2024-04-21 15:01:26
At the Magnesia Litera awards, the right-wing Echo defeated the left-wing Alarm. In the nonfiction category, the philosopher Tereza Matějčková won with essays and interviews for the weekly Echo, in which she writes about gender and cancel culture in addition to literature. The jurors gave it priority over sociologist Vojtěch Pecka’s book on climate disinformation, which was published by the Alarm website and which criticizes, for example, ex-president Václav Klaus.
The prose Hella by the Russian Alena Machoninová became the book of the year. The most famous Czech literary prizes were awarded on Thursday evening at the New Stage of the National Theatre, the ceremony was broadcast on television.
While prose used to be one of the most watched categories, this year the battle has intensified in the field of journalism. This was enhanced by the fact that for the first time since the prize was founded in 2002, it was possible to bet on the winner at the Tipsport betting office, and by the unusual political debate for Litera.
Former lecturer from the Faculty of Philosophy in Prague, Tereza Matějčková, had to explain at the author’s reading from her book God is Dead – Nothing is Allowed why she contributes to the “conservative Echo, considered a right-wing, almost alt-right paper”, as the organizer of the award, Pavel Mandys, said. “I find it interesting that we emphasize the concept of otherness, but as soon as someone stands just a millimeter different, he is already an alt-right and a fascist,” Matějčková responded, after which she turned to the topic she returned on social networks.
There, Echa editor-in-chief Dalibor Balšínek he wrotethat they have to “defend the girl from the disgusting attacks of the bastards”, while on the day of the presentation, the website Alarm read out Matějčková as polarizing society with her statements about transgender issues.
The invasion of politics on Litera somewhat overshadowed other news of this year. The winners of the genre awards for fantasy, detective story and humorous book were announced for the first time as part of the main evening, similar to how the Anděl music award started to do some time ago. Following the example of the British Booker Prize, the organizers first published the so-called longlist, i.e. a broader list of nominations.
In those narrower than prose, some missed the novels of Klára Vlasáková, Petra Hůlova or Radka Denemarková, others missed Andrea Sedláčková’s bestseller about the artist Toyen, which won the Lidové noviny Book of the Year poll.
On Thursday evening, the prose debut of the poet Marek Torčík about the traumatic coming of age of a gay man in a small town in Moravia was finally awarded Litera for prose. The award for the act of publishing went to Karolina for the complete edition of the works of the poet Karel Šiktans, which was prepared by the now ninety-four-year-old literary historian Jiří Brabec for two decades.
The award for poetry goes to Tereza Bínová, for example, the award for contribution to book culture went to Pilsen poet Tomáš T. Kůs, who popularized the genre of slam poetry.
Appearances are deceptive
But the main winner of the evening and the book of the year, chosen by 229 booksellers, editors and publishers, was Hella, the fiction debut of the translator from Russian Alena Machoninová.
Not even three hundred pages long, the publication ostensibly describes the fate of Czech Jewess Helena Frischerová, who went with her husband to build communism in Moscow, but in 1937 they became victims of Stalin’s purges. He was executed, she ended up in the gulag for ten years. After her release, she never returned to Czechoslovakia, she lived in Moscow until her death in 1984.
Helena Frischerová’s penetrating gaze pierces me like ten bullets, writes Alena Machoninová. | Photo: Academia Publishing House
But appearances are deceiving. Hella is not a historical novel about the horrors of communism. It is highly intimate, essayistic prose with an autobiographical streak. On one level, it depicts the uncovering of a real person behind a literary character, as the narrator first identifies Frischerová as one of the heroines of Moscow-the Border, a cautionary novel by Jiří Weil from 1935.
Hella is also literature about literature. The author quotes from the novels of Russian novelists Andrej Platonov and Marije Stěpanová, which she translated into Czech. He compares translations of Osip Mandelštam’s late poem, compares Frischer’s memoirs with the works of so-called camp authors such as Varlam Šalamov.
Of course, Helena Frischer was a victim of communism. And she felt the consequences of the gulag until her death. “Everything burns inside, absolutely everything – wrongs, losses, my own mistakes. I am mutilated beyond recognition,” she wrote in a 1959 letter. about forgiveness, I adore everything I left behind, I lose connection with the present,” she described back in 1977.
But the book is about more. Alena Machoninová asks to what extent it is possible to reconstruct someone’s life based on scraps, official documents or correspondence. And what about all those piecemeal statements, allusions or white spaces that the survivors are silent about.
As she follows in Frischer’s footsteps, the focus shifts to the narrator. Although she physically touches the papers that were touched by the prisoner. He searches for her grave in the drifts of snow in the northeast of Moscow. Under the surveillance of the cameras, she examines the investigative files of the convict in the Russian state archives. And later she visits her friend who is sitting opposite her on the bed in a long white nightgown.
