32   The Deserts of Bohemia

Czechoslo­vak Republic, becoming to a large extent the backbone of its military and civil service, such a charge was hardly a laughing matter.

What was a stigma for the right, however, the left saw as a badge of honor. The Czech Communists (the Party was founded in 1921) conve­niently expunged from their memory the fact that after his return to Prague, Hasek eschewed all political activities, resuming instead his old dissolute lifestyle; they mythologized him according to their own image. Thus, "Comrade Gashek" (the Russian transliteration of his name) was born—a dedicated revolutionary ready to sacrifice his life for the libera­tion of the proletariat. The Communist takeover of 1948 marked the be­ginning of a new stage in Hasek's posthumous life. Elevated to the pan­theon of immortals in 1959, he was made the patron saint of socialist humor and satire, and a yearly festival dedicated to this genre was estab­lished in his name in Lipnice, the little town in southeastern Bohemia where Hasek is buried. One must not forget to mention that in 1963, dur­ing the international festivities celebrating the eightieth anniversary of his birth, a feature-length movie about Hasek's life was released in the Soviet Union and a street in Moscow was named after him. What more could a Marxist-Leninist ask for?

After this lengthy digression, it is obvious that the parallel between Hasek and Kafka that Kosík drew in 1963 is not altogether innocent. Why would a Marxist philosopher seriously compare two writers with such different ideological profiles, likening a politruk of the Red Army with a decadent bourgeois who, as Howard Fast put it with Lenin-like bluntness, sits "very near the top of.... the 'cultural dung heap of reaction,'... one of the major Olympians in that curious shrine the so-called 'new critics' and their Trotskyite colleagues have erected"?¹⁷ But Kosík's marriage of the two Prague writers did not take place in a social vacuum, and politics do make strange bedfellows. The union was part of a well-orchestrated campaign to rehabilitate Kafka, or, more precisely, to use him in the intra-Party struggle between the Stalinist establishment and the Communist reformists in the early 1960s. This in itself is an excellent example of how fiction can function politically in a one-party society.

In May 1963, Liblice Castle near Prague provided an appropriate set­ting for an international scholarly conference whose explicit aim, accord­ing to its organizer, Eduard Goldstücker, was to become the "basis of a fu­ture, well-founded Marxist view of Kafka."¹⁸ This is not to say that previously all Marxist

¹⁷ Howard Fast, Literature and Reality (New York, 1950), p. 9.

¹⁸ Eduard Goldstücker, "O Franzi Kafkovi z pražské perspektivy 1963," in Franz Kafka:Liblická konference, 1963, ed. E. Goldstücker et al. (Prague, 1963), p. 23.