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Milan Kundera, intangible Czech heritage and the ‘Ride of the Kings’

  15:28

UNESCO grants ‘intangible cultural heritage’ status to pageant whose symbolism, as evoked by Kundera, remains elusive abroad

Staging ‘The Ride of the Kings’ was a matter of national pride under the Nazi occupation; it has taken on another layer of meaning thanks to Milan Kundera’s 1967 novel ‘The Joke’ foto: © jizdakralu.vlcnov.czČeská pozice

The Czech Republic has its fair share of UNESCO “world cultural and heritage list sites” — from the historic centers of, Prague, Český Krumlov, Kutná Hora, and Telč, to the château and gardens of Kroměříž, and Litomyšl Castle to name but a few of the best known. Now, for the fourth time, the United Nations has bestowed “intangible cultural heritage” status on a Czech entity, “The Ride of the Kings.”

Czech writer Milan Kundera once described this annual colorful Moravian folklore procession as “a singularly beautiful ceremony whose meaning has long been lost and which survives only as a string of obscure gestures.” And within the context of his celebrated novel The Joke, there is a great irony in the world body having honored the event in this way, given that foreign publishers failed to grasp the true significance and centrality of the event — in particular that of the folk music accompanying it — in Kundera’s seminal work.

Though the first historical reference dates back to only 1808, the “Ride of the Kings,” held in towns throughout the Slovácko region, is said to have its roots in the flight of Hungarian Kind Matthias Corvinus from his father-in-law, the Czech king George of Poděbrady (Jiří z Poděbrad) in the 15th century, who escapes detection by dressing as a peasant woman and clenching a rose in his teeth so as to have an excuse not to speak and betray his identity as he makes his way to safety in Trenčín.

Other ethnographers say the tradition originated in pagan times when the best young cattle herder was made “king” for a day. Whatever the case, it is considered a great honor for the local Moravian boy chosen to play the role, and for his family. It is for that reason, and the highly symbolic nature of the procession itself — for purists and opportunists alike — that the “Ride of the Kings” takes center stage in a revenge plot in Kundera’s mordant farce The Joke.

The Ride of the Kings takes place during Whitsun week, when young men in folk costumes ride through Moravian villages along with the “King,” a boy not older then fifteen. It obtained political significance during the German occupation and later through Kundera's novel. The Joke opens in Stalinist-era Czechoslovakia, when its youthful anti-hero Ludvík is still an ardent supporter of the Communists — having gained national fame with a contrived new folk songs like “The Song of Stalin” and “How wonderful there are no masters now” — yet with a tragic flaw: his sense of humor.

Irked by the zealous naivety of his less clever classmate yet would-be lover Markéta, who is attending an ideological summer camp, Ludvík fires off a sarcastic postcard to her, saying, “A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Optimism is the opiate of the people! Long live Trotsky!”

Markéta fails to see the humor and turns him in; Ludvík is soon expelled both from both the party and his university — in no small part thanks to the excoriating grilling he gets at the review from his friend and comrade, Pavel — and sent to hard labor in the mines. Two decades later, there is no “laughter or forgetting” for Ludvík, who has managed to become a successful scientist despite being long denied a formal education, and he sets out to seduce Pavel’s wife, Helena, in an act of revenge.

It is now the early 1960s. He arranges to meet Helena, a radio journalist, in the backwater where she is to interview Jaroslav, an old friend of Ludvík’s, about his effort to revive “The Ride of the Kings.” Kundera, already in self-imposed exile in Paris, writes in the preface to his 1967 novel of the tradition’s faded glory yet enduring significance:

“If a man loses the paradise of the future, he still has the paradise of the past, paradise lost. From childhood I have been fascinated by the folk tradition called ‘The Ride of the Kings’: a singularly beautiful ceremony whose meaning has long been lost and which survives only as a string of obscure gestures. This rite frames the action of the novel; it is a frame of forgetting. Yesterday's action is obscured by today, and the strongest link binding us to a life constantly eaten away by forgetting is nostalgia. Remorseful nostalgia and remorseless skepticism are the two pans of the scales that give the novel its equilibrium.”

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The Joke was adapted into a film by Czech New Wave director Jaromil Jireš, but it was quickly banned following the Soviet clampdown on the reforms that came to be known as the Prague Spring. Coming full circle, in a sense, last year, Kundera wrote to the London Times Literary Supplement, angrily lamenting the reordering of chapters by his British publisher of an English-language edition of The Joke, “All my life long I have been protesting against the mutilation of works of art in the name of an ideological doctrine as practiced in the socialist countries of Europe.”

The art that Kundera referred to, discussed in the novel as a both symbol and as an entity in itself, was Moravian folk music, to which he had devoted an entire chapter —which the publisher omitted, thinking it would be lost on foreign readers and of little interest (an American version published later followed suit).

While perhaps not the most compelling of chapters, it did set the stage for the tragedy that was to befall Jaroslav, who, when a young jazz musician during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, had helped to revive the region’s cymbalo bands, its feast days, and the Ride of the Kings pageant.

Jaroslav saw it as his patriotic duty to repudiate the German invaders’ claim that the Czechs “had no right to exist, that they were only Germans who spoke a Slavonic tongue.” Jaroslav himself was chosen as king as a teenager and rode through his village in a demonstration against the Nazis — “a deputation from the depths of history” — and now wants his son to do the same.

Alas, the boy chosen as king turns out to be a stand-in for Jaroslav’s son— devastating the proud father — and Ludvík’s effort at revenge descends into still another bad joke at his own expense, as Pavel, informed of the tryst, reveals he couldn’t give a fiddler’s fart about Helena’s infidelity, as he has his own bit of arm candy on the side.

Meanwhile, “The Ride of the Kings” makes its way through the sleepy town, its participants chanting the lines whose meaning has been erased from the collective memory:

“Hear ye, hear ye, one and all,
From hill and dale, from near and far,
And learn what came to pass this Whitsunday!
We have a needy king, and yet right virtuous,
And that day thieves did rob his empty lands
Of full one thousand head of cattle.”

Yet whereas the Communists had appropriated “The Ride of the Kings” for propaganda purposes — along with all folk customs, which were sponsored in the Stalinist spirit of New Art — with Alexander Dubček’s liberal reforms, idealistic  youths like Markéta of postcard fame was are harder to find. The fanaticism of the ‘50s is gone, though the power of the state remains. The pageant is ruined by a gang motorcyclists, “noisy, drunken adolescents” all, including Jaroslav’s son, who rebels against his establishment father, and, in doing so, unwittingly, the cooption of the Czech nation’s heritage.

Held on the last Sunday of every May for at least the past two hundreds and three years — the original “Ride of the Kings” ranks among the oldest and longest uninterrupted European folk customs. The procession sings songs and recites poetry in front of the house of every girl on the threshold of womanhood (and the chastity of the “King” is highly praised in song, though his age would seem to all but guarantee it). The village of Skoronice is preparing to build a museum dedicated to the tradition; it has the oldest photograph of the ride, from 1896.

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