Who was Egon Bondy?

In the 1970s and 1980s numerous editions of Unsound Siblings appeared in unofficial “samizdat” editions. The book caught the imagination of a young generation in Czechoslovakia looking for ways of escaping the bland and morally bankrupt regime that ran the country after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. Completed in 1973, it is set in a dystopic distant future of environmental and social disintegration but is filled with references to its own time, instantly recognizable to contemporary readers. It embraces a spirit of rebellion.

When he wrote Unsound Siblings, Egon Bondy was already established as the unlikely “superstar” (his own term) of the Czechoslovak musical underground. He was in his early forties, small, wiry, bearded, with a childish enthusiasm, a squeaky voice, a Rabelaisian sense of humour and a habit of speaking of himself in the third person – in a curious mixture of self-aggrandisement and self-parody. At the time he was known primarily as a poet and philosopher. “I could not understand how people could live without exploring the most fundamental questions of life from morning to night,” he wrote in the autobiographical text The First Ten Years (Prvních deset let) of 1981, and his fascination with the basic questions of human existence overrode any interest in the conventions and disciplines of novel-writing. Unsound Siblings is one of his first prose works and he is almost casual in his use of the novel form. The book defies categorisation, playing with the interaction of ideas and registers. It is rambling, filled with philosophical and political reflection, and with a quirky humour and lyricism. Occasionally it takes off on flights of fancy in the spirit of Jules Verne, one of Bondy’s literary heroes.

Bondy’s writing career had several distinct phases. He began as a rebellious teenage poet in the late 1940s, a Czech Beatnik avant la lettre. In the 1960s he focused on philosophy but was rapidly marginalized after the 1968 Soviet invasion. In the 1970s, he was “discovered” as a poet by the musical underground. At the same time, he began writing prose. Finally in the period after the fall of communism, he rebelled with equal energy against the new capitalist spirit of the early 1990s.

Bondy was full of paradoxes and irreconcilable contradictions, and he embraced these contradictions with unconcealed enthusiasm. The list is long. From the age of eighteen he was passionately anti-Soviet, yet he remained a lifelong Marxist. He rejected compromise with Czechoslovakia’s communist regime, yet he informed on his friends to the secret police during several periods in his life. He was obsessed with questions of shared social responsibility but embraced irresponsibility with a passion. He was without religion, sceptical about mysticism (mocking the mystical elements even in his own work), but he rejected mechanical materialism in equal measure, developing his own “atheistic non-substantial ontology”. He was strongly influenced by Eastern thinking but was convinced that it could not be transferred to a Western context. He was a lyric poet, yet in the 1974 poem „Tear-Off Calendar“ („Trhací kalendář“) he wrote of saving lyric poetry by throwing out the “pseudo-lyrical swill” and putting lyricism through “a nice purifying bath of philosophy”. In the case of his own poetry, the “purifying” bath included language that was about as scatological and full of vulgarisms as you can get. Yet his portrayal of the romantic love between A. and B. in Unsound Siblings is unashamedly sentimental. He was self-obsessed, indulging in every possible form of self-aggrandizement, yet he wrote poetry that was absolutely open, painfully honest, and merciless in its exposure of his own weaknesses and vanities.

 

Bondy was born Zbyněk Fišer in 1930. His father, Jan Fišer, was a general in the Czechoslovak Army, with the added distinction of having served as a Czechoslovak Legionary, one of those who fought against Austria-Hungary during the First World War. The family lived well in a modern villa surrounded by its own garden in Prague. Zbyněk was an only child, and by the time of the German occupation in 1939, his father had already retired. His mother died during the war. In The First Ten Years, Bondy suggests that his father’s unconditional devotion to him was rooted partly in a sense of guilt at his wife’s early death. Although he was a military man, Jan Fišer appears to have been far from the authoritarian stereotype, and he had a close and trusting relationship with his son. When Zbyněk had a breakdown in his late teens, induced or aggravated by alcohol abuse, his father did not hesitate to pay for his hospital treatment.

Both father and son had no illusions about the regime that came to power in the communist coup of February 1948. In The First Ten Years, Bondy recalls that it never occurred to his father to “make me do anything on behalf the regime, for he felt that any kind of employment to make your living in such a regime was a form of hypocrisy”.

