.
    The sculptor doesn’t hear all of this; he and his colleagues are invited to join the meeting forty-five minutes later. First the architect, Vlasta Štursová, gives her explanation: they have deliberately not raised the figure of Stalin, because that would mean distancing him from the people, but in fact he is leading the people, and they stem from him.
    Švec explains to the authorities that if they wish for Stalin to be different in height from the rest, the monument will have two different scales. “From the artistic point of view, that is untenable,” he says.
    The government buys him a bigger studio, because his old one is turning out to be too small. Now, Party representatives will hold their meetings at his workshop.
    They come with their own penknives.
    Each time, they stick them in the clay and trim down the heads of the people behind Stalin.
    The first man with a penknife is the minister with radical views on Mont Blanc and Mount Elbrus.
    Wielding the second penknife is the most virulent of them all, Professor Zdeněk Nejedlý, author of
The History of Czech Music
. He was an art historian, and had even been a democrat; during the occupation he illegally escaped to Moscow and became a professor there. He came back to become a theoretician of everything in socialist Czechoslovakia.
    In 1951, he is minister of schools, the sciences, and the arts. He writes a famous essay about new art and love. “People will still fall in love,” he predicts, “but we expect that, under socialism, as the working class, they will love each other more and better than before. They’ll no longer come up with any of that fake stuff about ‘unhappy love affairs,’ or the sensual deterioration in which bourgeois romance so often wallowed.”
    For instance, he can’t bear the fact that Czechoslovakia was famous before the war for avant-garde photography. When he sees shadows or smoke photographed out of context in Jaroslav Rössler’s photographs from the 1920s, he flies into a rage.
    (When Stalin dies, Nejedlý will state that from now on the Czech monument makes the most important statement about the Father of Nations: Stalin lives forever.)
    Four months after the first reprimand, Švec receives another. The authorities upbraid him again in 1952, in 1953 and in 1954.
    Four years go by, the stonemasons have been working on the blocks of granite for a long time now, the scaffolding and the crane are in place, and the artist is still being advised to “soften and change some of the figures, so they won’t look despotic.” Švec takes women back to his studio and drinks with them.
    He comes forward with explanations.
    A year before the monument is unveiled, his wife can’t bear the situation any longer, and turns on the gas in the bathroom.
    Švec finds her dead in the bathtub.
    •   •   •
    New doubts arise, which luckily have nothing