Page 105 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 105
Searching for the Image of the Village in the Swirl of 20th Century Ideological Conflicts 105
The protagonists are now attempting to manage again with historical
awareness of the sensitive relationship to the land and its cultivation, yet
confronted with large-scale cooperatives, whose materialistic manage-
ment and attitude to land and countryside has not changed a bit in the
last thirty years, this attitude must be necessarily defeated, coming across
as idealistic and dreamy:
At that time I had to stop being too brash, especially in the coopera-
tive. I just watched all that havoc, keeping my trap shut. I drove a tractor
on our fields as if it was somebody else’s property, pouring that poison-
ous shit on it just to make the kolkhoz work. Many times, I remembered
the pain my parents felt when they had to watch the fields, the spinneys,
the land being plundered. Mom kept repeating: ‘Above all, people have
changed with all that. Remember, if you plough a spinney or a balk, you
tear the line between the people. You destroy the old ways that have al-
ways held things together here.’ And she was right. People have never act-
ed according to their convictions, anyway. They have always envied one
another here. And as the field boundaries disappeared, so did the scru-
ples. You could see that all around you. Even after the revolution, nothing
changed here. When the fields were being restituted, it was as if the farm-
ers were stealing the purest gold from the people in the village. It was as
if no one understood that the land being returned was exhausted, no one
saw the amount of work to be done before it could recover a little bit. All
of them suddenly forgot the harm done by their cooperatives. As if a few
handfuls of money were going to make up for those broken relationships.
The destroyed families. Nobody thinks about it. They’re all consumed by
envy here (Dvořáková, 2018, 84).
And this is not the only aspect to show that the difference between
the Czech socialist village of the 1980s and the village of the second dec-
ade of the 21st century is basically not apparent; however, some nostalgia
is covering the memories of bygone years:
All over again there, but the pig is smaller. Certainly not two hundred and
fifty kilos. That was just Vavirek’s eyes bigger than his stomach. Hardly two
quintals. I’ve boozed enough and the Vavireks keep pouring drinks too.
They are thinking of what the pig-slaughtering used to be before. ‘Even
with your father, it was still something. I won’t forget that as long as I live,’
Grandpa Vavirek pats me on the shoulders and Bohóš nods. ‘They kept a
pig in almost every house, the whole family got together, it was an event.
Also, there used to be more snow, that was also part of the mood,’ the old
man recalls and takes a slug straight from the bottle. I know it almost by
heart, he repeats that year after year, but I always let him talk. After all, I
The protagonists are now attempting to manage again with historical
awareness of the sensitive relationship to the land and its cultivation, yet
confronted with large-scale cooperatives, whose materialistic manage-
ment and attitude to land and countryside has not changed a bit in the
last thirty years, this attitude must be necessarily defeated, coming across
as idealistic and dreamy:
At that time I had to stop being too brash, especially in the coopera-
tive. I just watched all that havoc, keeping my trap shut. I drove a tractor
on our fields as if it was somebody else’s property, pouring that poison-
ous shit on it just to make the kolkhoz work. Many times, I remembered
the pain my parents felt when they had to watch the fields, the spinneys,
the land being plundered. Mom kept repeating: ‘Above all, people have
changed with all that. Remember, if you plough a spinney or a balk, you
tear the line between the people. You destroy the old ways that have al-
ways held things together here.’ And she was right. People have never act-
ed according to their convictions, anyway. They have always envied one
another here. And as the field boundaries disappeared, so did the scru-
ples. You could see that all around you. Even after the revolution, nothing
changed here. When the fields were being restituted, it was as if the farm-
ers were stealing the purest gold from the people in the village. It was as
if no one understood that the land being returned was exhausted, no one
saw the amount of work to be done before it could recover a little bit. All
of them suddenly forgot the harm done by their cooperatives. As if a few
handfuls of money were going to make up for those broken relationships.
The destroyed families. Nobody thinks about it. They’re all consumed by
envy here (Dvořáková, 2018, 84).
And this is not the only aspect to show that the difference between
the Czech socialist village of the 1980s and the village of the second dec-
ade of the 21st century is basically not apparent; however, some nostalgia
is covering the memories of bygone years:
All over again there, but the pig is smaller. Certainly not two hundred and
fifty kilos. That was just Vavirek’s eyes bigger than his stomach. Hardly two
quintals. I’ve boozed enough and the Vavireks keep pouring drinks too.
They are thinking of what the pig-slaughtering used to be before. ‘Even
with your father, it was still something. I won’t forget that as long as I live,’
Grandpa Vavirek pats me on the shoulders and Bohóš nods. ‘They kept a
pig in almost every house, the whole family got together, it was an event.
Also, there used to be more snow, that was also part of the mood,’ the old
man recalls and takes a slug straight from the bottle. I know it almost by
heart, he repeats that year after year, but I always let him talk. After all, I