Zbyněk did not fit in at school. He interrupted his secondary school studies at seventeen without the school-leaving certificate needed to study at university. In The First Ten Years, he describes how he realized that his destiny was poetry. With typical tongue-in-cheek self-mystification, he writes that by articulating the very idea of becoming a poet – in response to a question from two strangers who came up to his table on the terrace of a restaurant by the river in Prague – he forged his own destiny.

At the time he was a devotee of surrealism, which had acquired a huge following in Czechoslovakia before the Second World War, revolving around the poet Vítězslav Nezval. While many young poets embraced the communist coup of February 1948, Zbyněk did the opposite. He had joined the Communist Party the year before, but he became disillusioned almost immediately, for aesthetic reasons as much as anything else. He recalls in The First Ten Years how the Czechoslovak education minister and literary critic Zdeněk Nejedlý casually dismissed the great Czech romantic poet of the nineteenth century, Karel Hynek Mácha, as a bourgeois decadent, preferring the blander patriotism of the historical novelist Alois Jirásek. The “militant campaign for socialist realism” launched by Nejedlý was completely alien to the young Zbyněk. He was equally appalled by the artificiality of staged marches by factory workers in support of the new regime.

His closest circle of friends shared his abhorrence of the new order. They included the poet and writer Honza Krejcarová, whose mother had been the brilliant pre-war journalist Milena Jesenská, murdered in Ravensbrück, and whose father was the functionalist architect Jaromír Krejcar. His turbulent relationship with Honza is a central – and highly entertaining – theme in The First Ten Years, where he writes that “she treated everything and everyone around her in a spirit of utter irresponsibility.” He also made friends with the poet Ivo Vodseďálek, who was one year his junior. Their friendship was to play a formative role in his career as a poet.

Among his older friends at the time were the hugely influential left-wing writer, artist, and theorist of art and architecture, Karel Teige, and the literary critic and historian, Záviš Kalandra, to whom he became particularly attached. It was under the influence of Kalandra that Zbyněk began to recognise the gulf between Marxism as an ideal and in practice. This paradox became a theme throughout his life and work, and it is clearly articulated by the protagonist A. in Unsound Siblings: “All revolutions, from the October one onwards, have foundered for precisely this reason – the revolutionaries have taken over the running of society.”

Zbyněk was only nineteen when Záviš Kalandra was arrested – on false claims that he was a Trotskyite. As one of the defendants in the first of the mass show trials of 1950 he was condemned to death and executed. The trauma of the experience stayed with the young poet and deepened his anger against the regime and the Soviet Union. “From that moment I vowed to fight against the Soviet Union until the end of my days,” he wrote in The First Ten Years.

 

The regime had no time for surrealism, and after the 1948 coup the literary activities of Zbyněk and his circle of friends became illegal. In 1949 they put together a first illicit surrealist poetry collection, producing a hundred copies which they never managed to distribute, but which did have one long-term consequence for his life as a writer and poet. All the poems were published anonymously, using Jewish-sounding pseudonyms in protest against the growing anti-Semitism of the regime. Zbyněk Fišer chose the name Egon Bondy. The name stuck and he continued to use it for the rest of his life.

Bondy and Ivo Vodseďálek founded the samizdat “Midnight Edition” (Edice Půlnoc) in 1950, taking its name from the illegal Éditions de Minuit in France during World War Two.  They turned away from surrealism, seeing it as an inadequate response to the changed political reality of Czechoslovakia. Four decades later, in the essay „The Roots of the Czech Literary Underground“ („Kořeny českého literárního underground“) from 1990, Bondy wrote that they were looking for a response to relentless Stalinist propaganda: “The metropolis had been plastered all over with posters and absurd slogans… It was impossible to resist this attack and most people could not resist it because it was a completely unexpected and unprecedented situation, even for those having experienced Nazi propaganda.” He added that “this situation demanded that we offer an artistic response to what was happening around us, an offensive response. Thank God that we were too young to choose internal exile.”

These two principles – of the need for an “offensive” response to an aggressive regime and the rejection of “internal exile” – re-emerge nearly twenty-five years later in Unsound Siblings, which he wrote during the second political clampdown after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. Seeking an effective way of resisting a corrupted regime without engaging with it or simply retreating into the private sphere is a perennial preoccupation in Bondy’s writing as a poet, philosopher and prose writer.

