The Questionnaire by Jiří Gruša

First published:Dotazník, aneb modlitba za jedno mesto a prítele, 1978 (English translation, 1982)

Type of work: Poetic realism

Time of work: From the onset of World War II through the early 1970’s

Locale: Chlumec, a richly historical town in Bohemia, Czechoslovakia

Principal Characters:

• Jan Chrysostom Kepka, the narrator, an unemployable citizen of Socialist Czechoslovakia
• Edvin Kepka, Jan’s father, who is noted for his good looks
• Alice Vachal Kepka, Jan’s mother, a carrier of ancient traditions
• Erna Klahn, the girl next door
• Mirena Klahn, Erna’s mother, a music teacher
• Uncle Bonek, Edvin’s brother, collaborator with both the Nazis and the Socialists
• Uncle Olin, Alice’s cousin and Jan’s eccentric mentor
• Monsignor Rosin, the local pastor and historian

The Novel

In ironic answer to an employment application, the unemployable Jan Chrysostom Kepka attempts a full explanation of his life for the benefit of the faceless bureaucrat, Comrade Pavlenda. Jan’s life began before he was born, is played out on multiple levels of reality, and continues after his death. His keenly recollected conception occurred in 1938, during a tryst between an army deserter and an unmarried schoolgirl. Just before Jan’s birth, his parents marry, in the ancient Church of St. Barbora. The medieval martyr Barbora, and Jan’s entire Chlumec ancestry, form part of the consciousness of both Jan and the other inhabitants of Chlumec. Jan’s paradisaic childhood unfolds among playful, affectionate people. Their warm, sane atmosphere surrounds him like a protective transparent bubble, through which, though untouched himself, he sees the insanity and ugliness of outside events with a crystal, preternatural clarity.

From early childhood through late adolescence, Jan is erotically obsessed with little Erna. While still young enough to be pulled in a cart by his dog Astor, Jan married Erna several times. “I clicked my tongue at Astor, waved my rosemary sprig, and I was off to see my bride.” A real union with Erna eludes him. To be near her, Jan takes music lessons from her mother, Mirena, but it is Mirena, widowed by the “comrades,” who becomes his first lover.

The liaison ends when Jan is called up for military service. The experience consists chiefly of painting propaganda posters and sleeping in a dog kennel. His commander, a former hangman, goes mad, in one of many bizarre incidents that reveal the dark side of life as exquisitely as the sanity and peace of Jan’s home life show the light.

Everything happening to the people whom Jan knows happens, in a sense, to Jan as well. This is particularly true of events in the life of Uncle Olin, a former brewer, French legionnaire, and perpetual rebel and survivor. It is also true of Monsignor Rosin, whose History of Chlumec, though awkward and prosaic, blazes with fresh detail and psychological insight in Jan’s imagination. Jan obsessively re-creates the last days of Rosin, who was finally herded into a Nazi death pit for preaching about “the city which cannot hide.”

Jan and Olin seek to evade defeat by the repressive forces around them. They are mystics, who try to outfox these forces on some higher plane. Their weapons are imagination, magic, local lore, astrology, and (most important, but most unconscious) old-fashioned Czech humanism. The repressive forces, though evaded, are observed coldly and plainly. The novel’s last event is the East Bloc invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. “I pulled up the blinds and saw a row of bugs crawling down the road from Hradek and Svetlice toward Chlumec.” Jan retrieves an exhibition of puppets that he has set up in the town square and is roughed up by soldiers.

I reached out to get my suitcase back, but two other soldiers reached out for me first, spun me around—direction Hradek—prodded me in the back with their rifle butts to make me gasp and jump. Then they shot me dead.

  They shot me full of holes. But I kept walking. Even with bullets plopping out of little holes in my body. I was light as air. Back inside Alice. I glanced at my watch to see the precise time of my death.  It was 10:57, precisely as per ephemeris.

The novel concludes with the effulgences of Jan’s vivid, prophetic, but now disintegrating consciousness.

