Ballek’s Lesné divadlo as a Political Statement

Abstract

More than 60 years ago the Czech writer, Karel Čapek, wrote that ‘one loves one’s native region and serves the state’.¹ These words, which serve as the motto to the second part of the Ladislav Ballek’s latest novel, Lesné divadlo, were not chosen by the author coincidentally. The nub of Čapek’s idea, that it really would not be commendable if Slovak self-confidence ended with the Little Carpathians, is also not without substance. Čapek writes that the boundaries of this self-confidence ‘are in Cheb and Sluknov’. And these words do indeed constitute a certain key to the resolution of Ballek’s epic conception, in which the native region and that narrow region’s history not only love each other incestuously, but also bind them with public, even important, affairs of state. In Lesné divadlo service to the state on its southern frontier is linked with service on its western frontier; the gaiety of Palánk is linked with the contemplative sobriety of the Bohemian Forest. The main character does his national service as a border-guard in the Bohemian Forest and his father had been an excise man in southern Slovakia. The relationship between these two men’s activities, a relationship which makes for a path to national synthesis, is neither simple nor unambiguous. Nevertheless, it does mark something like a zenith in Ballek’s epic conception of the world, of the lot of the Slovaks from a broad national and international point of view, in his conception of man as a part of complex, often contradictory, individual and socio-historical or political systems.