Neodvolám: Our Summer of Czech Dissent

Prague is a beautiful city under any circumstances, but sometimes the universe determines to speak with even greater magic, and purpose.  Ten years ago this month I accompanied my ex-wife an on academic fellowship to the Czech Republic. We had our indefatigable four-year-old, Dashie, in tow. Her job was to teach, ours to explore this glorious and historic city. It was a hot summer, uncharacteristic for Prague—the heat radiated off the stone walks and buildings. Dashie and I took refuge in a basement bowling alley many of those days. But before the weather turned oppressive, we walked. And walked. And we started to see connections that I had not anticipated.

​Many of those days we walked for miles. We visited the famed Lennon Wall at least twice. We had our caricatures done on the Charles Bridge. We sampled Prague pastries and goulashes, Prague parks and monuments, all of them, I think. Up and down Wenceslas Square multiple times. Shops, galleries, and cafes, day after day. And more Charles Bridge, always ending up back at the Charles Bridge, so much so that Dashie began to let out a moan every time he saw the bridge's famed and familiar statuary, the only time he complained over the course of those miles and miles. And of course our journeys took us to museums, all the museums Prague has to offer. We didn’t know those museums would be taking us on a journey.

The first museum I proposed that we visit was the Central Gallery on the Old Town Square, which features the works of Alphonse Mucha (Mucha Foundation), the famed Czech Art Nouveau painter and designer, and Salvador Dali. The museum also features works by Andy Warhol, which was the object of our visit. Warhol, of course, is from Pittsburgh and I thought a little of the old hometown flavor would be good for Dashie--remind him where he came from. Warhol’s parents had emigrated from Mikó, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia) and so both the Czech people and us Pittsburghers claim Warhol as one of their own. The exhibits were lovely. I no longer recall, but it may also have been in the Central Gallery that we saw an exhibition on the works of Karel Saudek, the famed Czech comics artist who was popular from the 1960s on. Saudek’s work was influenced by Disney, Crumb, and others, and the authorities often deemed him “too American.” Many of his best works were thinly disguised protests against the repressive Soviet-backed and authoritarian Czech regime. This was the first time during our trip that I began to think about the Prague Spring of 1968.

One of the things I learned at the Central Gallery, embarrassed not to have already known, was that Warhol designed album covers for American rock bands, famously including The Velvet Underground. This became a more interesting piece of information when we hit our next Prague museum, the Museum of Communism (Museum of comunism). This museum provides detailed exhibits on life under communism. Depictions of political repression, economic privation, and artistic control were reminders to this American of how easy it is to bend to power, even for a people as fiercely independent as the Czechoslovakians. This made the museum’s many exhibits about Czech anti-communist protest all the more inspiring. 

​One of the underground musical groups that took protest to heart had in fact been inspired by the Velvet Underground, a Czech group that formed around the time of the Prague Spring known as The Plastic People of the Universe. The music of the Plastic People is boldly defiant, in its very essence. Rejecting approved categories such as melody, rhythm, and harmony, the sounds of the Plastic People are not only politically defiant, they are aurally impudent as well. A mixture of punk, Zappa, and perhaps industrial rock, I’m not sure they can be listened to in a conventional sense, which I suppose was the point. They were frequently persecuted and even imprisoned for their sonic protest. They continued to perform despite the persecution, helping to galvanize an entire generation of Czech rebels who spoke through their art. At the Museum of Communism, Dashie and I learned that the Plastic People became associated with the movement known in Czechoslovakia as “Charter 77,” a coalition of artists and writers that gathered around the revolutionary figure of the playwright Vaclav Havel to challenge the regime’s political and artistic repression.

​One of the figures who had given inspiration to the Charter 77 generation was a young student by the name of Jan Palach. As the Prague Spring was being crushed by Soviet tanks, Palach put not only his voice but his very body in the path of the regime. Palach immolated himself at the top of Wenceslas Square in January 1969, 20 years old, in protest of Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring. His funeral attracted thousands of Czech mourners. Dashie and I visited the very moving memorial to Palach at the top of the square. Twenty years later, Havel would come to power in large measure to the steadfastness of the anti-communist opposition, including Palach, the Plastic People, and himself. It was a return to a democratic tradition that refused to be extinguished.

​One of the surprising things I learned was the Czech veneration of Woodrow Wilson. It is fashionable these days to deplore Wilson as a racist (he was, to be sure) and a reactionary. Wilson’s interventionist foreign policies (i.e., liberal internationalism) routinely come under condemnation by his determined modern critics. But in his day, and for many millions around the world, Wilson’s calls to “make the world safe for democracy” were inspiring, especially to those who found themselves living under colonialist, imperial, and authoritarian regimes. It was Wilson’s refusal to allow the recreation of the Austo-Hungarian empire after WWI that helped to carve the modern Czechoslovakia from those imperial ruins. In the 1920s and 30s, and until Czechoslovakia was betrayed to the Nazis in 1938, under the determined leadership of Tomáš Masaryk Czechoslovakia became something of a model for democracy around the world. There is a Wilson boulevard and a Wilson train station and a Wilson monument in Prague. Czech democracy, having survived the Nazis and Soviets both, is a hard habit to kill, apparently.