Bondy and Vodseďálek articulated the theory of Total Realism and Embarrassing Poetry. “We discovered and realized the possibility of using the pseudo-aesthetics of the Stalinist slogans, giving it a unique aesthetic meaning which was reminiscent to some extent of Duchamp’s treatment of his ready-mades. We neither underestimated nor doubted the emotional charge of the Stalinist artistic production: we amplified it to the very verge of vertigo and ad absurdum. Our poems from that period were sometimes constructed as seemingly naïve, apparently unsuccessful attempts to emulate Stalinist aesthetics – with a clumsy use of meter or rhyme or a ‘misfit’ metaphor that is not ironic but merely embarrassing.”

The idea of Total Realism (Totální realismus), also the title of his collection of poems from 1950, was in direct opposition to Socialist Realism, which Bondy and Vodseďálek argued was anything but real: “We saw the gigantic Soviet perspectives of joy and pride in their artworks. They were not ‘reflections of reality’, as some art historians tried to tell us. They formed the unique system of complex mythology that could establish moral and aesthetic values… Once faced with these works, our past ideals seemed compromised and undesirable.” (The Roots of the Czech Literary Underground). The hypocrisy of officially approved art was still preoccupying Bondy when he wrote Unsound Siblings. One of the most grotesque figures in the novel is the absurdly pompous “official” artist, Egid Pepich, laureate of the (fictitious) State Prize of Leonid Brezhnev.

From the start, Bondy was a political poet, and several of his early poems remind us of the painful interaction between the personal and the political in a totalitarian society. In the poem „The Street Loudspeakers“ („Tlampáče na ulicích“) (1950), to which Bondy himself refers later in The Roots of the Czech Literary Underground, the tenderness of the young lovers is contrasted with the banality of sports results and the casual horror of the reports of the latest executions: “The street loudspeakers announce the exact time / the hours when electricity is switched off / the results of the latest trials / and of the sports matches”  […] “I was just reading a report about the trial of the traitors / when you came / After a while you undressed / and I lay down beside you / and you were kind to me as usual // When you left / I finished reading the report about them being executed”.

To distance himself from the corrupted present, Bondy looked to writers from the past for inspiration, writers who were untainted by the regime, but shared his preoccupation with the absurd or grotesque and with the gap between words and their meanings. He was fascinated by the playfulness of the poetry of the German poet Christian Morgenstern and translated his most famous collection, Gallows Songs (Galgenlieder) from 1905 into Czech (Šibeniční písně). He was also influenced by the nonsense verse of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. In Unsound Siblings there are several moments where Bondy slips, with evident relish, into the language of nonsense poetry. At one point B. recites a poem from memory, distorting the language of the regime until it becomes incomprehensible – a few changes of letters turn the adjective “bezpečnostní” into “bezectnostný”. In the Czech original this transforms the “security forces” into “dishonourable forces”. Unsound Siblings also features a blank page for readers to add their own memories, a literary nod to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Bondy was always interested in the power of words to forge new realities, and in Unsound Siblings A. says: “I had to write it. I do not know for whom. But it needed to be written. Something is added to the world if it’s been written well.”

In the early 1950s Bondy and his friends were leading bohemian lives. He later compared them to the Beat Generation in the United States, and he loved to claim that they predated the American Beatniks. “We became the vagrants and the homeless, and in line with the political situation of that period, the exiles in the most literal sense of the word. At the time of forced employment (it was illegal to be unemployed), we refused to work and, as a consequence, we could not obtain food vouchers to exchange for food. At the time of complete control of all the citizens through files and written records, we had no work registration cards and no personal identity documents. We were drinking fruit vermouth instead of taking drugs and, instead of cruising across the United States, we used to cross the state border back and forth under fire, in order to smuggle in some nylon stockings from Austria. Instead of Zen Buddhism, we had Ladislav Klíma, a paramystical Czech philosopher from the beginning of the twentieth century… and Leon Trotsky.”

In claiming that he and his friends were crossing the border to Austria under fire, Bondy is probably exaggerating, but the tragedy of Záviš Kalandra is a reminder that Stalinist Czechoslovakia was a place where writing could be a matter of life and death.

In The Roots of the Czech Literary Underground, Bondy argued that while Beat poetry and Pop-Art in the US were exploiting the “aggression of the trivial that keeps attacking us by picture and by word from commercial advertisements and from consumer goods,” something similar was happening in Czechoslovakia, where “we employed the aggression of the trivial which in Czechoslovakia of 1949-1953 consisted of omnipresent Stalinist fetish and slogans.” He later recalled that “our way of life developed certain analogies with the American Beatniks, such as bebop, hard-sex, vagabondage, begging, theft (we stole anything but cars which were not around at that time), and anti-social activities of any kind.” This period included several periods in psychiatric hospital, “but”, Bondy writes, “it did not help. I would do anything for beer.”

