shawn wang y.x.

Prague: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (ed. Paul Wilson)

By Swyx on August 18th, 2009

“What could be more instructive for the traveller – and more fun! – than to see a country through the eyes of its own most imaginative writers?” Jan Morris

Contents:

• Preface by Paul Wilson
• Prologue: I see a Great City… by Daniela Hodrova
• Petrin: Bells by Jiri Karasek ze Lvovic
• Hradcany: The First Vision by Gustav Meyrink
• Mala Strana: What Shall We Do With It? by Jan Neruda
• Mala Strana: The Little Bulldog by Karel Pecka
• Kampa: American Heating by Jindriska Smetanova
• Charles Bridge: The Sword of St. Wenceslas by Frantisek Langer
• Charles Bridge: A Psychiatric Mystery by Jaroslav Hasek
• Charles Bridge: The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
• The Old Town: The Legend of the Old Town Clock by Alois Jirasek
• The Old Town: Description of a Struggle by Franz Kafka
• The Old Town: GM by Gustav Meyrink
• The Old Town: The Hotel Pariz by Bohumil Hrabal
• The Old Town: The Case of the Washerwoman by Egon Erwin Kisch
• The Old Town: The Magic Flute by Bohumil Hrabal
• The Old Town: The Past by Michal Ajvaz
• Prague: The Receipt by Karel Capek
• Prague: Mendelssohn Is on the Roof by Jiri Weil
• Prague: A Prague Eclogue by Jiri Kovtun
• Prague: A Race Through Prague by Ota Pavel
• Prague: Invasion Day by Ivan Divis
• Prague: A Visit to the Train Station by Jachym Topol
• Prague: Tenor Sax Solo from Washington by Josef Skvorecky
• Epilogue: The Spirit of Prague by Ivan Klima
• A Prague Chronology

Prague Lit

Contents:

• Preface by Paul Wilson
  • For the last thousand years, Prague has drawn people in mysterious and powerful ways, and held them enchanted. It is a city of stability in turmoil. The turbulence of Prague is the turbulence of a troubled history flowing through a valley of high ideals and lofty aspirations. Enlightened emperors who might have ruled their domains from grander seats of power have chosen to place their thrones in Prague, and encouraged scholars, artists, and architects to come and raise the edifices of stone, images, and ideas on which the “city of a hundred spires” is built. Tyrants, too, have held sway here, and perhaps because they felt threatened by the very lightness of the city in its good times, they created ponderous empires of darkness that sought to cursh and enslave her spirit and her people. As a result, the city’s history has a unique rhythm, an ebb and flow of radiant optimism and dark despair, that brings to the spirit of Prague a black humor tempered with gentle irony, sentiment withotu sentimentality, a sense of romance without romanticism, a skepticism without cynicism.
  • Just as the physical city of Prague would be unimaginable without its unique topography, withotu its palaces, its churches, its parks, its streets, and its hostelries, so the Prague of the mind would be unimaginable without its storytellers and the tales they weave. It would be inconceivable without the work of Jan Neruda, who breathed literary life into a whole quarter of Prague, Mala Strana; or Franz Kafka, who sold insurance by day and beetled away at his true vocation by night, writing his strange, absurdist tales in german; or his contemporary Jaroslav Hasek, author of the Good Soldier Svejk, who led the life of a bon vivant and wrote his satirical sketches in the same city as Kafka but in a parallel and laragely separate community that lived and wrote in Czech; or Karel Capek, the prophetic journalist, playright, and novelist who introduced the world to robots; or Bohumil Hrabal, whose stories capture the extraordinary lives and voices of ordinary Czechs ruminating aloud over their beer. These storytellers embody Prague the way Dickens embodies London, Victor Hugo embodies Paris, or O. Henry embodies New York.
• Prologue: I see a Great City… by Daniela Hodrova
  • In Smetana’s Opera, Princess Libuse says; “I see a great city, whose glory will reach to the stars. And what then? Mist shrouds my eyes and much is hidden from my troubled sight – terrible secrets, curses… My beloved Czech people shall not perish, but shall triumph o’er the horrors of hell!”