Who could have known then? Everything seemed so right, fair and heavenly, the heroine of the novel Hella remembered pre-war Moscow. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
By that time, however, Helena Frischerová is more of a “mirror in which she tries to see her own features”, as the Magnesia Litera jury put it. The reader gets to know the situation of the narrator, who, like the real Alena Machoninová, has lived in Russia since the beginning of the millennium. And although she sobered up from him, like the foreigners in Jiří Weil’s novel, at the same time Moscow became “my city, my home” for her.
Now, straddling two worlds and languages, she tries to explain why she doesn’t run away from the totalitarian country, even though it was high time. Why is she drawn to Frischer’s fate with terrifying terror, while it is “so appallingly logical”, because how else could foreigners have ended up in Moscow during the Stalinist trials. Because how else could foreigners turn out in Moscow today, adds the reader silently.
Parallels do not always have to fit 100%. Nevertheless, the narrator realizes in the Russian capital that the world has once again sharply divided and “I found myself on its wrong side, I know it, I’m afraid of it, and yet I remain hopeful that, unlike Hella, I can leave in time”.
No way back
Alena Machoninová experienced the 2012 protests against Vladimir Putin’s return to power in Moscow. She was there at the time of the Russian annexation of Crimea, which shook some of her friendships. And of course she watched the start of the Russian war in Ukraine there. She still stayed with her husband. Only when their visas expired did they return to the Czech Republic last fall.
“But I wouldn’t talk about a return. I think it’s more like a visit,” Machoninová said last month in Havel’s library. “I have the feeling that I live in some kind of internal emigration. At the same time, I find that my experience of the war from Russia is completely different from yours here. And not because I don’t approve of the war, not in any way, but because it affected me in some way much more ” she continued.
Alena Machoninová, the author of Helly, accepts Magnesia Litera as the book of the year. | Photo: Václav Vašků
In the end, Hella is thus closer to the thoughts of exiles Věra Linhartová or Milan Kundera than to camp literature. He also wrote about the impossibility of returning home, where in decades it will change so much that one cannot understand it, in the prose of 2000, Nevedění. And no one here understands the returnee anymore.
After returning from the camp, Helena Frischerová could not continue the conversations interrupted mid-sentence before the arrest, as if nothing had happened. She was not the same as when they closed her. She talked about the way back, even went to the train station, but for her Prague remained just an unfulfilled dream. An unattainable home.
Hella shows that such a home is shaped not only by physical place and time, but also by language, friendship, and literature. That it is even the most important in one respect.
Frischerová started writing for therapeutic reasons, and it was through this writing that she “found herself again”, according to Machoninová. The same goes for its narrator, perhaps even its author. Which is clear in at least one respect. “My home? It’s in Moscow, in the Timiryazev district,” she told Host magazine.
That it is incomprehensible to someone in the Czech Republic, after two years of the Russian war? Of course. Just like when in Kunder’s book people didn’t understand why all emigrants didn’t return after 1989. Fortunately, that’s why literature exists. The experience of exile remains ineffable. By reading Hella, one gets as close to her as possible.
Winners of the 2024 Magnesia Litera Awards
Book of the year
Alena Machoninová: Hella (Marathon)
Luxor Litera for prose
Marek Torčík: You will destroy memory (Paseka)
Litera za poezii
Tereza Bínová: The Red Giant (Odeon/EMG)
Litera for a book for children and young people
Jiří Dvořák: Myko. Complete newsletter from the world of mushrooms (Baobab)
CRo Plus Litera for journalism
Tereza Matějčková: God is dead. Nothing is allowed. (Echo Media)
Litera for academic literature
Stanislav Březina, František Krahulec, Sylvie Pecháčková, Hana Skálová: Meadows. The Adventure of Learning (Academia)
Litera for publishing act
The work of Karel Šiktanac (Karolinum)
Litera for a translation book
László Szilasi: The Third Bridge (Trans. Marta Pató, Protimluv)
DILIA Litera for debut rock
Eli Beneš: Slight loss of loneliness (Akropolis)
Litera za detektikuku
Jana Jašová: Cruel Moon (Motto/Albatros Media)
Literary for fantasy
Jan A. Kozák: The Saga of Lundir. Son of Winter, Starcasters and Builders (Malvern)
Litera for a humorous book
Lucie Macháčková: Wedding stories (Ikar/EMG)
Magnesia Award for contribution to book culture
Tomáš T. Kůs and the Slampoetry.cz platform
Kosmas Readers’ Award
Martin Moravec: Between heaven and patient (interview with Mark Dvořák)