Convoluted Truths about Persistent Evils: A Review of Ján Johanides’s But Crime Does Punish (2022, Karolinum Press)
by Katarina Gephardt
The publication of Ján Johanides’s short novel But Crime Does Punish (Trestajúci zločin, 1995) in English translation by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood is an important event for Slovak literature. While attending a London-based conference on Slovak literature in 2019, which commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, I heard many scholars express their interest in seeing the works of Johanides translated. While Slovak literature lacks the international recognition of widely translated Czech literary figures such as Milan Kundera or Bohumil Hrabal, Johanides is a writer of comparable stature and significance within the Slovak context.
The author embarked on his career as part of a burgeoning generation of young writers in the late 1950s who were determined to challenge the tenets of social realism and delve into the intimate and existential dimensions of the human experience. In later interviews, Johanides denied that he belonged to any particular movement and argued that the only thing he and his contemporaries had in common was the unfortunate circumstances imposed upon them by the communist regime. Johanides's writing is undeniably unique in many respects. Translations of dead authors, however, can be more difficult to market than those of living ones, so it is welcome news that Karolinum has published But Crime Does Punish as the first volume of a planned series of Slovak classic books in English.
Given these circumstances, the publication of this English translation of Johanides's work is even more significant. Julia and Peter Sherwood's translation conveys the idiomatic nuances and idiosyncratic qualities of Johanides's vocabulary, as well as his narrator's associative and occasionally elliptical syntax. Capturing these features of Johanides’s prose is especially important given that the novel’s impact hinges on the narrator's rapport with the reader. The translation is helpfully contextualized with translators’ notes explaining the novel’s many historical and cultural references. The afterword by the late Robert B. Pynsent, a leading scholar on Slovak literature in the Anglophone world, situates the key themes of the novel in the broader context of Johanides’s oeuvre.
Like Johanides’s other prose fiction, But Crime Does Punish experiments with its narrative structure and point of view. Originally published several years after the regime change of 1989, the novel grapples with crimes of the past. Its title and opening setting evoke familiar Central and Eastern European literary traditions. Like Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the text is preoccupied with the nature of evil and its traces in human consciousness. The occasion for the narrator’s account is the visit of Mr. Klementini, whose father fell victim to the oppressive regime, embarking on a visit to a castle that serves as both the repository of secret service archives and a quintessential regional museum, replete with customary displays including taxidermied animals. The claustrophobic castle setting and the bureaucratic obstructions associated with the archive evoke themes associated with Kafka’s fiction.
The narrator is the custodian of the archive, Ondrej Ostarok (an oxymoronic combination, with the first name meaning “manly” and the last name meaning “stunted man,” as Pynsent helpfully points out). Rather than directly addressing Klementini's inquiries regarding his father's trial, Ostarok delves deeper, peeling back the layers of historical evils that span from the atrocities of both world wars, to the reign of terror under the communist regime, and eventually to the tumultuous era of the 1990s marked by rampant mafia-related crimes. Maddeningly for Ostarok’s interlocutor Klementini – and also, at times, for the reader of the novel – Ostarok continually digresses, yet insists that all the tangents he shares are related and relevant. Since Klementini is named only on the third page, the reader begins to identify with the “you” of the narration in the opening pages and is positioned, along with Klementini, as a guest who is compelled to listen to the narrative and invited to sample various gourmet offerings such as a dish of milk-caps or a glass of Müller-Thurgau wine.
The first narrative thread evokes Ostarok's personal history, recalling a memory of a family gathering during which different generations shared their individual recollections of historical events. This context provides a template for Ostarok’s convoluted storytelling, which continually reminds the reader of the unreliability of the perceptions that humans draw on to determine the truth of events:
Every single one of them, as I learned later, was telling his own truth, except that each of them squeezed it into a frame that was as tawdry as it was ostentatious, and they would all have sounded quite plausible if they hadn’t been drunk, if they hadn’t been flailing their arms around, if they hadn’t put on such airs and graces, if they hadn’t sworn blind, hands on hearts, that they were telling the truth, and if they hadn’t stroked their knees as if they belonged to the grammar-school girls sitting across the room.
Like many of his contemporaries, Ostarok ended up in the Valdice prison through no fault of his own, having been arrested after an unrestrained drunken speech delivered by his father, a local party chairman, at a carnival ball. He observes that he survived the brutality of the prison by training his mind and his senses to conjure an alternate reality:
You see, the camera of the human eye needs to be trained. And then retrained, and then retrained again, in accordance with the latest Party line. Do you follow me, Mr Klementini? It wasn’t until I ended up in Valdice that I learned to generate a suitable backdrop. And believe me, life without a backdrop is as impossible in Valdice as it is under socialism, or in post-Communist society for that matter. … There are things.. that you can’t survive, that you would never survive, you just wouldn’t be able to take, unless you built a castle on a chicken leg inside your own head.