• Petrin: Bells by Jiri Karasek ze Lvovic
  • And the bells rang on. They spoke of the faded glory of this land, the feuds of its princes and the onslaughts of its enemies agains thte walls of the city. They spoke of the arrogant burghers and the dissolute priests, its weak kings and perfideous vassals. The tide of blood made the heavens blush. The great phantasmagoria of churches ablaze and monasteries in ruins rose up before his eyes. An enormous chalice stood out against the red sky. Vysehrad collapsed. The walls of Hradcany crumbled. Mala Strana vanished in flames. The Carthusian monastery on Ujezd was wrapped in the smoke of a conflagration. And the whole earth trembled as in an earthquake.
• Hradcany: The First Vision by Gustav Meyrink
• Mala Strana: What Shall We Do With It? by Jan Neruda
• Mala Strana: The Little Bulldog by Karel Pecka
• Kampa: American Heating by Jindriska Smetanova
  • She looked at me in amazement. “Why should I use it for heating, darling? I have the best air-conditioning money can buy – all built in. But my brother, who makes antiques, will install a red light in the stove and a stereo recording of burning coke. Have you any idea what an American Heating stove from Czechoslovakia will mean to my family? Goodness!”
• Charles Bridge: The Sword of St. Wenceslas by Frantisek Langer
  • The most famous tale of all is the one about the miraculous sword. That sword, so the story goes, is immured in the bridge, though no one knows where. But when things are aat their worst in Bohemia, St. Wenceslas will ride forth at the head of the Knights of Blanik to save his land. When he reaches the bridge, his horse will stumble on a stone and the stone will be overturned, revealing beneath it the famous sword. Grasping it, St. Wenceslas will brandish it over his head three times and cry aloud: “Off with the heads of all our foes!” And instantly, all the enemies of the Czech lands will find themselves shorter by a head, and peace and tranquility will reign once more in Bohemia, for ever and ever.
  • In that instant the sword vanished… It was a German patrol and it peered down with malicious curiousity, wondering why there were so many Czech children down there and what they were up to. But it never found out, because as quick as a flash, the sword had disappeared beneath some child’s coat – a winter coat, a sheepskin jacket, or a parka, maybe that boy’s, perhaps that girl’s. Nobody knew who had it, but it didn’t matter. The only thing that could be said for sure was that it was hidden next to a child’s heart. For the truth is that the stones of a bridge may be dislodged and overturned, but never a child’s heart.
• Charles Bridge: A Psychiatric Mystery by Jaroslav Hasek
  • His sharp eyes discerned that Mr. Hurych was learning suspiciously over the bridge. A police patrol trotted up and Mr. Bilek, holding Mr. Hurych with all his strength, panted, “Gentlemen, this man tried to jumped into the river, and I saved him.”
  • Covering his face with his hands, he cried out, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I didn’t want this to happen!” Then Mr. Bilek Spoke to him again. “I’m the hairdresser, Bilek, from Smichov, and I want you to feel free to tell me what led you to do it.” Mr Hurych began to cry.
  • “How much is six times twelve?” But Mr. Hurych gave the police doctor a resounding slap in the face. Next morning, they took him off to the insane asylum, where he has been under observation for half a year now. So far, the doctors have been unable to determine any awareness on his part that he is mentally ill. According to psychiatry, awareness is one of the signs that recovery is on the way.
• Charles Bridge: The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
  • “I was thinking,” Said Prokop, rather hurriedly, as if apologizing for his own silence, “while the curatin was flapping, how odd it is when the wind plays with inanimate objects. It’s almost like a miracle when thigns that lie about without a particle of life in their bodies suddenly start to flutter. Haven’t you ever felt that?”
  • “One solid peice of newspaper only lagged behind; it lay helplessly on the pavement, flapping venomously up and down, like a fish out of water, gasping for air. I couldn’t help the thought that rose in me: if we, when all’s said and done, arent siilar to these bits of fluttering paper. Driven hither and thither by some invisble, incomprehensible “wind” that dictates all our actions, while we in our simplicity think we have free will. Supposing life really were nothing but that mysterious whirlwind of which the Bible states, it “blowest where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it comest and whither it goeth!” Isn’t there a dream in which we fumble in deep pools after silver fish, and catch them, to wake and find nothing in our hands but a cold draught of air blowing through them?”
