Vyhľadávanie
He was born in Budapest, the capital city of what was then Greater Hungary. His father, a tailor, and his mother, a midwife, had gone there to work from the western Slovakian town of Senica. In Budapest he completed his primary schooling and passed through the first four grades of secondary school. The revolutionary events of 1919 left such a deep impression on him that they inspired his political development for his entire life, even though his parents at that time returned to their native town and enrolled their son in a teacher training college in Modra. Study was no problem for him, so he devoted most of his time to reading. He wrote rhymes of all sorts for his fellow-students, and soon he began composing theistic reflections in verse. In the student magazine Vatra, where he had sent his own first poems, he discovered Rabindranath Tagore and commenced a translation of his poetry. Soon he had taken to imitating the symbolist Ivan Krasko and his elder fellow-student Ján Smrek (afterwards a leading poet and translator). A knowledgeable professor lent him books of modern Czech poetry. On a school outing in Prague he himself bought S. K. Neumann’s collection Rudé Zpěvy (Red songs). The work of the left-wing Czech poets very quickly grew close to his heart.
He graduated in June 1923, and in September he began to teach in a primary school in Bratislava. Novomeský, finding himself in the capital city of Slovakia, understood that he was there in order to have more opportunities to escape from teaching: his instructors, that is to say, had observed that he possessed no talents for singing, playing the violin, calligraphy, drawing, and physical training. He enrolled at the University’s Philosophical Faculty as an external student. Soon Czech literature, in particular, became a consuming interest. Wolker’s poetry fascinated him; he also appreciated the work of Nezval, Biebl, Seifert, etc. He had already begun to find there, as he afterwards said, “the connectedness of poetry and revolution.”
From the Spring of 1924 he was editor of the student magazine Mladé Slovensko, which he began to transform into a left-wing journal. He maintained a connection with the Free Association of Slovak Socialist Students, and sent poems for the first time to the communist press. On the level of ideas he began to change Mladé Slovensko also. He collaborated in the publication of the left-wing journal DAV. In less than a year he was relieved of the editorship of Mladé Slovensko, because he had been “shamelessly” propagating communism among the youth. Accordingly, he left to work in the Communist daily Pravda chudoby in Ostrava, where his boss was Klement Gottwald, later to be president. Before leaving for Prague Gottwald appointed the twenty-year-old apprentice as managing editor. Novomeský had to direct the editorial board, write a stack of pages every day, and regularly serve time in prison for infringements of the press law. It soon became apparent that he was a journalist of a kind whom the readers of the working class press had never yet known.
In February 1927 he finally published his first collection of poems, Nedeľa (Sunday), already written two years previously and many times revised and supplemented. It was most concisely appraised by his colleague Edo Urx, who pointed out that there were no “agitational verses ... soaked in the blood of class hatred”: rather, these were modern poems, full of “an uncommon humanity”, sung by a man who loved the commonplace things of life, with “a peculiar note of poetic melancholy” which no other Slovak could equal. In the summer of 1928 Novomeský (along with his closest friend Clementis) accompanied the Russian writer Iľja Erenburg on a tour of Slovakia, and they formed an enduring friendship. He took part in the inner-party discussions of that autumn and supported Gottwald’s line. (He could not foresee the kind of fruit it would bear decades afterwards!) Together with Clementis, in the following year he restarted the publication of DAV. He was editor of that journal until the autumn of 1937.
In March 1929 he went to work in Prague’s Rudý Večerník. He managed, though, to write for the whole of the contemporary communist press. The leftwing intellectuals of Prague accepted him as an equal partner. He took part with them in all political and especially cultural campaigns. Quickly he made his mark as an outstanding reporter of the E. E. Kisch type. He participated also in protest actions, after demonstrating workers were fired on by military police. The untimely death of Majakovskij affected him deeply. He sought the reasons behind it, and explained them to himself and to his readers.
His duties as a reporter required him to travel incessantly throughout the republic. In 1932, however, he managed also to get married. At a conference of young intellectuals at Trenčianské Teplice he gave a critical review of the cultural-political situation in Slovakia. He was finally able to publish a second collection of poems – Romboid (Rhomboid) – although only in a bibliophile edition. To his friends, critics and readers he was obliged to explain why he was no longer laying such emphasis on social questions as he had done in Nedeľa. He declared that in the course of his daily employment in the working class movement he was constantly involved with “social and yet more social issues”, and so quite naturally, as a man and as a poet, he had begun to seek what was missing in the poetry of that time: “the beauty of other aspects of life, and beauty in another aspect”. He had realised that the poet’s point of view is simply a struggle “for the many-sided appropriation of that which is, along with that which ought to be”; or “dream and reality, facts and fancies, how to set that particular fact to rights and change it”. Turning to the technical side of Romboid, he added that it was his “humble ambition” to make good the conquests of “poetism and the whole developmental line of modern poetry”, so as to address both the old and the newest problems of poetry, which ought never to be evaded.
