Introduction - This Epilogue is one of eight short sketches comprising "Dreaming Prague Gardens", a poetic-discursive history of a Baroque palace garden in the cultural heart of Prague (Mala Strana) recently restored and opened to the public. A version of the Prologue appeared in the Prague-based journal New Presence, details below. The intervening six sections await a proper venue for publication. This fragment is part and parcel of the Things Czech portion of the LANY Archive - Grotto.
EPILOGUEVrtbovská garden is again open, but its secret life is safe, obscured beneath the recent renovations and the cultural ubiquity of the “Baroque”. Stealing a page from the literature of Magical Prague, a body of speculation derived from medieval sources but renewed in early 1900s' fiction and 1930s' Surrealism, an entirely different order of measuring the importance of Vrtbovská garden is possible.
According to such tradition, Prague is a city built on a template of sacred geographical premises. This view is based on macrocosmic and microcosmic analogues derived in turn from archaic readings of geo-physical and astro-physical relationships. The phenomenological writings of the architectural historian Christian Norberg-Schulz are permeated with this reliance on the vague, old science of geomancy and figurative architectonics.
Image (above) - Vrtbovská Garden c.1995
The argument is as follows: Prague lies at the center of Europe and is perfectly poised to express the physical-figurative essence of “the center”. Figurative, quizzical maps of the city’s monuments, arrayed along cardinal axes (with the Vltava flowing through the idealized template), ‘confirms’ the oldest layer of the ancient city as a reflection of the heavens. Dating to the 6th century, Prague was built up in layers, all of which somehow, today, co-exist and support the iconology of the sacred construct. “In Prague, thus, we encounter a particular kind of ‘microstructure’; a structure whose richness does not only reside in the micro scale, but in what is dimly suggested.”(1)
This densely wound fabric is “sprung” in the squares, orchards and gardens of the city and “punctuated” by the legendary one hundred spires of Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque churches. The whole of Bohemia is condensed in the capital city: “[T]he hill and the river are opposed complementary forces, which make nature become alive with expressive power.” Rudolf II’s kunst- and wunderkammer (collections of miniature natural and man-made wonders) and the agate-encrusted chapel at St Vitus (noted by Apollinaire) are further crystallizations of this figurative, microcosmic phantasmagoria. The Emperor’s collection “was a goldmine of minute objects put together with microscopic care: minute ivorywork on nutshells, cherry pits and shells, delicate ornamented enamelware …” ... “Goldsmiths at the Prague Court inlaid shark’s teeth in gold as serpent’s tongues …” ... “Stone polishers chiselled rough crystals, handsteine, into miraculous landscapes, crucifixion scenes and models of mines.”(2) Vrtbovská garden is also an expression of this aestheticized miniaturization of the world, of analogies nesting within analogies, but of a cultural typological (and topological) versus symbolical order.
Angelo Maria Ripellino’s Praga Magica (1973) encapsulated the entropic poetics of Kafka, Meyrink and the later Dadaists and Surrealists, a reading of Prague’s shadowlands and underworlds, albeit fervidly post-Romantic readings of urban and cultural decay -- a literature of demented pullulation, ghosts and golems. This is a Decadent recapitulation of the Golden Age. An outstretched skein, Magical Humanism is a thread winding through Czech culture for 500 years.