Former prisoner Ostarok’s trauma and self-deception for the sake of survival reflects the condition of the society at large, for his narrative recounts various forms of evil, including violence and pervasive surveillance. The narrator and his father are imprisoned during the 1950s show trials, during which false witnesses, including neighbors and relatives, were summoned to support accusations of treason and subversion. A prison guard crushes Ostarok’s testicles, and his resulting sexual dysfunction and sterility symbolically correspond with the broader problem of reproducing truths about the past in his storytelling. Eva, a woman he meets at a bar, is beaten to death by secret policemen; Ostarok is not sure whether his friend Vrtiak is an informer. Privacy was an elusive concept, as the narrator reminds us here in Slovakia everyone knows everything.
After Ostarok is released from prison and rehabilitated following the post-Stalin “thaw,” a colonel in state security approves his application for a position in the archive and conducts regular inspections of the sealed files. While inspecting the taxidermied animals in the castle museum, the colonel betrays that he lost his belief in communism following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, a revelation that shocks the narrator:
Then he leaned close to me and asked in a whisper: what if all these animals were Party members and that’s what is preventing them from moving? They can’t make a move because they’ve been stuffed by the Communist Party and the government. I froze and let out a scream. I remember it was a wordless scream, like when you’re having teeth pulled. I was overcome by horror. Horror and bewilderment.
It is thanks to the colonel that the narrator becomes a custodian of human perfidy rather than merely a lowly guard dog of steel boxes, both because the colonel gives Ostarok access to the files and because he makes him complicit in their eventual destruction. In December 1989, shortly after the Velvet Revolution, the colonel arrives at the castle accompanied by five men and two lorries. The five men load the files into the lorries (trucks), and the colonel asks the narrator to accompany them. The colonel, who knows the perpetrators of a World War II massacre, enlists the old men who committed the atrocities to dig up the pit. The files are buried on top of the bodies of the victims:
And then the files started to rain down on the skeletons. Some of them contained your mother’s testimony, Mr Klementini. In a matter of minutes the skeletons were covered in a layer of files. Next it was the turn of the quicklime. … A layer of documents, then a layer of lime. And again, like layers in a cake. … The old men moved as if in a speeded-up film. I’d never have expected them to be quite so nimble.
In this hauntingly evocative scene, reminiscent of a captivating black-and-white documentary film, Johanides draws attention to the enduring presence of historical evils. To reinforce the message, the narrator recounts how he once visited a friend who casually displayed shrunken heads of American Indians on his sideboard as if they were family heirlooms. Ostarok tells this story of evil associated with colonialism to the colonel in a phone call, hoping to delay his suicide. The colonel kills himself, but as the narrator points out, he is nevertheless an idealist who believes that evil eventually eradicates itself given that when evil people form a group … sooner or later they end up killing each other, wiping each other out.
Johanides continually reminds the reader of how historical change is often a matter of repetition, yet the narrative also validates the colonel’s hope in the future of humanity. While riding in the lorry with the state security men, their faces seem uncannily familiar to the narrator:
I realized that in this light there was something about these men that made them resemble, in some fundamental, crucial way, the warders of Valdice at the time of Stalin’s death. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. … I was gripped by a sense of horror, as if on the verge of paralysis. Just like the day Stalin died: the same despair, the same dreadful fear, the same crass grief was imprinted on every single one of these faces, like an indelible official stamp.
Following the revolution, the opportunistic state security men easily adapt and become entrepreneurs who benefit from the new capitalist system: One bought a department store, another a garage, the third a dry cleaners’, the fourth a hotel and the fifth something else, one man even became an undertaker. Now he owns two funeral parlors. He produces those ceramic photographs you see on gravestones. The former agents scratch each other’s backs and prosper for a while, but after one of them is murdered, the group disperses and its members are forced into exile abroad.
Writing in the 1990s, when many intellectuals were hopeful about the future and ready to leave the past behind, Johanides stressed the continuity between the past and the present. However, aspects of the colonel’s and even Ostarok’s characters reflect the writer’s existential hope that individual human choices can alter the course of history. Pynsent’s assessment of Johanides in the afterword captures the personal qualities that made his fiction extraordinary: Johanides is an exceptional writer because of the combination of a practical knowledge of duty and a suspicion of rights, his personal kindness and his concentrated failure to fall in with the compromise of most of his fellow Slovak writers. Different kinds of historical evil, whether they manifest as intolerance or corruption, persist in the present: Slovak nationalism works to suppress the shameful legacy of the World War II fascist state. Efforts to persecute the perpetrators of the 2018 murder of the journalist Ján Kuciak, whose reporting laid bare the deep-rooted corruption within Slovak society and politics, have yielded only partial success. The continuity of evils that plague contemporary Slovakia and the courage of individuals and movements that resist them confirm that the message of But Crime Does Punish was nothing short of prophetic.
Katarina Gephardt is professor of English at Kennesaw State University in metropolitan Atlanta. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, Central European literature, and travel writing. Her book The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789-1914 (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014) focuses on polarized imaginative geographies of Europe in nineteenth-century British fiction and travel writing.