In the early fifties two of Bondy’s closest friends were the writer Bohumil Hrabal and the artist Vladimír Boudník. Their time together in the Prague inner suburb of Libeň is immortalised in Hrabal’s brilliant novella The Gentle Barbarian (Něžný barbar) (1981). The barbarian in question is not Bondy, but Boudník, whose work brought the hidden beauty and textures of Prague’s crumbling industrial periphery to life. Bondy drifts in and out of the story, starting every conversation with “Kurva fix” – an oath that combines crucifix with kurva – whore. In the story, Bondy is in awe of Boudník’s creative imagination, “Kurva fix! To come up with just one nice image, I have to dig up the whole square, inch by inch! And he just pours hundreds of them from his sleeve.” Like many of the people Bondy knew, Boudník finds his way into Unsound Siblings – or at least his name – in the form of the artist Vladimír (in the diminutive form Vladimírek in the original), whom A. visits in his studio. The artist shows A. his latest work, a painting of five naked lions with sorrowful expressions, “grieving over the drowning of the Earth.”

 

At the age of twenty-seven, Bondy returned to secondary school to complete his school-leaving exams, driven by the idea of studying philosophy. In an anecdote from The First Ten Years, he claims that he missed the deadline to apply to study philosophy and psychology at Charles University in Prague, but that the assistant dean took a liking to him, recognising a fellow alcoholic. He graduated as an external student in 1961 and continued his studies, at the same time publishing regularly in academic periodicals. He was awarded a PhD and the title Candidate of Sciences on the basis of two books which were published under his original name Zbyněk Fišer in 1967, Questions of Being and Existence (Otázky bytí a existence), and The Consolation of Ontology (Útěcha z ontologie). In the more relaxed atmosphere of the 1960s he was considered acceptable as a Marxist free thinker.

It was at this time that Bondy started reading about Maoism. In the early 1960s, news from Maoist China was censored in Czechoslovakia, and this was enough to arouse his interest. The idea of the total destruction of bureaucracy and its replacement with a society ruled from below appealed to Bondy, and he was far from being alone. In one form or another, Maoism was in vogue in Europe and North America. The Bondy scholar Martin Machovec notes that some American Maoists even collected money to support the Czechoslovak opposition. In Unsound Siblings, A. states that “the people must govern themselves or be governed.” But Bondy has no illusions that this will ever happen. In the poem „Tear-Off Calendar“ he writes: “It is just a dream / but the only right dream / the dream of truth and freedom / – but just a vapour from my mind”

Bondy’s interest in Maoism was in part a response to what he saw as the sterility of orthodox Marxism and interpretations of materialism that are purely mechanical. In the 1960s, he developed the concept of a “non-substantial ontology”, which he described in detail in The Consolation of Ontology. He rejected the idea of some „thing“, idea, being or principle that creates, underlies, transcends or gives meaning to the universe, and thus also the idea of God. He offered a non-substantial alternative. Ideas and information have a fully valid reality in themselves, and do not need to be related to the “substantial” idea of a God. He felt that this concept could open the way toward genuine human freedom and creativity and could feed a sense of social responsibility, the foundation for a supportive form of social organisation, but one uncluttered by the temptation to “stop somewhere on the unfinished road and leave the remnant to faith, illusion, or agnosticism,” as he wrote in The Buddha (Buddha), published in 1968.

This idea is explored further in Unsound Siblings, where the dysfunctionals are struggling to find ways of living in a mutually supportive community. A. says: “No one is a stranger here, their own subject, protecting a border that can never be crossed. A person is never alone. They may be locked up in a darkened cell from birth to death, never seeing another person, but they are not alone.” Bondy’s philosophy is collective. In his work the existentialist “stranger” has no place.

In his search for a form of Marxism, built on an “ontology without any ontological substance”, Bondy became actively interested in Eastern philosophy – Chinese, Arabic, Jewish and Indian. In 1968, drawn by the idea of atheism without materialism, he wrote The Buddha, a study of Buddhism. He felt that the writings of the Buddha showed a “remarkable determination to achieve the brightest truth without tinsels and without creating illusions” and that this was “inherent in the spirit of true Buddhism from the character of its founder.”

