The Nonconformists

American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain

Brian K. Goodman

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674292949
• Print ISBN:
  9780674983373
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies

How risky encounters between American and Czech writers behind the Iron Curtain shaped the art and politics of the Cold War and helped define an era of dissent.

"In some indescribable way, we are each other's continuation," Arthur Miller wrote of the imprisoned Czech playwright Václav Havel. After a Soviet-led invasion ended the Prague Spring, many US-based writers experienced a similar shock of solidarity. Brian Goodman examines the surprising and consequential connections between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War—connections that influenced art and politics on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

American writers had long been attracted to Prague, a city they associated with the spectral figure of Franz Kafka. Goodman reconstructs the Czech journeys of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and John Updike, as well as their friendships with nonconformists like Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Ivan Klíma, and Milan Kundera. Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, was home to a literary counterculture shaped by years of engagement with American sources, from Moby-Dick and the Beats to Dixieland jazz and rock 'n' roll. Czechs eagerly followed cultural trends in the United States, creatively appropriating works by authors like Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves.

The Nonconformists tells the story of a group of writers who crossed boundaries of language and politics, rearranging them in the process. The transnational circulation of literature played an important role in the formation of new subcultures and reading publics, reshaping political imaginations and transforming the city of Kafka into a global capital of dissent. From the postwar dream of a "Czechoslovak road to socialism" to the neoconservative embrace of Eastern bloc dissidence on the eve of the Velvet Revolution, history was changed by a collision of literary cultures.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Ginsberg’s File
• Introduction: A Novel Fusion
• Chapter 1: The Man Who Disappeared: Franz Kafka between Prague and New York
• Chapter 2: Behind the Gold Curtain: F. O. Matthiessen on the Czechoslovak Road to Socialism
• Chapter 3: The Cowards’ Guide to World Literature: Josef Škvorecký’s American Epigraphs
• Chapter 4: The Kingdom of May: Allen Ginsberg through Springtime Prague
• Chapter 5: The Tourist: Philip Roth and the Writers from the Other Europe
• Chapter 6: Across the Gray Zone: American Writers and the Czech Jazz Section
• Epilogue: Everything Goes
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index