Book review of Nohavica and (his) our little war

Even in the subtitle on the cover, the word “his” is clearly crossed out and replaced by the term “ours”. So the title is: Nohavica and our little war. The author thereby indicates that the discussion about the musician – about his pre-November bowing to power and his post-September inclination towards the Kremlin or some anti-systemic figures – with the author of the song from Ostrava Darmoděj whether When they took me for a soldier, nicknamed by some the whistleblower from Těšín, does not apply. That we somehow lead these paths outside of him, behind his back or in the lower levels, which the divinely gifted poet only looks down on from somewhere.

After one has finished reading Houd’s volume, one more correction can be suggested – the war is primarily the author’s. He leads it against alleged moralists, selected music journalists, and especially against the ability to sort or analyze facts. Unfortunately, Houda is winning this last war across the board.

The 42-year-old author of a book about normalization festivals, who lectures at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University and works at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences, has been devoted to Nohavic for a long time. He carefully collected a lot of materials, talked to a lot of witnesses, had access to the singer-songwriter’s archive; only he himself did not give him an interview, even though he knew about the creation of the book.

Houda lets the testimonies of all kinds of organizers from the normalization times be heard. He obtained recordings of concerts, from which he quotes Nohavic’s speeches on stage, talked to his old friends and those who only passed by the artist. He makes extensive selections from interviews and reports.

The problem is that Přemysl Houda does not know how to deal with this material. More statements pile up, even if they only shallowly vary the ones previously said. It is similar to Jára Cimrman’s comparison to a volcano that covered itself with its activity.

The inability to sort out the facts takes on grotesque proportions when Houda allows the respondents’ testimony to be heard at length completely out of context. For example, such a Martin – the name in the book is fictitious, the person in question wanted to remain anonymous – in 1982 moderated Folkový kolotoč, where the singer performed. Martin’s civilian profession was a normalization policeman, and Houda talks to him at length about what it was like when he had to go and confiscate an old lady’s passport.

The author lets another man, referred to only as Karel, who took part in the same show two years later, tell how he worked in television news after 1989 and what a mess it was. “But then I needed money, so I started shooting commercials in 1993,” Karel continues to describe irresistibly – unfortunately in the book about Nohavic, where it has nothing to do with it. Cimrman features cannot be overlooked in places.

Houda’s text also littered with quotes from all kinds of philosophers, writers, playwrights and intellectuals. He needs several pages of statements by Joseph Conrad, Otto Driesen, Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Bourdieu or Friedrich Nietzsche in order to declare that at first sight things seem more definite than when they are carefully measured. I guess until the overwhelmed reader thinks: if so many smart people are saying it, it must be true.

Let us also use one name, Saint Thomas Aquinas. Simply put, the supreme scholastic codified for the next several centuries the following procedure of argumentation for early medieval theological thought: if I want to declare something, I have to find a support for it – in the Bible, with the fathers of the desert, later with St. Thomas, in short with something verified and approved. It is inherently impossible to come up with something new on its own, because all the ideas have already been voiced and we just need to find the right ones. Watching this 13th century process in 2023 is as fascinating as meeting a living fossil.

Přemysl Houda did not write a classic biography. Attempting to map Nohavic’s public footprint. In the matter of cooperation with StB or adoption the medal from Russian President Vladimir Putin is so consistently added neither to the singer’s critics nor to his defenders that he is slowly becoming a relativizer of truths. Everything is said to be much more complicated, and Nohavica is apparently too far-reaching a personality to fit into our small viewpoints.

The song Tell me, dear sir, Hasler, as Jaromír Nohavica sang it in 2017 in Prague’s Hradčanské náměstí. Photo: ČTK | Video: Czech Television

The author does not name a clear point of view even in the thoroughly recovered meeting of the banned singer Nohavica in the mid-1980s with one of the most powerful communist apparatchiks, Miroslav Šlouf. (Of course, it cannot be done without one of the respondents telling how, right after the Velvet Revolution, he interviewed Václav Havel on the radio program Mikroforum, which is of course preceded by a selection from the thoughts of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky and the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.)

Unintentionally chilling is the description of the episode when, at a similar time, the exile magazine Witness without the singer’s knowledge printed some of his lyrics and an essay about him. He responded by sending the publisher Pavel Tigrid away from the stage Blues about big asses. Houda writes that “for Nohavica, Tigrid does not differ from his ‘comrades’ in one not insignificant respect” and that the singer against Tigrid is only “defending his small piece of land, a quarter of a square meter, which he feels is being robbed by those who want to appropriate it , to narrow and use for your own, not his, struggle”.

While Nohavica valiantly defended Tigrid, the exiled arch-enemy of the totalitarian regime, a journalist and driver of cultural events and critical thinking, many years later he no longer fought so bravely. For example, when politician Tomio Okamura shared shared a photo on social networks and thereby presented the singer’s alleged support for his SPD party. Although Houda asks a suggestive question at the beginning of the book, what the bard thinks of Okamura, he basically does not answer it.

He even mentions other more recent matters in the notes without addressing them: metal from the Czech-Russian company Stříbrný lukostřelec from 2017, Nohavic’s popularity on conspiracy or anti-system websites, or songs like Arab fucks my wife, It’s raining or last year’s song with the rhyme “was that rocket Ukrainian or Russian? / We’ll wait to see what the president of the USA has to say”.

The award from Vladimir Putin could not be reduced to a mere mention. Houda begins the relevant chapter with a chronology: November 4, 2018 Nohavica receives the Pushkin Medal. February 24, 2022 Russia attacked Ukraine. February 25, 2022 Nohavica says he will not return the medal because he received it for singing songs and not for warfare. Subsequently, he adds that he is not a fan of cheap gestures and wants to offer the proceeds from the concert to the account of SOS Ukraine, which the organizers of the collection refuse.

The problem is that the facts are chosen in a highly manipulative way. When Nohavica bowed to Putin in Moscow, Russia had long had troops in Ukraine. And not only there, let’s remember South Ossetia with Abkhazia, formerly part of Georgia. Anyone with eyes knew even then that the Kremlin was practicing an imperial war policy.

In the book about Nohavic, Přemysl Houda tries so consistently not to succumb to “the current categorical demand for a black-and-white vision of the past and firm boundaries between ‘moral’ and ‘immoral'”, as the philosopher Václav Bělohradský writes on the cover of the book, until he falls into this trap himself. By what facts he chooses, how he ranks them and what he doesn’t talk about, he clearly takes one of these sides. And it’s not really just a “little war” over one singer.

Přemysl Houda: Nohavica and (his) our little war
Publishing house Rybka Publishers 2023, 352 pages, 398 crowns