• The Old Town: The Legend of the Old Town Clock by Alois Jirasek
  • This new clock in the City Hall tower in the Old Town was not like other clocks, but was so marvelous that there was no other like it in the whole world. Townsfolk, craftsmen, idlers, students, women, the young and old, all were standing on tiptoe, craning their necks, their eyes glued to the big dial, which showed twenty-four hours, and was crisscrossed with lines and golden circles. Beneath it was a board with painted pictures of the twelve signs of the zodiac. To the right were stone statues, a skeleton symbolizing death, and a Turk holding a sack of coins. The air was filled with the sounds of many voices like the babble of running water. The noise would always suddenly die away whena bell began to toll form the new clock. Amid cries of amazement, many hands would point in astonishment at the figure of Death, who was pulling a rope that rang the bell. Then two small windows over the clock face opened, and the figures of two apostles appeared in them and moved on, making way for the others, till all twelve apostles had appeared in the windwos. Each turned momentarily to face the audience before resuming his advance from west to east. Then above the windows, a stone cock would crow, the clock would strike the hour, and the figures were all motionless again for another hour. They spoke of the clock’s originator, endowed with special gifts and talents; all admired Master Hanus, who had built it. One old sage remarked scornfully to his students that a bell-pulling skeleton and crowing rooster and tricks like that served only to entertain the populace. Then he pointed out to them that this clock was valuable to all scholars and especially to astronomers, because it showed how the sun revolved around the earth, it showed the signs of the zodiac, and under what sign we were at any given time, when the sun would rise and set on any particular day, where in the horizon the sun stood at any particular time, farther in winter, closer in summer.
  • “I do not believe that a more magnificent one coul dbe found anywhere else in the whole world,” he said, “unless Master Hanus himself should build it.” The governor gave a start, and glanced at his councillors, who quickly returned his look. In order to make sure that nobody would compete with them, they decided to commit a terrible deed.
  • He did not even turn around when the door opened and three men came in, wearing cloaks and hoods that covered much of their faces. Before he had time to ask what they wanted, two of them seized him while the third blew out the candles. Then they gagged him and pulled him to the glowing fireplace.
  • He had his guide take him to the fourth part of the clockworks, the most complex of all. IN his darkness he could only hear the clicking and ticking of the many parts. As he stood there, listening, he thought of the council, of how blindness had been his reward, of how the council had made him suffer, only to be able to boast before the whole world of his great achievement. He held out his right hand over the clockwork, and then, as though he could see clearly, his bony fingers began manipulating the machinery. Outside, the excited throng screamed. The councilmen ran to the tower. But the clockworks stood motionless, and their builder lay on the floor beside them in a dead faint.
• The Old Town: Description of a Struggle by Franz Kafka
  • What did this mean? Was he trying to insult me? As for me, I was ready to do without not only this music, but the walk as well. Why wasn’t he speaking to me anyway? And if he didn’t need me, why hadn’t he left me in peace in the warm room with the benedictine and the pastry? It certainly wasn’t I who had insisted on this walk. Yet my acquaintance was still behind me. No word was uttered, nor could it be said that we were running. But I wondered if it wouldn’t be a good idea to turn down a side street; after all, I wasn’t obliged to go on this walk with him. I could go home alone and no one could stop me. Then, secretly, I could watch my acquaintance pass the entrance to my street. Good-bye dear acquaintance!
  • From these words I imagined that my acquaintance suspected in me something which, although it wasn’t there, made me nevertheless rise in his estimation by his suspecting it. So it was just as well I hadn’t gone home. Who knows, this man – thinking of housemaid affairs while walking beside me, his mouth steaming with cold – might be capable of bestowing on me in the eyes of the world a value without my having to work for it. Let’s pray the girls won’t spoil him! By all means let them kiss and hug him, that’s their duty and his right, but they mustn’t carry him off. After all, when they kiss him they also kiss me a little – with the corners of their mouths, so to speak. But if they carry him off, then they steal him from me. And he must always remain with me, always. Who is to protect him, if not I? Suppose some jealous man appears from the POstgasse and attacks him? What willl happen to me? Am I to be just kicked out of the world? I’ll believe that when I see it! No, he won’t get rid of me.
  • While I was still trying urgently to think of some means by which I coul stay at least a little while longer with my acquaintance, it occurred to me that perhaps my long body displeased him by making him feel too small. And this thought – although it was late at night and we had hardly met a soul – tormented me so much that while walking I bent my back until my hands reached my knees. But in order to prvent my acquaintance from noticing my intentions I changed my position only very gradually, tired to divert his attention from myself, once even turning him toward the river, pointing out to him the trees on the Schutzeninsel and the way the bridge lamps were reflected in the river.
