In the Morning We Played Quartet

Václav Polívka (1927-1971) was born into Czechoslovakia’s elite, roughly eight years after the country emerged from the ruins of Austria-Hungary. His father – also named Václav – was a senior official at the government chancellery, while his mother Marie had won renown as a philologist and translator of Danish and Norwegian literature. As a clear sign of the Polívka family’s close ties to the centre of power, young Václav grew up in a house within Prague’s majestic Castle district, where Czechs from relatively humble circumstances in 1918 replaced the German-speaking upper class who had ruled Bohemia and Moravia since 1526. This was as close as one could get to an aristocratic title in Masaryk’s Czechoslovak Republic. In this diary, which was found in an attic in Oslo, Norway in 2011, Václav Polívka describes a mere three years of his life. Yet they are three crucial years, both for the young medical student and for Europe, which is moving from World War to Cold War. In the spring of 1945 Prague is the last capital in Central Europe under German occupation, and the city's inhabitants live in intense fear of suffering the same grisly fate as Warsaw. But neither bombings nor terror can prevent Václav from cultivating his consuming passion: classical music. Not only does Polívka attend concerts several times a week; he is himself a very competent pianist and student of the legendary pedagogue Václav Holzknecht. He also plays the cello, and occasionally composes works for the quartet he has established. As a reviewer for the newspaper Mladá Fronta, Václav knows everybody of importance in Czech musical life. Several of his music friends, among them the Germanist Rio Preisner and the pianist Pavel Štěpán, later left their mark on Czechoslovak culture. Through his mother, Marie, who was active in the Scandinavian milieu in Prague, Václav acquired early on a personal relationship with the Nordic countries. In the first post-war years Václav’s and his mother's home (his father passed away in 1941) in Jiřská Street became a natural meeting point for Scandinavians in Prague. In the summer of 1946, Václav went with his inseparable friend and fellow student Jaroslav Přenosil on a nearly two-month-long trip to Denmark. The stay at the International People’s College in Elsinore, which he repeated the following year, produced a number of amusing comments about how a young and ironic representative of the Czech cultural elite regards Scandinavia. It was also in Elsinore that Václav met a young Danish woman, Vibeke Hauer, with whom he falls in head-over-heels in love, and later starts a family. In this respect, Václav Polivka’s diary is a Czech-Nordic love story with a happy ending. However, it is as a commentator on the political developments in Czechoslovakia in the earlyyears after the war that he reveals himself as an unusually perceptive observer. Like the vast majority of Czechoslovakia's population, Václav after the liberation is very excited about the Russians and the Soviet Union. But despite his young age and lack of political experience, he immediately senses the danger signals. How can the Communists create a just society when they simultaneously tolerate criminal acts? What kind of democracy is it that accepts indoctrination, censorship and outright lies? Is an “iron curtain” really about to descend between Czechoslovakia and Western Europe? On the basis of a sober assessment of what he sees around him, Václav feels increasingly strong anxiety. When disaster becomes fact in February 1948, he is so depressed that the otherwise neat diary notes are barely legible.