In the years that followed he was one of the most prolific news reporters. In the Ľudový Denník, DAV, Tvorba, etc., he sharply formulated his opinions on the old, contemporary and future Slovakia. Everywhere he stressed the need for a revolutionary solution of the national question, and the principle of equality of Czechs and Slovaks. In the summer of 1934, together with Nezval, Jilemnický and other Czechoslovak delegates, he was a guest at the first Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow. When he spoke, among other things he supported the demands made on Soviet literature by Gorky, but above all he laid emphasis on the addresses by Radek and Bukharin (who would later be executed). Personally he admired the work of Blok, Majakovskij and Jesenin; of the living poets he admired Pasternak. However, he firmly rejected the “work” of the officially favoured Demyan Bedny. Even after returning home he did not propagate the opinions of the Stalinist ideologues (Zhdanov, etc.)
Steadfastly he continued to work for the Czech and Slovak left-wing press, but he found time too for his own poetry. The renowned publishing house of Mazáč (where Ján Smrek was the Slovak literary editor) published firstly a re-edition of his first two collections and then his new book, Otvorené okná (Open windows). The critics expressed themselves still more positively than before, asserting that his new work showed maturity. Novomeský, however, found it necessary to point out that he did not agree with those banal praises of “growing wise with age” which reject “the authentic wisdom of youth”. Sombrely he declared that in that particular time everything “pure and upright” (he meant poetry above all) had retreated “to think in a room alone”; but poetry continued to hold a position, and from there it must transport itself “through the world‘s critical confusions, so as to see purely what is pure” (and “the pure” includes also “the beautiful”). Precisely this, in his view, is “the essential function of art”; and so he deduces that if “the pain of seeing hurt even one single person” who had apprehended it in Otvorené okná, this was proof that “behind those clouds the pure, which I am thinking of, really existed”.
In June 1936, at the first Congress of Slovak Writers, he gave an analysis of the situation and indicated solutions. He had a hand in formulating the final resolution – an exceptionally progressive proclamation of Slovak writers against war and fascism, for humane values, social justice and national rights. On October 28 he received the state prize for Otvorené okná.
From January of the following year he became an international activist. In that month he took part in an international conference of cultural workers on aiding Republican Spain. At home he lectured and wrote mainly about the course of political developments abroad. In July he set off for the conference of the International Association for the Defence of Culture in Paris; after that he took part in international writers’ congresses in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona, and he visited Czechoslovak volunteers at the front. On his returned he published a series of articles and gave lectures on the situation in Spain.
In the following year there was no let-up in his feverish activity. He wrote and spoke all over the Republic about the danger of war. As the co-organiser of the international congress of PEN-clubs, he accompanied foreign participants round Slovakia. After the Munich verdict, with the suppression of the communist press he lost his employment. He sent his pregnant wife to stay with his parents in Senica. For a brief period he found work in the daily Nová svoboda. He supported himself by translating Hungarian prose, and for Smrek’s monthly Elán he wrote of the brotherhood of Czechs and Slovaks, of their “inseparability” and the continuing solidarity of both cultures. The Prague publishing house Melantrich rescued him for a brief while by issuing his collection of poems, Svätý za dedinou (The saint beyond the village).
Novomeský distanced himself from those responses which wrongly interpreted the name of his collection and the tendency of the poems. He himself did not feel he was a saint beyond the village. He was thinking only of “the present-day position of poetry” and generally of those values which the book was concerned with. According to him, in the Záhorie region “the saint beyond the village” is a somewhat mocking term for the lonely, powerless man who merely looks on and nods his head in bewilderment. It was art and humanity that had seemed to him to be “saints” of this type, incomprehensible “for common speech”, when he wrote those poems. In addition, he was forced to explain the concluding verses of the collection. He declared that here he was not thinking just of any kind of word, but of the word “that had suffered and come through many torments” in the struggles for truth and beauty. He had in mind the word of such authors as Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Verlaine, Rilke, Lermontov, Pushkin, Jesenin, Majakovskij, and the Slovak Janko Kráľ. All these he thought of as the supporting columns of a building which, although it is constructed only of words, is nevertheless “the most splendid and secure deed of the ages”. He admitted that the word in itself does not heal, but it becomes “a curative force, as an idea it becomes a power, when the masses make it their own”.
From the year 1940 Novomeský worked in Bratislava as an official of the Cereals Society (!) and lived with the prose-writer T. G. Tajovský. Soon, though, he moved to the economic journal Budovateľ. He brought his wife and son to join him in Bratislava. The Slovak Writers’ Union chose him as a member of their committee. He wrote sporadically for Elán and for the radio. Several times he was arrested and imprisoned in Ilava. Despite that, he involved himself in illegal activity.