Bondy was a serious philosopher, and perhaps his strongest contribution to the history of philosophy lies in his attempt to find bridges between Western and Eastern thinking. In The Buddha, he writes: “Today, when we are only beginning to incorporate the history of non-European thought into our historical perspective, we are gradually coming to recognize that works of Buddhist philosophy belong among the most valuable and thoughtful heritages of Eastern cultures and that they provide a permanent and additionally stimulating contribution to human cognition.” Bondy is cautious about taking Eastern thinking out of context. One of the most unsympathetic figures in Unsound Siblings is Shakti Maharishi, who spends his time meditating and seeking transcendence, turning his back on the world. A.’s response is sarcastic: “The funny thing is that you still need to eat.”

In the 1960s, Bondy also engaged with Christian thinkers. He had been brought up with no religion, but he was a close friend of the Czech philosopher Milan Machovec, who together with Erich Fromm and Ernst Bloch initiated a lively dialogue between Marxist and Christian thinkers that was brought to an abrupt end by the 1968 invasion.

In 1959, Bondy married Jaroslava Krčmaříková, a fellow student who was six years his junior. Their son Zbyněk was born in the same year. In an interview for the newspaper Mladá fronta Dnes in 2010, Zbyněk recalled that he did not see much of his parents as a small child and that it was his grandfather, the retired general Jan Fišer, who did much of the parenting. A photograph survives of the two-year-old Zbyněk, hand-in-hand with his ever-patient grandfather.

The marriage did not last and in 1963 Bondy fell in love with Julie Nováková. She was a librarian, ten years his senior and married with two children. At first, she did not take his declaration of love seriously, but their relationship endured, and they became all but inseparable. Bondy always spoke and wrote about Julie with immense affection, and after her death in 1994, he wrote no more poetry. In the context of Unsound Siblings, their relationship is important, as the protagonists A. and B. clearly have much in common with Bondy and Nováková. With a typical Bondy playfulness, they are even called “Bondy and Julie” in the final sentence of the book, although there are plenty of details that distance them from their namesakes. Their daughter Tereza is also a piece of poetic licence.

 

As a Marxist philosopher, Bondy had worked within the bounds of the regime through the 1960s, despite the unorthodox nature of his Marxism. Although they brought him the freedom to publish (his book The Buddha could not have been published at any other time), he did not embrace the reforms of the 1968 Prague Spring with anything like the euphoria of many of his contemporaries. He suspected its protagonists, including party secretary Alexander Dubček, of being ambitious opportunists and hypocrites. The term “socialism with a human face” which came to be associated closely with Dubček’s reforms, gets an unflattering mention in Unsound Siblings, where Bondy writes that the hypocrisy of its propagators was “so transparent that today the term has become a well-known joke.”

With his deep mistrust of the Soviet Union Bondy was less surprised than many by the Soviet-led invasion of August 1968 that brought Dubček’s dreams to an abrupt end. As the period known euphemistically as “normalisation” began, the end of his own officially sanctioned “career” as a philosopher was rather unspectacular. He was declared eligible for a state disability pension in 1969, at the age of thirty-nine. In periods of political conservatism, communist Czechoslovakia had a habit of dealing with misfits by “retiring” them early, sending them into academic limbo.  It is no coincidence that the “dysfunctionals”, the heroes of Unsound Siblings, are called “disability pensioners” (invalidní důchodci) in the original Czech. Just like Bondy in the 1970s and 1980s, they are totally excluded from mainstream society, but most of the time they are tolerated. In the book their status is described as follows: “Under socialism nobody, not even the dysfunctionals, lives in poverty, they don’t have to worry about finding work, they have medical cover.” This could be applied directly to Czechoslovakia at the time the book was written.

Any attempt to send Bondy into obscurity was never going to work. He had never aspired to official recognition and his unofficial career as a philosopher was far from being at an end. In 1977, he embarked on a hugely overambitious thirteen-volume history of world philosophy, Notes on the History of Philosophy. He acknowledged that he was less than qualified for the task, but he was horrified by the effects of censorship, cutting people from the accumulated knowledge of the past and severing them from collective memory. This is also a theme in Unsound Siblings, where the dysfunctionals are struggling to make sense of fragments surviving from a lost past. At one point A. stumbles upon a stone cross, “one of the symbols of the ancient cults” and through the mists of the distant past, the dysfunctionals confuse the Czech communist martyr Julius Fučík with his namesake (and uncle) who composed lively marches, polkas and waltzes for military bands. Bondy’s history was never completed, but the section on Indian philosophy is still considered one of the best introductions to the subject in the Czech language, with its comparative analysis useful for clarifying philosophical problems shared by Western and Indian traditions.