  • He lifted his right arm, flicked his hand, and listend to the castanet-like sound of his cuff links. Obviously, this is the time for the murder. I’ll stay with him and slowly he’ll draw the dagger – the handle of which he is already holding in his pocket – along his coat, and then plunge it into me. It’s unlikely that he’ll be surprised at the simplicity of it all – yet maybe he will, who knows? I won’t scream, I’ll just stare at him as long as my eyes can stand it. “Well?” he said.
• The Old Town: GM by Gustav Meyrink
  • The news spread through town like sparks through a field of stubble. Everyone, but everyone, remembered George Mackintosh, the German-American who had walked out on Prague just five years ago. What could he want here this time?
  • The city’s jaw dropped several inches: a house on Ferdinand Boulevard! Where did the old swindler comeup with the money? And Indian servants to boot. Well, we’ll see how long he lasts! Naturally, Mackintosh had another novelty: an electric powered device said to be capable of sniffing out gold veins in the earth – a modern-day divining rod of sorts.
  • And indeed, there it stood, in black and white and certified with an official seal: gold on every single one of the construction sites American George Mackintosh had purchased; gold, in its common form, mixed with sand in such a high proportion that one could safely predict the presence of an immense quality of the precious metal, particularly in the substrata. The proof that this was so and could not be otherwise was so simple and clear that everyone had to grasp it, even if they didn’t believ ein the reliability of the electric-powered metal detector. What luck that the new mining law was now in effect! How prudent and discreet the American had been to arrange it all beforehand! The landlords whose lots had been suddenly found to contain such wealth now swaggered about the city’s coffeehouses, praising to the skies their shrewd neighbor, who had once been so groundlessly and shamefully slandered.
  • A dark haze hung over the city. It was as if the demon of gold had spread its bat-like wings and blocked out the sun.
  • At last, the big day arrived. Once-splendid edifices had vanished as if plucked form the soil, and an army of miners stepped in where once walls had stood. The shovels and pickaxes flew. And the gold? Not even a trace! It must be deeper than they had assumed. Then – what have we here? A special oversized advertisement in the papers:
    • From George Mackintosh to his dear friends and his dearly beloved city! Circumstances oblige me to bid farewell forever to you all. I hereby dedicated to the city one large air balloon which you will see launched to day for the first time from Josef Square. In my memory, you may use it at any time free of charge. As I did not have time to stop by to say good-bye to all the gentlemen in town, I am leaving the city a large calling card…
  • It was Maloch, the photographer, who finally solved the puzzle. He was the first to climb aboard and take a ride in the celebrated balloon, and he took a picture of the devastated city from a bird’s eye view. Shining out of the dark sea of homes through the white ruins, the vacant lots and demolished homes linked to form a snarled message: GM. The American’s initials! Most of the landlords had a heart attack.
• The Old Town: The Hotel Pariz by Bohumil Hrabal
  • Best of all I liked the prive chambers the young ladies called the Clinic, or Diagnostics 100, or the Department of Internal Medicine.
  • The older brokers would laugh and make jokes and treat the undressing of a young woman as a collective game of strip poker, removing her clothes little by little, right on the table, while they sipped their drinks from their crystal champagne glasses and savored the bouquet. The girl would then lie back on the table and the old brokers would gather around her with their glasses and plates of caviar and lettuce and sliced Hungarian salami, and they’d put on their spectacles and study every fold and curve of her beautiful female body, and then, as if they were at a fashion show or a life-study class in some academy of art, they’d ask the girl to sit, or stand up, or kneel, or let her legs dangle from the table and swing back and forth, as though she were washing them in a stream.
  • At the end of each session, the young woman they had just examined would hang around the private chamber, waiting, breathing heavily and eyeing me greedily as if I were a movie actor, because she was so aroused she couldn’t bring herself to leave. So after I finished clearing the table and put away the last piece of cutlery, I’d have to finish what the old men began. The women would throw themselves on me with such passion and eagerness, it was as if they were doing it for the first time, and for those few minutes I felt tall and handsome and curly-haired, and I kenw that I was king for those beautiful young women, though it was only because their bodies had been so tickled by eyes, hands, and tongues that they could scarcely walk.