In the summer of 1943 he became a co-founder of the 5th illegal committee of the Communist Party, and later also a member of the leadership of the National Resistance Council. A daughter was born to him in April 1944. In September he left for the rebel centre of Banská Bystrica. On October 7 he flew to London with the Slovak National Council delegation to discuss the Council’s positions with President Beneš. From mid-November, together with the Council delegation, he had talks in Moscow. In January 1945 he flew to the liberated territory of eastern Slovakia. He worked in the governing organs and prepared and directed the daily newspapers Pravda and Národná obroda. In April, in Košice, he spoke on the Slovak National Council’s attitude towards the government’s program. He was chosen as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia and appointed vice-president of the Slovak National Council and Minister for education and culture in Slovakia. In May he came to Bratislava, with the party and government organs. He delivered the keynote address at the Congress of Artistic and Scientific Workers, held in August, and sketched the new tasks of culture. In order to save Matica Slovenska from liquidation he became its president; likewise in the case of the Writers’ Union, etc. He also managed to restart Smrek’s monthly Elán, though it took him a year to do so.
During the period that followed he did much other laudable work in the field of culture, but he simply had no time to continue writing his own poetry and journalism. He published only a slender booklet of his older verses, written in 1940-41, Pašovanou ceruzkou (With a smuggled pencil). This appeared in 1948 with woodcuts by the painter Koloman Sokol, whom he had enticed back to his homeland from the USA. (Afterwards, though, he was no longer able to keep him at home.)
Two years after the so-called Victorious February (1948) the clouds began to gather over Novomeský and other personalities of the one-time DAV. The Stalinist “purges” of the 1930s quickly began to be implemented in Bulgaria, Rumania and Hungary. In Czechoslovakia the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Clementis, found himself on the register of bourgeois nationalists, along with the other former Davists, Novomeský, Husák, etc.
The first public act of the prepared drama was the criticism of the Davists at the 9th Congress of the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS) in May 1950. Viliam Široký, president of the KSS, accused the above-mentioned trio of great and dangerous errors. The inflamed congress audience rejected their self-criticism. Afterwards the Central Committee of the KSS stripped them of the functions they had hitherto held (Novomeský was transferred to the presidency of the Slovak Academy of Sciences), and exacted from them new and harsher self-criticisms. In Moscow it was finally decided that Czechoslovakia’s chief criminal had to be the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Rudolf Slánský, and Clementis was transferred from the specifically Slovak group to Slánský’s “wreckers’ ” group. A monster trial of fourteen accused took place from November 20-27, 1952; eleven, including Clementis, were condemned to death by hanging and three to life imprisonment!
The “investigators” tried for a long time, but unsuccessfully, to extract a confession from Gustáv Husák. Hence the trial of the so-called Slovak bourgeois nationalists was finally held in April 1954, a year after the death of Klement Gottwald, when political hangings in the socialist camp had already come to an end. Novomeský was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. But he was conditionally released before Christmas 1953, and a year later the remainder of his sentence was commuted “for good behaviour”! He was not, however, allowed to return to Slovakia. A lowly place in Prague’s National Literary Archive was allotted to him. From 1962 individual poems of his began to appear in the Czech monthly Plamen and in Slovenské Pohľady.
In the following year he received a civic and party rehabilitation. He was able to work in the Institute of Slovak literature in the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and to move with his family to Bratislava. 1963 saw the publication of his memoir poem, written long previously, Vila Tereza (Villa Tereza), on the meetings of Czechoslovak artists in the Soviet diplomatic building in Prague at the end of the 1920s, and a longer composition Do mesta tridsať minút (30 minutes to town), memories of the people of his native Senica. For Vila Tereza he was awarded the State Prize. Poems about his prison experience – Stamodtiaľ (From over there) – were published in the following year. In December he received the highest state decoration, Hero of the Czechoslovak Republic. For his journalistic achievement he was awarded the Ľudovít Štúr prize in 1967. After his return to Bratislava he was extraordinarily active and received many further honours. Selections of his poetry and journalism appeared, and also a cycle of poems about Bratislava – Dom, kde žijem (The house where I live).
In politics he collaborated closely with the weekly Kultúrny život, and he supported the political aspirations of Gustáv Husák, feeling grateful to the man who, by refusing to admit to fabricated crimes in prison, had saved not only his own life but also the lives of other accused, Novomeský included. However, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 their political paths gradually diverged, and in 1970 Ladislav Novomeský resigned all his functions. His disagreement with Husák’s new politics, and his disillusion with the entire course of political development, greatly aggravated the condition of his health, so that a lingering and incurable illness plagued him until his death in 1976.
Novomeský’s poetic works, and an essential part of his life-long cultural journalism, have not lost their value, even with the passage of years and the new situation in politics.
Finally, at least three names may be mentioned of books of poems by Novomeský translated into foreign languages: Izbrannoje, Progress, Moscow 1968 (afterword I. Erenburg); Vila Tereza et autres poèmes, Honfleur-Paris 1969; Abgezählt an den Fingern der Türme, Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1971.
Translated by John Minahane