 

The early 1970s in Bondy’s life in many ways echoed the early 1950s. In the wake of the invasion his poetry is overtly political. “Armies of occupation never ask the occupied if they would prefer love to war,” he writes in „March Poem“ („Březnová báseň“) from 1971. In the same poem he is contemptuous of those who retreat into internal exile and content themselves with a weekend cottage and a new car – “quite calmly, they confuse the desire for wealth / with real freedom in society.” At this time, he began to experiment with longer poetic forms, including the cycle of fifty poems, Diary of a Girl Looking for Egon Bondy (Deník dívky, která hledá Egona Bondyho), which became one of his most widely read collections and helped to attract a younger audience to its work.

At some point in 1971, Bondy was again admitted to psychiatric hospital, where he met the poet Ivan Martin Jirous, nicknamed Magor (the Madman), the driving force behind the Prague underground music scene. They became friends. Bondy told Jirous about his dreams of world revolution, Jirous told Bondy about the music scene, and once they were both back home, they continued their conversations in the pub U Bonaparta in Prague’s Lesser Quarter, where Bondy and Julie Nováková were living in a tiny apartment.

The clampdown on unofficial culture was only beginning, but it was clear that things were going to get a great deal worse. Jirous was managing the band The Plastic People of the Universe and he later recalled a concert that took place in the winter of 1971 in the isolated country town of Ledeč nad Sázavou. People travelled huge distances to get there, and according to Jirous, their determination made the band’s lead singer and bass player Milan Hlavsa realise how important the underground music scene was becoming. There was no turning back. In his 1975 essay, Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival („Zpráva o třetím českém hudebním obrození“), Jirous reflects on that moment and writes: “The stand must be taken right at the beginning. For as soon as the first compromise is made, whether it is accompanied by hypocritical excuses or it springs from an honest belief that it doesn’t really matter, everything is lost.”

At the beginning of the 1970s, The Plastic People of the Universe were singing covers of Velvet Underground songs, and apart from a few of the early post-war poems of the poet and artist Jiří Kolář, their repertoire was in English. They were looking for material in Czech, and in this respect Egon Bondy could not have turned up at a better time. His poetry, with its economy of language, outrageous rhymes, emotional rawness and provocative vulgarity was ideal for the band, and Milan Hlavsa set to work putting the poems to music. “Bondy is a poet who deals with the most basic and profound aspects of man, from his dimensions as a social creature to his imperfect and very vulnerable private biological being,” Jirous writes in Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival. “There is hardly a single taboo that is not overturned in Bondy’s poetry; but this is never done as an end in itself or as a deliberate provocation: it is merely a simple expression of the truth of life and the position of man in the world.”

In the early 1970s there was no reason for thinking that the process of “normalization” would end in the foreseeable future. Jirous writes that “relying on miracles cripples creative energy and, above all, weakens collective activity: one is dominated by the feeling that nothing which seems impossible is worth doing. But the conscious realization or the subconscious sense that something is here for good is necessarily liberating. If the world is never going to be any different than it is now, there is no need to waste your time waiting for salvation. We must learn to live in the existing world in a way that is both joyful and dignified.” In this spirit, the Plastic People chose to ignore the regime as much as they could. “The perfect way of insulting someone is to act as if they do not exist,” the band’s saxophonist Vráťa Brabenec remembered in an interview many years later. “We acted as if the Bolsheviks simply didn’t exist. Of course, nothing could have pissed them off more” (Prešovský korzár 2009).

 

There was a synergy between Bondy and the Plastics. In the underground he saw something of his dream of a mutually supportive social group living outside official society and bonded by their shared exclusion. He wrote Unsound Siblings to celebrate this world and to articulate its role in Czechoslovak society, telling a story that would put into context the values he had already set out in his philosophical and poetic texts.

The result is remarkably upbeat. Ivan Martin Jirous, in his 1990 essay „On Czech Underground Literature of the 70s and 80s“, speaks of a “spiritual enclave”, “idyllic times” and “fairy tale”, without using the terms ironically. The underground bands created “a spiritual enclave, where the bonds of friendship were so deep that we cannot be sure that these idyllic times will ever return.” Bondy’s Unsound Siblings “transposed this world into the realm of a fairy tale and, in return, it influenced the self-consciousness of the underground as an autonomous minority, which, outside the official world of the establishment, attempted to create a structure that can be in the full sense of the word described as parallel, although this term was first introduced into Czech culture some years later.”