These latter forms mark the outer historic reaches of the Rudolfine era. The poetics of decay are premised on a tragic, degraded historicism. The old forms were, c.1900, a debris field floating in the dark Bohemian imagination. This is the pre-modernist midnight reverie, a psychosis presaging the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Secessionist, Cubist, Constructivist and Functionalist insurrections were to follow, in rapid succession, a frenzied attempt to salvage the spirit of innovation from the spirit of despair. Kafka, the Hunger Artist, did not live long enough to see the results of the insurrections (dying in 1924). His intense individualism would not have found much solace in any such anti-historical utopian movements anyway. His solipsism perfectly encompassed the former claustrophobia of Prague’s Jewish Quarter and divisions within the city. His proto-existentialist novels, infinitely interpretive by psychoanalytical means and all published after his death, have fixed forever the image of a rotting, labyrinthine decrepit city. (Two of the greatest popular attractions, today, in Prague tourism, are ‘traces’ of Kakfa and ‘traces’ of Mozart.) Hence Hélčne Cixous' remarks in "Attacks on the Castle" (1999) that the Prague that is Prague is 'nowhere to be found'; it is, in other words, otherworldly, and resides in the mind's eye.(3) The Old Town, the New Town, and the Small Town are all relative terms. Mala Strana was founded in 1257, the Old Town in 1232-34, and the New Town in 1348. The Jewish Quarter, in the northern stretches of the Old Town, was demolished in the late 19th century. Urban renewal started, however, in the middle 18th century. In 1749, by decree of Empress Marie Theresa, most of Prague’s fortifications were pulled down opening up vast new areas for public parks and avenues lined with trees. By 1900 the city was soaked in one thousand years of strife and glory. Its next one hundred years would be no different. Kafka merely noted the death rattle of one long phase.
By the 1950s the gardens of Mala Strana were picturesque ruins, overgrown and haunted by the vagaries of history. Following the Communist putsch (in the 1940s) ownership of the palaces was disputed and the government converted the former noble estates to so-called public facilities. Ministries and apparatchiks were often 'parked' in the decaying quarters. The gardens were left to nature’s fickle care. Photographed in the 1950s by Josef Sudek, the gardens of Mala Strana represented a ragged yet dignified pre-Communist legacy. Sudek’s black-and-white photographs of these former privileged enclaves exuded ennui and nostalgia at once. Jaroslav Siefert’s poetry, often paired with Sudek’s photography, rivals that of Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) for utmost lachrymose effect. (Leopardi has been called the first aesthetician of ennui.) Beneath the rampant vegetation and cracked masonry a former glory was yet evident. Prague’s nearly-spent glory met the gaze of the alert observer, two infinities meeting (as it were), peering at one another through the cracks and gaps within the political and cultural currents cautiously encoded into Sudek’s work. His photographic series of St Vitus is perhaps his most well known series (now and then). Vrtbovská’s terraces were bedecked in the 1950s with crabgrass and wildflowers. Rampant vines draped the stairs and walls. Wild species from Petrin’s slopes invaded the walled garden. The statuary was packed off to the national museums and the stucco and fresco decorative elements slowly slid into the murk and mire of Communist-era indifference.*
In essence the gardens of Mala Strana were put to sleep, an act of architectural euthanasia. In sleeping, however, the dreaming of the gardens began. This dreaming merged with the dreaming of the Czech people … back to the First Republic … and beyond… in reverse to the Golden Age of Rudolfine Prague … and to the mythic founders of the city, the 9th-century Premyslids of Vysehrad … Czech historiography acknowledges the mystical roots of the city in the veneration of the oldest layers of its fortifications, a Michelet-like reverie (after all). The southwest foundations of the first castle are linked by a diagonal stroke to the north-east Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque ensemble at Hradcany (Prague Castle). Charles IV (1316-78) is revered, today, perhaps more than Rudolf II (the recent rehabilitation of Rudolf’s legacy notwithstanding). Both were Holy Roman Emperors who, ruling from Prague, conferred on the city a cultural preeminence, in Europe, to rival Paris, Berlin or Vienna.
The Czech nation is said to transcend political arrangements.(4) The Czech sense of identity is transpolitical. With the respect accorded multiple incarnations of the Habsburg hegemony, within a grander one-thousand-year trajectory, the Czech nation is essentially cosmopolitan and humanist. Nominally a “Catholic” country, it also sponsored the earliest Protestant revolts against the Church. Today, still a Catholic country, most Czechs profess a mischievous agnosticism or a vague pantheistic view of nature and culture. Since the Velvet Revolution in 1989, a mostly peaceful transition to democratic government, the Czech Republic, minus the revanchist political elements of Slovakia, has reemerged as a secular humanist culture with profound links to Middle European speculative philosophy. In reverse, Structuralism (at Charles University), Surrealism, Romanticism and Protestantism (notably in the Moravian Brethren and Comenius) have left traces of resistance to narrow ideological mandates imposed from outside (or within). These forms of resistance color Czech culture to this day with a kaleidoscopic, synoptic worldview rooted in crosscurrents of past struggles and a land perceived for centuries as the crossroads of Europe.