The Characters

Jan Chrysostom Kepka has the freshness of perception of a child. Ironically, the older he gets, the more childlike he becomes. Jiri Grusa does not wholly identify with Jan, by any means. He hints that Jan is slowly going mad, no matter how rich and enticing Jan’s perceptions may be. The other side of Jan’s childlike vision is his emotional immaturity. After a very promising start, even amid the abysmal external conditions of the Nazi Occupation and the Soviet liberation, Jan begins to slide backward around the time that Czechoslovakia becomes Socialist. He only barely restrains himself from actually telling young Erna that he has become involved with her mother. After military service, he can find nothing more productive to do than breed cats—and not even successfully, since his “Ma Fille” turns out to be a “Mafius.” He carries on a long-distance flirtation with a female cat-owner in Germany, a relationship consummated in a comical and outrageous fantasy. His devotion to Alice continues in full force to the end. Yet his is not a true Oedipal complex, because there is no sense of rivalry between his father and himself. He views Edvin with a mixture of good-humored condescension and tenderness.

Alice is the most realistic, vibrant, and consistent character. She is spotlighted by Jan’s love but has enough personality to stand on her own: dry humor, courage, wholeness, stubborn patriotism, and a mouth “that says what must be said.” She is not described as beautiful, but her beauty is never in doubt. She is the bearer of “four-beam,” “equatorial” eyes, inherited from a well-hidden Jewish ancestor. She is thus the center of a complicated historical subplot which is also part of Jan’s life. Edvin and Olin, like Alice, are whole, harmonious characters with emotional integrity. They are touchstones of normalcy and natural goodness.

In the Czech tradition, Grusa is reluctant to strip humanity from characters who are simpleminded, immoral, or crude. His Russian liberators, hilarious in their crudity, are drawn with just enough naturalism so that they stop short of being caricatures. The despicable Uncle Bonek, a greedy collaborator with both Nazis and comrades, is given human motives and a human consciousness—although Grusa’s description of his macabre end is gleeful. Only the former hangman, Lieutenant Mikit, leaves the human realm.

Critical Context

Although The Questionnaire was not officially published until 1978, when it was issued by an emigre publishing house in Toronto, Canada, founded by exiled Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, it first appeared in Czechoslovakia in 1974, in samizdat. At that time, Grusa was arrested and charged with “initiating disorder”; he subsequently emigrated to West Germany. Doktor Kokes Mistr Panny (1984; Doctor Kokes, master of the virgin), his first novel after The Questionnaire, was, like its predecessor, published in Canada.

The Questionnaire continues in the tradition of Czech humanism that goes back to the medieval allegorist Jan Amos Komensky, and continues in the twentieth century with myriad Czech writers. At least from the time of Karel Capek (coiner of “robot”) onward, Czech humanism has been combined with a love of modernism, sometimes carried to an extreme. Grusa’s prose is further enriched by the kind of innovative imagery more characteristic of twentieth century Czech poetry such as that of Josef Hora or Jaroslav Seifert.

The Czechs have been especially at home in the modern medium of filmmaking. Grusa’s choice of puppet making as a skill for Jan is a nod to Jiri Trnka, a pioneer in using puppets in animated films whose mute masterpiece, The Hand (1965), made a strong plea for the rights of creative man (and by extension, Everyman) to flourish organically and peacefully, without interference from the heavy hand of the state.

To be a humanist—a follower of a very old tradition, and Grusa is steeped in tradition—is, paradoxically, to be as modern as possible, since human nature does not change. The special feature of Czech humanism, from the Middle Ages through Grusa, has been to affirm human nature precisely as it is, with its weaknesses and absurdities, and to see true evil as a deviation from what is human. Grusa was among those who had to leave Czechoslovakia permanently, when the East Bloc turned down the Prague movement for “Socialism with a human face.” As a major statement of Czech humanism, The Questionnaire deserves an international audience. Its excellent English translation, by Peter Kussi, may help to ensure that readership.

Bibliography

Banerjee, Maria Nemcova. Review of Doktor Kokes Mistr Panny in World Literature Today. LIX (Spring, 1985), pp. 286-287.

Banerjee, Maria Nemcova. Review of The Questionnaire in World Literature Today. LVII (Spring, 1983), p. 314.

Grusa, Jiri. Franz Kafka of Prague, 1983.

Soete, George. Review in Library Journal. CVII (August, 1982), p. 1480.