In this way Unsound Siblings is an act of overt political rebellion, but it is not a call to arms. In his series of conversations with the Trotskyite, Lev Davidovič Mandelbaum, at the heart of the book, A. rejects the idea of violent revolution. This view echoed by Ivan Martin Jirous in the „Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival“, where he describes the underground as “a culture which cannot have the destruction of the establishment as its aim because in doing so, it would drive itself into the establishment’s embrace.”

A central theme in Unsound Siblings is humankind’s wanton destruction of the environment. The opening scene, where A. stumbles over the “corpse of the world”, is a vivid piece of writing. It sets the novel in a post-apocalyptic context where the natural environment has already been devastated to such an extent that even the most common animals and plants have become extinct and people are eating ersatz foods and drinking ersatz Pilsner beer. If we are reminded of a lunar landscape, it is worth remembering that the book was written at a time when the Czechoslovak regime had embarked on an unprecedented orgy of environmental destruction. The most spectacular case was the medieval town of Most in North Bohemia, which was razed to the ground to make way for opencast lignite mining.

The dysfunctionals are struggling to engage with the fragments that are left, while official society maintains its faith in ever-increasing technical progress. When, at the end of the book, the inhabitants of the official city literally throw themselves over the edge of the world, borne on the illusory cycle of never-ending technical progress, it is the dysfunctionals who survive and are left, in a very down-to-earth way, to pick up the pieces. “In Bondy’s fantasy” – to quote a banner at one of the dysfunctionals’ parties – they get their happy ending. Bondy the Marxist puts history on their side.

Unsound Siblings can be read as science fiction. Bondy enjoyed the genre, both for its unfettered inventiveness and the way it could liberate ideas from the constraints of present-day reality. He admired Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, whose Cat’s Cradle had recently been translated into Czech. With its dystopian world on the brink of total self-destruction and whose rulers are caught in their own technological traps, Unsound Siblings uses the science fiction trope of an underclass, a subculture, living physically and mentally beyond the margins of an automated society. Although Bondy has little in common with the liberal humanism of the pioneer of Czech science fiction writing (and inventor of the word robot), Karel Čapek, Unsound Siblings does echo Čapek’s 1936 novel, War with the Newts (Válka s mloky). Both use science fiction to convey a political message, and they share a vision of a world being drowned through the arrogance and vanity of mankind. A more direct inspiration for Bondy is Jules Verne, whose work had been popular in Czech translation since the second half of the nineteenth century. The titles of his novels The Mysterious Island and Two Years’ Vacation are mentioned in the book.

Bondy was fond of children’s books, and the novel also mentions “the Schoolboy Kája Mařík” (Školák Kája Mařík), a character from the 1926 work of the same name by Marie Wagnerová. Bondy himself wrote several highly irreverent stories for children.

Some real names turn up in Unsound Siblings. One is the literary critic and dissident Jan Lopatka. Bondy was a close friend and in the 1970s used to babysit for Lopatka’s daughters, dedicating his book of gothic children’s horror stories, Truthfully Horrifying Stories (Pravdivě příšerné příběhy) to them. Milan Koch – the captain of the raft on which the dysfunctionals are saved at the end of the book – is a real poet. He was a friend and neighbour in Nerudova Street. Just months after Bondy finished the book, Koch was run over and killed by a Prague tram at the age of twenty-six, Bondy mentions him with affection in his poetry, both before and after his death. “In his eyes, the simplest day-to-day experiences transformed into miraculous stories,” he recalled in 1992. The Plastic People of the Universe are named directly in the novel, as well as their album Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Band, which was later released in France under the punning title Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned (1978).

Exactly four years after Unsound Siblings, in February 1977, Bondy wrote a cycle of fourteen poems connected with episodes and themes in the novel, which by that time had acquired cult status in underground circles. This was a bleak time. In 1976 several members of The Plastic People of the Universe had been arrested, and their arrest was the direct impulse for the launch of Charter 77, an appeal to the Czechoslovak government to respect its human rights obligations. The lead singer and bass player of the Plastic People Milan Hlavsa approached Bondy and asked him to write some lyrics for the band. The resulting poems are interesting for the light they shed on themes in Unsound Siblings that Bondy considered important. One of them, Boat Trip (Cesta na člunu), has the quality of a fabulous tale, with echoes of the 19^th century Czech poet Karel Jaromír Erben. Other poems, such as Concert on the Meadow (Koncert na louce) and Cousin (Sestřenka), pick up the theme of the quest for freedom in a corrupt and stagnant society. Island 1 (Ostrov 1) is a lament for a lost world: “Death hangs over the landscape / Butterflies but a memory / in schoolbooks / Who harmed the world so? / Those who stuff themselves into uniforms / – standard-bearers of progress.”