  • This had been the specialty of Karel, my predecessor, who had the apatitude and the capacity and the love for it, though I had that too. And I must have been good in other ways as well, because all the young women would greet me when they met me in the hotel or on the street, and if they were a long way off they’d bob or wave their hankies or their purses, and if they had nothing in their hands, they’d at least give me a friendly wave, and I’d bow or acknowledge them with a wide sweep of my hat, then stand straight again and raise my chin, feeling taller than my double-soled shoes could make me.
• The Old Town: The Case of the Washerwoman by Egon Erwin Kisch
  • At Five o’clock in the afternoon Frau Begman was found dead in her apartment. She had been murdered and robbed. Suspicion was immediately cast on her maid’s lover, whom the concierge had seen leaving the house at about 3. By 6 the maid, as well as Franz Polanski, her lover, had been turned over to the police. I rushed off to the home of the accused. Officers had already been there, and tried to draw information from his mother, but the news of her son’s arrest had thrown the old woman into such a state of mental chaos that the officers merely summoned her to appear at the police station the following day.
  • “Look, mister, please, I ‘m jsut a poor washerwoman. I’ve been washing clothes over that tub for twenty-five years and never once has there been so much as a diaper missing. I’ve never even mixed up a pair of stockings. No one watches out like I do to see that sleeves don’t get frayed. And now I’m to be in the papers where everyone can read about me. Please, you wouldn’t have the heart.”
  • “He got it from me. It’s not his fault. My poor Franz. He inherited it from me. Yes, from me!” I could see where this new tack was leading. The woman thought she saw a way out for her Franz by taking all the blame upon herself, perhaps by presenting herself as a regular Borgia. “The truth is, I’m a murderer.” I could smell what was coming. She was going to dig up a few misearable infractions and in the end the whole business wouldn’t be worth a stick of type. “Yes, I’m a murderer. Only my boy had more strength than I had. He went through with it. I didn’t”. “We often have ideas like that run through our heads.”
  • “See this knife? I tried to stab a man to death with this once. That’s a long time ago, thirty years ago, when I was a parlor maid at Martin’s the tax assessor in Marianska Street. I was a young girl then, just in from the farm.” “Who did you try to stab?” “The first man who had ever been nice to me in my whole life! Along comes someone who says to me ‘You’re a nice kid’ and he pets me and kisses me and first thing you know I’ve given myself to him.” “And of course he didn’t marry you. The old story.” “Go on, I never even thought of marriage. It’s like when you take clothes and soak them in suds and then you can twist them between your fingers and do anything you want with them. Thats just the way he handled me with this flatteries. of course, you can go too far and wash the color and the nap out of the laundry, and its the same with people…” Very well put, I thought to myself, and taking out my notebook, I wrote down: “Philosophy over a Washboard.” Make a good heading over a double-columned piece.
  • A few minutes ago I had been in a room smelling of soapsuds, in the company of a weepy old washerwoman, with a washtub and a gas range, and two religious pictures on the wall. Now all that had vanished. Around me was the dim red light of a bachelor’s apartment and in fron tof me a young girl who had been forced to undress.
  • “Go ahead, write it all down young man, and put it into your paper. Frau Polanski is an evil murderer. Franz Polanski is completely innocent. He’s just a victim, heir to the blood of Frau Polanski and her murders. Write that down.” “Murders? You mean you tried it a second time?” “Of course I did. I’m guilty of two murders for which I had neither the strength nor the time.”
  • For a long time I didn’t have the courage to say right out to Polanski, “I’m pregnant.” But when it was as plain as the nose on your face, I finally c ame out with it. I decided I’d get rid of my child, even if it cost my life. But there wasn’t a midwife anywhere who would do it for me because by this time I was seven months gone. I drank more hot claret, and jumped from the table twenty times, and I knelt for hours before the Mother of God and prayed and confessed and fasted and made vows, but nothing helped. On this devil’s own wall, this tub, I pressed my belly and washed away with clenched fists, washed chemises that were bloody all right, but not a drop of blood could I squeeze out of me. Then I took out that old knife again and I stabbed myself in the belly, to start the blood flowing, to kill the child and myself too – When I came to, they shold me my child, my little Franz. The knife hadn’t even grazed him. And perhaps it was all for the best because I soon came to love him.