It was impossible not to begin to see a connection coming into focus as we walked through Prague: Wilson and Warhol and Palach and Saudek and the Plastic People and Havel: a tradition of Czech dissent and defiance, the foundations of freedom and democracy. I thought much about these connections as we were forced to observe, from afar, a modern-day re-enactment of repression taking place far from us, in our adopted home state of South Carolina. June 17, 2015, also witnessed the massacre at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. Nine African American parishioners were mercilessly gunned down by a vengeful white supremacist, political and cultural repression made personal. We watched video feeds of protests taking place at the statehouse in Columbia to demand the removal, finally, of the Confederate flag from capitol grounds. It was a milestone when the flag was removed, I suppose, but it felt, and still feels, like cold comfort. Repression never sleeps, and the Czechs were teaching me about the constant price that has to be paid to keep it at bay.

​As our Prague sojourn began to draw to a close, we decided we needed one more night out in the Old Town Square. This is the massive central square in the heart of Prague which draws in all of the tourists. It is surrounded by shops, cafes, galleries, and museums. The well-known astronomical clock is there. The square is dominated by the massive statue to the great Czech martyr, Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in defiance of Catholic church dogma. Hus is revered and to many he remains the Greatest Czech of them all. As we ate one of our last goulashes, we noticed stages being set up in the square and a crowd gathering. We had stumbled into some sort of festival. We stuck around as a delightful Czech pop group entertained us for about an hour in the softening afternoon sun. As the group wrapped it up, and with rapidly fading four-year-old in tow, we started to head home, just as the second stage’s footlights pierced the twilight. Now fully sensitized to the magic of this place, I convinced the family to stick around just for a song or two, to see what’s up.

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​​I did not understand a word of the Czech lyrics. There was not a cognate or borrowed word to be found. But I was immediately hooked on the melodies and the beautiful harmonies. It became apparent after the third or fourth song that what we had stumbled onto was a depiction of the life of Jan Hus. We learned later that this performance was being premiered that night, to mark the 500th anniversary of the great man’s martyrdom. The modern electrified instruments and the recognizable pop beats had me thinking that it was some kind of rock opera. I was only a little off: it was in fact an oratorio entitled Mistr Jan Hus.

​We hung on for song after song, welded to the spot. The crowd had grown enormous and we were all transfixed. I will never forget those melodies, and to this day I often hum them under my breath, still not knowing a word of Czech save for one I came to learn: neodvolám, which means “I do not recant.” Once we had figured out what the story line was, it was easy to identify, if not understand, Hus’s trial. As he is being led to the stake, he offers his last beautiful, haunting cry of defiance: “Neodvolám”—“I do not recant.” Hus’s defiance had been captured in art as only great art can capture it. Havel knew this, and Saudek too, and even the Plastic People. We left for our apartment, I with a lump in my throat that I still can feel a decade later, humming the melodies, lost in the fiery connections between Hus and Palach and a spirit of defiance that now seemed to pour out of the Prague stone.

​So taken with this performance was I that the next morning I posted an appreciation on a Facebook page. That post got a response, from the composer and star himself: Richard Pachman. A famed Czech composer, singer, artist, and writer, Richard reached out to thank me for my post. We exchanged messages, and he warmly offered to host us at dinner. He graciously bestowed some gifts on Dashie. We talked for a long time about Hus and Prague. He even more graciously invited us on a personalized tour of Prague a few days later to see some of the sights we had missed—he knew the city so well. We even somehow ended up at a piano—I have a video of Dashie on Richard’s lap, belting out several Abba numbers together. A few nights later Richard treated us to Mozart's immortal Don Giovanni, in the theater where the opera had its premiere in 1787.

​There was magic for me in Prague those weeks in June 2015. I don’t think it was about a lesson to be learned. I think it was about a feeling to be nurtured. To be free, to express, to live a life authentically and truly. To cherish dissent, to nurture independence, to recognize that integrity and conscience are more important than safety and security, even of one’s  own body. Freedom is hard. It requires vigilance and determination. It requires daily acts of heroism, this task we have inherited, to govern ourselves. It may even require, as Hus, and Masaryk, and Saudek, and the Plastic People, and Palach, and Havel, and Pachman all have known, that we say, “Neodvolám”: No, we do not accept your authority. No, we do not recant.

Posted by David J. Snyder, June 10, 2025