Michal Hvorecký: I feel like a minority

A young successful writer entered the Slovak literary arena like thunder from a clear sky in 1998 with his debut album Silný pocit čistoty (A Strong Sense of Cleanliness). He lives between Bratislava and German-speaking countries, where he claims Sándor Márai has become a literary superstar, who has become an inspiration to others.

This is not your first time in Košice. What does it feel like to be here?
I have gotten an impression of a colossal center of civilization today, because I had decided to come here via a route, which I had not known at all and had never used before. I set off from our old house in Staré hory, traveled via Brezno through the so-called valleys of hunger, through Dobšiná, Stratená and Medzev. When Košice suddenly appeared before me, I was happy to find myself in such metropolitan civilization.

You belong to a generation that grew up with a notion of borders deeply imprinted in your consciousness. In Košice’s candidacy project European Capital of Culture, we promote the idea that political borders do not have to overlap with borders of culture. Could you see yourself supporting such an idea?
Absolutely. I have experienced two regimes. I was growing up in the so-called socialism and my family could not travel practically anywhere. The fact that the borders finally opened to me, as a person and an author, substantially influenced my work and my entire career. I live in several places. I spend a lot of time in German-speaking countries, and then in my home in Bratislava. I realize the specific position of my city and the entire country, which embodies a border between the Germanic and Slavic world. Here, all historic events, even if mostly provincial, took place, or touched us in some way.
Cities where we live, be it Bratislava or Košice, can be inspirational. They have their own cultural identity that had been in a great extent destructed, and destroyed. Nonetheless, it has survived to great extent, and can be still developed.

Do you realize you live in a city that is only a few dozen kilometers away from the Schengen border?
I am deeply aware of it, because I have many friends, and colleagues, who are Ukrainian writers. I think the situation, in which they find themselves it is not completely fair. I feel my friends in Serbia are in a similar position. In a sense, we were lucky to have ended up on the “right” side. I perceive such a division as unjust. I think we have been losing when we have shifted Ukraine to a position, which disappears from the radar of our consciousness, or when we have been portraying it with disrespect as something hermetically shut. It is a huge country and culture that we cannot ignore.

How do you perceive the relationship between societal majority and minorities?
If we do not insist on a strict notion of social class and ethnicity division, then creative people are in a minority, and writers too have a minority profession, which in a sense wrestles with the majority society. I myself feel more like a member of a minority. When my friends and I organized Wilsonic Festival, we were dealing with borderline culture, and it was difficult promote such ideas in this dimension. What I saw today was a piece of the world that to me, a person from Bratislava, no longer exists. It has completely disappeared from common discourse. It appears in tabloids, but it is not viewed as a living space any more. It has rather become exotica. We are confronted with a notion of a majority and a minority very often, and we sometimes try to overlook it. When it comes to Bratislava, the division there also has a financial dimension. 

Slogan of our candidacy urges to Use the city. You characterize yourself as a city person. Cities in your novels possess an odd quality. How should a city be used nowadays?
People in Slovakia have forgotten to perceive the public space as their own. In essence, it has much to do with the forty years of dictatorships that instilled a feeling in us that the state is our enemy, and the state made it known that we, the citizens, are the enemies of the state. It affected the consciousness of a shared experience tremendously.
In time of globalization, as I was growing up, life had become a lot more private, more closed up. And in its essence, we are public creatures. Communication is at the base of everything. We can communicate only in a society, or a community, and it does not matter whether it is 5 people in our hip-hop clan or 250 people in a theater.  We have forgotten to comprehend consciously where we go, what places we are falling in love with, where we create our own space, and a space that belongs to a certain community.  For example, the mayor of Bratislava has complained about the lines in front of one restaurant. But I can stand in a line if I want. When I am in a city space, no mayor will tell me what I should do. If we want to come together, even if it is in shopping lines to get bananas, it is simply our free choice. Power always looks for ways to explain to us that something is not a matter of free choice or not our domain.

Is there a difference between using public space in Slovakia and in the countries of “Old Europe”?
This part of Europe is more conscious of a solidarity notion, and they acknowledge values, which exceed the idea that they are exclusively private ones. They value individual’s contribution to growth of a community more than his/her effort to hoard for themselves.
I have come across a notion of a community in America most often. People there do not view government as we do. People do not concern themselves with what takes place in Washington, unless they live there. They are involved in life of their street, or part of town – everything is based on community participation. People there perceive the strength and importance of civic initiatives much stronger.

We are sitting in a city of Sándor Márai, about whom many people living in Košice know nothing. Do you have a special tie with him?
I keep repeating that the world and especially Germany had discovered Sándor Márai long ago, but we have not. His works have been published in all world languages for about 15 years. He has become a true literary superstar in Germany. He is an author who has been listed in the 20th century European prose classics – that is spectacular achievement, because we must realize the rank includes only about one hundred authors. In Germany, it was Marcel Strabniczky, a Polish-German Jew, with a famous literary television show, who introduced Márai in the beginning. He kept explaining that Márai was not Hungarian, but an author from Košice in Eastern Slovakia. He is an author of central European literature, not a Hungarian one. He is a prominent author, and Košice should be a bit prouder of him.

How should one speak of communism and not with the communists 20 years after its fall?
I think we should communicate with the communists as well. If we do not communicate with them, Slovak parliament, government and the majority of the institutions would be done in. I am not so strict in that direction, because it is impossible in our country, but stories should be told. Our cultural dimension is unique since we have defined our identity through novelistic story telling. I would possible to start communicating this subject theme via various stories of people who lived through communism. I do not believe in a political or even legal reconciliation with past any longer. We wasted that opportunity.

Košice, as the second largest city of Slovakia, searches to find common subject matters of other European cities via project called Second cities. What in your opinion, does the second largest city in Slovakia have to offer Europe?
To talk of Košice as the second city seems like a very good idea to me. I would encourage you here by stating that Bratislava is provincial as well and acts as a city of more significance than it truly has. After all, it is a very little known city in Europe.
People are not interested in Slovak literature any more. The world does not expect from us to discover new Central European literature that has not been known. It is interested in finding out how our experience differs from their experience of Europe, and how it will contribute to the chronicles of history, which is becoming a common space in the framework of the European Union. Every region has something specific to give in this sense. This project (Second cities) should be used for the people of the city region, so that they start to perceive their own culture too. If you achieve to draw people here from abroad who will start discovering the city and the region, as previously was the case of Graz, which became the European Capital of Culture, or Sibiu, or Linz, which were smaller than Košice but could introduce themselves singularly on the European map, it would be a significant bonus.

Roman Sorger
Photo: archive M.H.

Michal Hvorecký (1976) is a Slovak writer. He was born in Bratislava. He is the author of collections of short stories Strong Sense of Cleanliness (1998), Hunters & Gatherers (2001), novels The Final Hit (2003), Plush (2005), Eskorta (2007), and a medley of short texts Pastiersky list (2008). His works have been translated into German, Italian, Polish and Czech. He wrote a play “Slovenský inštitút. Jedna komédia”.  The novel Plush has been dramatized and performed in Divadlo Aréna in Bratislava and Schauspielhaus Hannover. Every year, he attends the Wilsonic Festival, which he co-founded with a DJ Tibor Holoda in 2000.
Source: www.hvorecky.com