The Cowards by Josef Škvorecký

First published:Zbabělci, 1958 (English translation, 1970)

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: 1945

Locale: Kostelec, a fictional town in Czechoslovakia

Principal Characters:

• Danny Smiricki, an eighteen-year-old youth, a saxophone player in a jazz band, and a would-be revolutionary
• Irena, the girl with whom he is in love
• Zdenec, Irena’s boyfriend
• Benno, another young member of the jazz band
• Prema, a revolutionary

The Novel

The action of the novel takes place during one week, between May 4 and May 11, 1945, the period between the defeat of the occupying Nazis in this area of Czechoslovakia and the takeover by the Soviets. The title refers to the fact that in spite of all the brave sentiments mouthed by the townspeople, few of them really want to be involved in the fight against the Nazi troops, until the issue is no longer in doubt.

The novel is narrated in the first person by Danny, a self-obsessed and self-conscious youth, who is often more worried about his unsuccessful courtship of Irena and his relationships with his peers in the jazz band than he is about the important events taking place around him. Danny is a member of the bourgeoisie and thus cannot really identify with the proletarians who are in favor of the approaching Russian troops. Nevertheless, he understands and fully exploits his privileged position. When he is arrested by the Germans during a demonstration early in the novel, he is saved from punishment, and possibly even execution, by the intervention of Dr. Sabata, a town official and a friend of Danny’s father. Danny then joins a partisan group and is issued a submachine gun, but immediately afterward, most of the group tamely turns over these guns when ordered to do so by the town authorities. The only holdout is Prema, their leader, who refuses to give up his gun and is jailed as a result.

The hopes and fears of the townspeople rise and fall at the confused news from the nearby front. The town organizes a militia, supposedly to keep order and to guard against an uprising of the local Communists. The militia marches around in the streets in small bands, but without guns. Danny joins this force too, but he feels silly while engaged in this pointless exercise. The militia engages in a number of fights with Communist insurgents, but since the town’s makeshift army remains unarmed, its efforts are futile. Eventually, Danny deserts.

The next development takes place when hundreds of prisoners of war, escaping from camps after German defeats, straggle into the town. Danny, who speaks English, becomes responsible for a group of English escapees and finds billets for them through his extensive contacts with bourgeois families. The next day, however, German troops on the retreat start moving through town, and Danny goes back to the militia, thinking that the time for real action has come at last. He finds another submachine gun and joins in the confused battle that soon erupts in and around the town between the advancing Russians and the retreating Germans. He loses his fear as he thinks of his love, Irena, and is caught up in the excitement of battle. Later, he meets Prema, his former revolutionary leader, who has escaped from jail. Together they set up a heavy machine-gun emplacement on the outskirts of town and destroy a German tank. Soon after, the battle ends, and Danny returns to the town, where he finds some townspeople taking a grisly revenge on a group of captured Germans. This sickens him. He seeks out Irena, who has been working for the Red Cross and discovers that her boyfriend, Zdenec, has not yet returned from the battle. Danny comforts her, all the while seeking to seduce her, but she resists his advances and he returns home in despair. The novel ends with his jazz band playing in the town square to celebrate the arrival of the Soviets and the end of the war. Irena is dancing with her boyfriend, who has returned, so Danny’s saxophone sobs out a melody that elegizes the end of his youth and signals the beginning of a new era. This is an era, however, that is fraught with new menace.

The Characters

Danny is a self-centered young man, given to fantasies. The novel is focused so strongly on him that the other characters do not emerge with any great clarity. He lives with his parents but returns home only to sleep and to eat; otherwise, he is constantly looking for action, seeking always for something to make himself glamorous in the eyes of Irena, who remains cool to him in spite of his best efforts. Danny, in fact, seems to be an arrested adolescent whose interior reality, in spite of all the momentous events occurring around him, is stronger than any reality in the exterior world. In a rare moment of self-recognition, Danny wonders how he could be so self-absorbed during the biggest war of all time, in which millions have been killed, millions wounded, and millions more destroyed in concentration camps.

The other characters become real only when they impinge on Danny’s reality. Most vivid is Prema, the dedicated revolutionary, who has kept a heavy machine gun hidden in a cellar since 1938, when the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia. His single-minded dedication is the mark against which the performance of all the other characters, including Danny, is measured. Prema’s resolve inspires Danny when the time comes to act against the Germans.

Irena is of a lower social class than Danny. Her very unattainability, both, socially and physically, makes her the ideal fantasy figure for Danny; she is the necessary focus for all of his sexual and social confusion. The stolid and powerful Zdenec, her boyfriend, is an expert mountaineer, dependable and courageous; the reader can scarcely blame Irena for preferring him to Danny.

Benno is the trumpet player in the jazz band. Rich, fat, lazy, and cowardly, his one rule is self-preservation; he lies at the other end of the scale from Prema. Benno is dominated by his girlfriend and humiliated by his peers. Like Danny, he is conscripted into the militia, but when any danger threatens, he takes to his heels. He survives the war, while brave men perish in the battles of liberation.

Critical Context

The Cowards was Škvorecký’s first novel, and it contains themes and metaphors which have recurred often in his work. Jazz has remained an important metaphor of freedom and resistance to authority, and the individual’s perception of reality, as opposed to the “official” versions of life, has become a central theme in his work. Clearly, Škvorecký is not a man who could remain content under an authoritarian regime, and all of his work has been a claim for the supremacy of the human imagination and freedom over the demands of the state.

Although he has been an exile from Czechoslovakia since the late 1960’s and has taught for much of that time at the University of Toronto, Škvorecký has continued to write in Czech, which reflects his obsession with his own identity and his situation as an exile. He has tried to maintain relations with his homeland, having translated many books from English into Czech and helping to run a Czech-language publishing house started by his wife. He won the Governor-General’s Award of Canada for his novel Pribeh inzenyra lidskych dusi (1977; The Engineer of Human Souls, 1984) and is the best known of all the writers in exile from Central Europe living in Canada.

Bibliography

Fulford, Robert. “Another Country,” in Saturday Night. January, 1983, pp. 5-6.

Fyfe, Robert. “Bridge over the Credit,” in Brick. Winter, 1986, pp. 29-33.

Hancock, Geoff. “Interview with Josef Škvorecký,” in Canadian Fiction Magazine. Nos. 45/46 (1983), pp. 63-96.

Kundera, Milan. “1968, Prague, Paris, and Josef Škvorecký,” in Canadian Forum. August, 1979, pp. 6-9.

World Literature Today. LIV (Autumn, 1980). Special Škvorecký issue.