Egon Bondy’s 1973 novel Unsound Siblings (Invalidní sourozenci) was recently published in English for the first time. The book is regarded as a classic parody of Czechoslovakia’s Communist authorities and is a fascinating document of the underground world of that era. I discussed Unsound Siblings with David Vaughan, author of the afterword to the English translation.
David Vaughan|Photo: Khalil Baalbaki, Czech Radio
“Not many people know Egon Bondy as a novelist. He’s very well-known as a rather rebellious, anarchic poet, from the whole period from the post-war era right up to his death in 2007.
“But he wrote several novels and this is his first one, in fact. It’s from the early 1970s and is called in the new English translation Unsound Siblings.
“It’s kind of a science-fiction novel. It’s set 600 years into the future, but it’s really about his own time and the life of the Czechoslovak underground in the 1970s, the music scene and the people who were revolving around it.
“So in that sense, I suppose, it’s a kind of allegory.”
Egon Bondy|Photo: Radim Beznoska, Právo / Profimedia
How does it stand up, over 50 years later?
“I think that’s the amazing thing about it, actually: Several of its themes are extremely current and relevant to our own time.
“It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world, which is on the brink of going out of existence.
“Water levels are rising and there are these two groups: official society, who are living in cities and believe that everything can be solved by technological progress; and people who are living completely outside of society.
“The latter are called in the English translation ‘the Disfunctionals’, and of course this is very much the underground of the 1970s.
“A core idea of the book is that these people are convinced that whatever problems happen to the environment, they’ll be able to stop them by the next technological advancement.
“And those who are living outside just say, This is nonsense, this isn’t going to work, we’ve got to live in a different way.
“I don’t want to spoil the ending – though I don’t think it really matters with a book like this – but they’re the ones who survive.
“I think that is very, very relevant to the debates about the environment today.
“And there are all sorts of nuances. Not only was Bondy a poet and a novelist, he was also a highly respected philosopher. He wrote several books and one of them, about Buddhism, is still influential.
“So he reflects on what this excessive faith in technology means. And also how you can keep your integrity in a society without having to succumb to the rules of people who you profoundly disagree with.”
Egon Bondy|Photo: David Neff, MAFRA / Profimedia
This book was inspired by his cooperation with the Plastic People of the Universe, the famous underground band whose members and associates were jailed in 1976. What form did Bondy’s cooperation with the group take?
“It’s a wonderful story. He started writing poems for them, and they started putting his poems to music, after he’d got to know the famous key figure of the underground, Ivan Martin Jirous, known also as Magor, or the Madman, or the Lunatic.
Ivan Martin Jirous|Photo: Václav Jirsa, Právo / Profimedia
“They actually met at a psychiatric hospital when they were both there, and then when they came home he started writing poetry for the band.
“And it was ideal, because it was very concise. It’s very rebellious. It was just what they needed.
“Also, the underground was a world of its own, outside of the official world – and that was where he very much felt at home.”
I don’t know much about Bondy, but I do know he was a secret police informer. But it seems that that aspect of his life is viewed in a nuanced way by people who knew him closely?
“I think it is. For example, Martin Machovec, who knew him, told me that he was known as somebody who had a habit of saying a bit too much.
David Vaughan, Martin Machovec (right)|Photo: Radio Prague International
“That was their way of saying that perhaps you should be careful what you said to him, or perhaps he’s going to pass information on.
“And he didn’t really hide it, which is interesting.
“So when it became absolutely clear, after the fall of communism, that he had been involved with the secret police, many of his friends forgave him.
“Another view, which is also very true, is, OK, for whatever reasons, he did inform to the secret police, in its very essence all his writing is always profoundly subversive – and that’s the legacy that stays.”
Egon Bondy’s Unsound Siblings, translated by Mark Corner and with an afterword by (former Radio Prague International editor-in-chief) David Vaughan, is available on the Karolinum Press imprint.