A foreign perspective on a particular country is a long-standing and interesting genre with its masterpieces and failures. The documentary book of the Polish journalist Mariusz Szczygiela “Gottland” (2006, translated into Ukrainian in 2010 by the Grani-T publishing house) can undoubtedly be considered a very successful example of this genre. A collection of stories about prominent representatives of the Czech people, famous, little-known or deliberately forgotten, through which the reader gets a picture of the life of the Czech Republic (and Czechoslovakia) from the beginning of the 20th century to the first years of the 21st, will be of interest both to readers who are well familiar with the history of this wonderful country and.
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More than ten years ago, the first section of this book became the beginning of the discovery by Ukrainians, and especially residents of Transcarpathia, of the person of Tomas Bata (more precisely, the Bata brothers - Tomas and Jan). The history of the most powerful capitalist and oligarch of the times of the First Czechoslovak Republic was all the more interesting since Transcarpathia was then part of it. And shoe magnates had stores in almost every more or less large settlement of the region, not to mention Uzhgorod, where the BATA trading house was located in the very center of the city and the building, fortunately, has survived to this day.
A native of the small town of Zlin, having learned the basics of assembly line production in America, he transferred the experience of Ford and his followers to sewing shoes and quickly ousted all competitors from the market, flooding young Czechoslovakia with cheap and at the same time high-quality products. However, the entrepreneur did not limit himself to shoes and quite quickly turned his old, cozy and half-asleep native Zlin into a factory city, where, in addition to the actual production facilities, he built the first 10-story skyscraper in Czechoslovakia (today it would be called a business center) with a director’s office in. And for workers with their families, he implemented a social housing project, the so-called “batovki” - tiny two-story buildings, free of charge, but only for the duration of employment. (However, no one retired from the factories of the BATA empire. ) The shoe king paid a lot of attention to the “fathers” - children who studied in the schools he founded, lived in boarding schools and then became diligent workers in his factories....
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The founder of the shoe empire, Tomasz Bata, died in 1929 when his plane crashed into the chimney of his factory in the fog, and was buried in the cemetery of the new formation, founded on his initiative. After which the business empire was headed by Jan, whom Tomas considered an incapable slacker, and he was very mistaken. He not only continued the work, but also distinguished himself with an even greater scope of plans. In 1937, he published the book “Building a State for 40 Million,” a detailed plan for the total industrialization of Czechoslovakia - with maps of its mineral resources, rivers and other resources, as well as existing and future railways, small airfields in almost every city, river traffic, etc.. (and on each map a proper place was given to Transcarpathia). The book even contained outlines of plans for the development of industries such as biogas production and wind power.. And on the eve of World War II, Yan Batya amazed his compatriots with an even more grandiose project. Feeling that Czechoslovakia would soon become a victim of Germany, he invited all Czechs to leave their homeland and move to Brazil and, with the consent of the government of that country, to found a new Czechoslovak state there.
Despite the grotesqueness of these plans, they had a real continuation - in 1941, Jan Batya founded two towns in Brazil - Bataypora and Bataguasa. And his son Tomik became the leader of the newly built Batavi in \u200b\u200bCanada....
It should be added that this is not the first literary dissection of Czech businessmen. One of the most famous was the book published in the late 1930s by the communist writer Maria Puymanova, the author of a thick novel-trilogy in which the plot of the first volume, “People at the Crossroads,” revolved around a ready-made clothing magnate with his own store in Prague and numerous characters, such as. By prudently limiting herself to a transparent hint, Puymanova avoided persecution, something that another author, Svatopluk Turek, failed to do.. The artist from the advertising department was quickly fired by Tomasz Batya, who did not mess with anyone. In his manner, without explaining the reasons, he tore up a whole pile of advertising posters of the artist and showed him the exit. But, unlike numerous workers dismissed in a similar way, Svatopluk did not remain in debt. And I started writing. In 1933, he published the novel “Botostroy” (translated as “machine for shoes”) in a small printing house.. Despite the absence of Bati's name, the book was clearly about him and his empire, and reprisals were not long in coming. Having used all the levers, the offended hero of “Botostroy” sets the security forces on the bookstore (“200 gendarmerie detachments are conducting searches in all bookstores in the country,” states Mariusz Szczygiel, not forgetting to mention Turek in his research). And then he threatens all publishing houses that he will deprive them of their advertising. No one dared to quarrel with the country's largest businessman in the difficult 1930s.
Therefore, “Botostroy” was republished after the change of power in Czechoslovakia. In 1950, the book was published in the USSR in Russian, and in 1955 - in Uzhgorod in Ukrainian (but translated not from the original, but from Russian). But the offended Turek does not stop and writes a sequel - “Botostroy without a boss” - about factories that have already been requisitioned into state-socialist ownership (and then a number of books of his “anti-batiad”). These factories will continue to produce boots and other products of the renamed Cebo company, which are in short supply in the USSR for a long time.. And Zlin for a long time, until 1989, will become the city of Gottwald (in honor of the first communist leader of Czechoslovakia). In addition to Puymanova and Turek, several dozen journalists and writers have joined the biography of the Batya family from the 1930s to this day.
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" In its 16 sections there is a place for the impressive history of the monument to Stalin - the largest outside the USSR and the most majestic sculptural composition in Europe. The composition was opened after the death of the dictator, in 1955, and it stood for ten years. The author of the sculptural group committed suicide shortly before its grand opening and was “banned” for decades. And the sculpture itself was later secretly blown up, no matter how funny it may sound. This story well reflects the features of the Stalin era in Czechoslovakia, which we imagine rather vaguely. As did the stuffy atmosphere of Czech life after the suppression of the Prague Spring of 1968. And also the times of the Second World War - through the prism of the tragic biography of Lida Baarova, a young film actress who fell in love with Goebbels... Of course, the author could not ignore Kafka, exploring the phenomenon of the word kafkarna (“This is something subconscious in people’s thoughts. If you live here for a while, it will probably clear up on its own.; suddenly you say: “Yeah, kafkarna!
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As for the title of the book, the ancient Goths have nothing to do with it. “Gotland” is a museum in honor of Karel Gott (“Not a single living artist, at least in the Czech Republic, has had his own museum with guides who work here at headquarters and conduct tours in three languages. Karel Gott is sacrum in desacralized reality" ) A world without God is impossible, therefore, in the largest atheistic country in the world - the Czech Republic - his role is played by this singing celebrity, the role of mein Gott - the author ironically.
Interesting and sad analogies can be seen in the history of the destruction of books, which also affected Czechoslovakia.. During the era of Stalinism in this country, according to the estimates of researchers of our millennium, 27 million books were destroyed (“they finally compiled a list of authors who will never be published again: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and several hundred others”). Literature published in the pre-socialist period was declared “trash” and “damage”. “Elementary school students... tear books into small pieces (immediately at the collection point) to make sure that copies will never return to reader circulation.
After the communists took power, in Czechoslovakia they managed to grind almost 70 percent of the “hack” into waste paper.. “Operation of withdrawal”, “operation of replacement” continues until 1958.”.
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It is worth adding that Gottland, published 14 years ago with the support of the Institute of Books in a two thousand edition (translation by Bogdana Matijas), is now not easy to find. And we can assume that an additional circulation would have found its reader today.