This “coloratura” is perfectly reflected in the ancient forms of the city and in the modern preoccupations of the people: There is a curious fascination abroad in the Czech Republic for the cult of genius loci expressed in a burgeoning literature of syncretist, mytho-poetic license (and licentiousness). The legends and fantastications of the Magic Prague literature summarize this quest for a quite different (and promiscuous) totalizing vision: “On the border between the zodiacal signs of Cancer and Leo in the circuit of the zodiac we cross an important watershed between the past and the future. It is a great zodiacal threshold dividing the ancestors from the progeny. The fixed fiery sign of Leo, under the rule of the Sun, represents the health and strength of new life, conceived in youth and love, like in the narrower sense of the world, creativity itself.”(5)
This borderline (borderland) runs north-west through Petrin lacing together those palaces of Mala Strana huddled at the southeast flank of Petrin, through Strahov (the great Reformation seminary and library), and to White Mountain (with its bizarre Star Villa). The symbolic center of Prague is the 12th-century Romanesque rotunda of the Holy Cross, in the Old Town. The actual center of “the holy astral geometric structure” is the presbytery of the church of St Michal in Opatovice, also in the Old Town. Seven and twelve are the original magic numbers animating Prague’s ancient ground plan. They are derived from the seven planets of the ancient cosmology and the twelve signs of the zodiac. This geometric plan stitches together the major architectural monuments of historic Prague. To presume that this magical mathematical content was still operative in Baroque Prague is not farfetched. Johannes Kepler was still kicking around and providing horoscopes for General Wallenstein in the middle 1600s. Wallenstein also commissioned the famous astrological passage for his then new palace in Mala Strana. The unproveable conjecture that Vrtbovská garden and palace inhabits this same sensibility, falling as it does on the sacred north-west axis, is the so-called riddle within the enigma. If the garden has a mystical content by virtue of this shared sacred geographic template (its close relationship to Petrin) and the Mannerist template (somewhat emasculated by recent efforts), its power to incite imaginative speculation is in no way diminished by its current neo-capitalist guise. Mannerist or Baroque, this site is marked out for magical realist significance by its very location. It harbors its secrets within the patina provided by Time Itself. Historiography Itself may well be nothing more than a surrational dream-state, the dream of dreams.
Gavin Keeney (1999)
ENDNOTES
1 - Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), passim
2 - Angelo Maria Ripellino, Magic Prague (London: Picador, 1995), pp. 74-5
3 - Hélčne Cixous, "Attacks on the Castle", in Neil Leach (ed.), Architecture and Revolution (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 228-33
*See Vladimir Denkstein, Lapidarium Narodnihu Musea (Prague: SNKLHU, 1958); Photographs in Olga Baseova’s Prazske zahrady (Prague: Panorama, 1991) show the post-communist state of the Mala Strana palace gardens. Ledeburská, Male Furstenburská, and Vrtbovská are all depicted in a state of casual abandonment with cracked walls, grassed-over terraces, lawns, peeling frescoes, white park benches, sand paths, loose masses of shrubbery, and dysfunctional fountains (oozing turgid water). The Kinsky garden, also on Petrin, has fared better owing to its Romantic origins in 1855, a style that absorbs the shocks of abandonment more agreeably.
4 - Ladislav Holy, Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), passim
5 - Milan Spurek, Praga Mysteriosa (Prague: Eminent, 1996), p. 101
A version of the Prologue for "Dreaming Prague Gardens", entitled "Facing (Down) Fake History", appeared in New Presence: Prague Journal of Central European & World Affairs (September 1999)
Vrtbovská Zahrada / History
Prague / Culture
Prague / Architecture
See also Things Czech (Yellow Pages)