Unsound Siblings became popular as soon as it appeared in samizdat. Martin Machovec remembers as a teenager spending two evenings listening to Bondy reading the text, and being spellbound not just by the book itself, but also by its capacity to draw like-minded people of different generations together. Through this and other works, Bondy inspired a generation of writers and poets many years his junior. Young writers like Jáchym Topol and Petr Placák realised that even under an authoritarian regime it was possible to write without constantly looking over your shoulder.

Unsound Siblings is the first of a trilogy of novels often categorized as science fiction. In Afghanistan (Afghánistán) (1980) two young lovers retreat into drugs and find themselves drawn into the shared imaginary reality of a future world decimated by nuclear catastrophe. Nameless (Bezejmenná) (1986) can be read in part as what Martin Machovec calls a “postmortal, bleak epilogue” to Unsound Siblings. It is also heavily critical of Charter 77 and its signatories, accusing them of creating a “shadow establishment”.

Bondy’s short stories, „The Little Monk“ („Mníšek“) and „The Shaman“ („Šaman“), both written shortly after Unsound Siblings are set in a distant past, but also touch on themes in the novel. „Non-Story“ („Nepovídka“) (1983) revisits the distant future and features artificially intelligent beings, bemused by the primitiveness of humans, who are preserved only in reservations.

 

Following the fall of communism, Bondy was sceptical about the new political order. While most writers of his generation felt that the Velvet Revolution had brought with it a return to real freedom and to the political responsibility that goes with freedom, Bondy saw this as an illusion – capitalism, globalisation and materialism, built on ever-increasing consumption were simply more of the same. He became active in several left-wing political movements, and, ostensibly in protest against the split of Czechoslovakia, he moved to the Slovak capital Bratislava in 1993 to teach philosophy. In the essay, „Why I am Still a Marxist“, published in the same year, he wrote of Marxism as “the only way to eliminate alienation, exploitation, and poverty, dehumanization, injustice, and ecological degradation.” In the years immediately after the fall of communism, his collected poetry from 1950 to 1987 was brought out by the publishing house Pražská imaginace, and The Plastic People of the Universe continued to put his poetry to music.

Bondy’s did not stop writing. His cyberpunk novel Cybercomics of 1997 is set in the year 2046 and puts the themes of Unsound Siblings into the context of an anti-utopia that is capitalist rather than socialist. The world is divided into the spheres of influence of two giant corporations and a Prague-based Mafia. The destruction of the environment – in the novel all non-profitable goods are thrown straight onto the scrapheap – is a theme that remains as relevant as ever.

Egon Bondy died on April 9^th 2007 in hospital in Bratislava, at the age of seventy-seven. Two weeks earlier he had suffered third degree burns after falling asleep when smoking in bed.

 

It is impossible to talk about Bondy’s life and work without bringing up his years of collaboration with the communist secret police, which seem at odds with his often-reiterated rejection of compromise with the regime. The files suggest varying degrees of cooperation over two decades. There is evidence suggesting that friends and colleagues of Bondy suffered directly as a result of his reports, and some were never able to forgive him. Ivan Martin Jirous was more conciliatory, pointing to the extent to which the young Bondy had suffered during the Stalinist years of the early 1950s. When Jirous first saw Bondy after being released from prison in the late 1970s, he did not hesitate to embrace him.

Perhaps it is to Bondy’s credit that he did little to keep his collaboration secret. His friends were aware that he was probably reporting to the police, and it was well-known that Bondy “was the kind of person who could not keep a secret,” as Martin Machovec puts it. Jirous described Bondy as an “infantile cretin” without meaning it as an insult.

In his relationship to the secret police Bondy was no hero, but surely the writer Petr Placák is right when he says that Bondy was anything but loyal to the regime. His work “is not provocation; it is nothing less than an ontologically founded otherness. Bondy the writer smashes the discourse that the regime forced upon the majority.”