If in the case of Broch, of Musil, of Gombrowicz, and in a certain sense of Bartok, delay in recognition is due to historic catastrophes (Nazism, war), but in Janacek's case it was his small nation that completely took over the role of the catastrophes.
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Small nations. The concept is not quantitative; it describes a situation; a destiny: small nations haven't the comfortable sense of being there always, past and future; they have all, at some point or another in their history, passed through the antechamber of death; always faced with the arrogant ignorance of the large nations, they see their existence perpetually threatened or called into question; for their very existence
Most of the small European nations became free and independent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus they have their own evolutionary rhythm. For the arts, this historical asynchrony has often been a fruitful thing, as it made for the curious telescoping of different eras: for instance, Janacek and Bartok were both ardent participants in the national struggle of their peoples; that is their nineteenth-century side: an extraordinary sense of reality, an attachment to the working classes and to popular arts, a more spontaneous rapport with the audience; these qualities, already gone from the arts in the large countries, here merged with the aesthetic of modernism in a surprising, inimitable, felicitous marriage.
The small nations form 'another Europe,' whose evolution runs in counterpoint with that of the large nations. An observer can be fascinated by the often astonishing intensity of their cultural life. This is the advantage of smallness: the wealth in cultural events is on a 'human scale'; everyone can encompass that wealth, can participate in the totality of cultural life; this is why, in its best moments, a small nation can bring to mind life in an ancient Greek city.
That potential for everyone's participation in everything can also bring to mind something else: the family; a small nation resembles a big family and likes to describe itself that way. In the language of the smallest European people, in Icelandic, the term for 'family' is
Secluded behind their inaccessible languages, the small European nations (their life, their history, their culture) are very ill known; people think, naturally enough, that this is the principal handicap to international recognition of their art. But it is the reverse: what handicaps their art is that everything and everyone (critics, historians, compatriots as well as foreigners) hooks the art onto the great national family portrait photo and will not let it get away. Gombrowicz: to no purpose (and with no competence either), foreign commentators struggle to explain his work by discoursing on the Polish nobility, on the Polish Baroque, etc., etc. As Lakis Proguidis writes, [2] they 'Polonize' him, 're-Polonize' him, push him back into the
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Ah, small nations. Within that warm intimacy, each envies each, everyone watches everyone. 'Families, I hate you!' And still another line from Gide: 'There is nothing more dangerous for you than
Of course, all modern artists have had experience with hatred and incomprehension from the public; but they were also surrounded by disciples, by theoreticians, by performers who from the beginning were defending them and promulgating the authentic idea of their art. In Brno, in a province where he spent his whole life, Janacek too had his faithful followers, some performers who were often admirable (the Janacek Quartet was among the last heirs to this tradition) but whose influence was weak. From the early years of the century, official Czech musicology disdained him. Knowing no other musical gods but Smetana, nor other laws than the Smetanesque, the national ideologues were irritated by his otherness. The pope of Prague musicology, Professor Nejedly, who late in his life, in 1948, became minister and omnipotent ruler of culture in Stalinized Czechoslovakia, took with him into his bellicose senility only two great passions: Smetana worship and Janacek vilification. The most useful support of Janacek's lifetime came from Max Brod; between 1918 and 1928 Brod translated all Janacek's operas into German, thereby opening frontiers to them and delivering them from the exclusive power of the jealous family. In 1924 he wrote the first monograph on Janacek; but Brod was not Czech, and thus the first Janacek monograph was in German. The second was in French, published in Paris in 1930. The first complete monograph in Czech only appeared thirty-nine years after Brod's. [3] Franz Kafka compared Brod's campaign for Janacek to the one for Dreyfus earlier-a startling comparison that indicates the degree of hostility leveled at Janacek in his own country. From 1903 to 1916, the National Theater of Prague persistently turned away his first opera,
And yet that little nation has never had any artist greater than he.
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Let us go on. I consider the last decade of his life: his country independent, his music at last applauded, himself loved by a young woman; his works become more and more bold, free, merry. A Picasso-like old age. In the summer of 1928, his beloved and her two
children come to see him in his little country house. The children wander off into the forest, he goes looking for them, runs every which way, catches cold and develops pneumonia, is taken to the hospital, and, a few days later, dies. She is there with him. From the time I was fourteen, I have heard the gossip that he died making love on his hospital bed. Not very plausible but, as Hemingway liked to say, truer than the truth. What better coronation for the wild euphoria that was his late age?
And it is also proof that within his national family there were, after all, people who loved him. For that legend