  • Just then, the door was jerked open. “Good evening, Mother.”
  • She looked at me and I could read her thoughts. A moment ago she had been the mother of a murderer and she had bared the darkest recesses of her life to a reporter. Now, suddenly, she was no longer the mother of a murderer, and this man from the papers had nothing more to do in her honest home.
  • Frau Polanski gathered herself together. She tied her kerchief over her head and became an old washerwoman once more, bent and humble. “All right, all right, son,” she saiid as she went over to the kitchen stove. “Don’t rush me.” I left without a story.
• The Old Town: The Magic Flute by Bohumil Hrabal
  • this was just terrible
• The Old Town: The Past by Michal Ajvaz
  • Why is it we constatnly drag around with us in our handbags and briefcases the weapons of our nocturnal wars, crystals of solidified poison in boxes lined with scarlet velvet, the head of the Gorgon Medusa, a tongue ripped from a dragon’s maw, the mummy of a homunculus, compromising correspondence in Sumerian? Why is it we drag around the terrifying innards of the past, fearing them as we do, smelling the pus they exude, knowing full well that in a bar, a cafe, or a friend’s flat Moira the Inexorable will spill them out on the table?
• Prague: The Receipt by Karel Capek
  • “You ought to hang on to that, that, miss,” he said gloomily.
  • With disgust Officer Soucek blew out a cloud of smoke. “You wouldn’t believe what somebody in that condition looks like. Why, their own mother wouldn’t recognize ‘em. And the flies – Once their skin’s gone, miss, it’s good bye and amen to beauty. And it’s the devil’s own job to identify somebody after that, you know. As long as they’ve still got eyes and a nose, you can do it; but after lying there more than a month in the sun – “
  • “Most likely he was trying to grab her purse too, but when the strap broke, it wasn’t worth nothing anymore, so he threw it out in the field; but he took everything out of it first you know. So all that was left in it was what had got stuuck in the lining, a ticket for the Number Seven streetcar and this receipt from a china shop for a fifty-five crown purchase. That’s all we found.”
  • Anyway, then the captain says, “Now Soucek, lets suppose something else; it’s weak as water, but we have to start somewhere. Look, a person who throws fifty-five crowns on a teapot isn’t going to live in Zizkov. There aren’t many roomers in central Prague, and people who live in Mala Strana only drink coffee. I’d guess it would probably be that area where the Number Seven travels between Hradcany and Dejvice. I’d almost say”, he says, “that a lady who drinks tea from an English teapot like this one could live nowhere but in a little house with a garden. You know the fad these days for anythign English, Soucek.”
  • “And would you believe it, at the forty-seventh house I came to, going right down the line, the housemaid says “Oh sure, that’s the same kind of teapot this lady who rooms here with the missus has!” So I waited while she went to get the lady of the house. “Ma’am,” I says, “didnt you hav e a maid who left here sometime in May?” “That’s right,” says the landlady, “we called her Marka, but what her other name was, I don’t remember.” “And sometime before that, didn’t this girl break a teapot?” “She did,” says the landlady, “and she had to buy a new one out of her own pocket. But my goodness, how did you know about that?” “Well ma’am,” says I, “we hear just about everything.”
  • “What was awful was when we were standing there by her body in that field and all we could find was that receipt and that streetcar ticket. Two tiny, good-for-nothing bits of paper – but all the same, we evened the score for poor Marka. Like I told you , never throw anything away, nothing. even the least little thing can turn out to be a clue or a piece of evidence. No sir, you never know what’s in your pocket that might be important.” Minka sat perfectly still, her eyes filled with tears. And suddenly, with a warm burst of affection, she turned to her Pepa and from her moist hand let fall to the ground the crumpled receipt which, the entire time, she had been nervously pressing between her fingers. Pepa didn’t see it, because he was gazing up at the stars. But Officer Soucek saw it, and, sadly and knowingly, he smiled.
• Prague: Mendelssohn Is on the Roof by Jiri Weil
• Prague: A Prague Eclogue by Jiri Kovtun
• Prague: A Race Through Prague by Ota Pavel
• Prague: Invasion Day by Ivan Divis
• Prague: A Visit to the Train Station by Jachym Topol
• Prague: Tenor Sax Solo from Washington by Josef Skvorecky
• Epilogue: The Spirit of Prague by Ivan Klima
• A Prague Chronology