Milena attended the Minerva School for Girls, which maintained the high educational standards of the old Austrian Empire. Latin and Greek were compulsory. One of the earliest secondary schools for girls, it had been founded at considerable financial sacrifice by a small group of Czech intellectuals. Its students included many who became prominent Czech teachers, sociologists, and physicians. Dr. Alice Masaryk, daughter of Tom£S G. Masaryk, the founder and subsequent president of the Czechoslovakian Republic, was among the first graduates.
Milena and her emancipated school friends were often referred to, half admiringly, half ironically, as “the Minervans.” Though an excellent student, Milena was far from being a model child. Close friendships were formed, not only, as usual, among members of the same school class, but also, in a manner of speaking, “vertically.” Members of different classes having the same interests and abilities were drawn together, a case in point being the trio: Milena—Sataša—Jarmila. Milena influenced the other two in very different ways, and meant something very different to each of them. Jarmila was so smitten with Milena that she took to imitating her almost slavishly. She wore the same clothes, made by the same dressmaker and paid for by Dr. Jesensky, though he didn’t know it. She spoke in the same tone of voice as Milena, affected the same facial expression and the same gliding movements. There was a strong physical resemblance between the two girls—they had the same beautiful figure, the same slender waist, and fine, long legs; both had magnificent hair—and this may have given Jarmila the idea of aping her friend. But Jarmila went even further. She even managed to imitate Milena’s expressive and highly original handwriting. Though she was well aware of what she was doing, it was quite innocent and merely showed how very much she admired her friend. She read the same books as Milena, listened to the same music, and fell in love with anyone Milena happened to be in love with. But to her great disappointment she always remained a few steps behind her idol. And that is not to be wondered at, for Apollo’s breath had never touched her; there was nothing Dionysian about Jarmila.
With Sataša, who was two years younger, it was a very different matter. The grown-ups referred to Sataša and Milena as “the Siamese Twins,” and whispered that they were lesbians. Actually, it was the sort of infatuation that can exist only between sixteen-year-old girls. Both were in a state of ecstasy, totally wrapped up in each other. But there was nothing physical, nothing erotic, about their love. Nor were they jealous of each other; there was no possessiveness, only an empathy free from unkindness, a tenderness that never lost its innocence. Sataša deliberately denied herself the right to criticize her friend and never hesitated to do whatever Milena, her superior, wanted. And yet, unlike Jarmila, she never sacrificed her own strong personality so far as to imitate Milena. She never became Milena’s shadow. These girls were full of life, they loved food, delighted in bananas, oranges, chocolate, and whipped cream. Especially bananas, which were then a rarity in Europe.
On the other hand, they sometimes made a show of being as decadent, blasphemous, and morbid as possible. They experimented with medicines that Milena stole from her father’s office. They would take all sorts of pills and wait eagerly to see what the effects would be. They even tried cocaine.When warned by adults, they argued that everyone has the right to experiment with his own body.
Dr. Prochaska, Sataša’s father, despite his reputation for liberalism, was horrified by this friendship between girls. He dramatized it unreasonably and did everything in his power to separate his daughter from Milena, who was indeed responsible for most of their escapades. But in this he was unsuccessful, though he had recourse to drastic methods, In the end, the passionate friendship that had given rise to so much gossip and indignation dwindled away all by itself.
When Milena was graduated from secondary school, her father, wishing her to carry on the medical tradition of the family, made her study medicine. During the First World War he forced her to help him in treating soldiers with face wounds. She was totally unsuited to such work. She was unable to control her nausea and suffered the torments of the wounded men as keenly as if her own face had been torn to pieces. But her father had no patience with such squeamishness. As far as he was concerned, the wounded men were merely “cases,” some more interesting than others, which he, as director of the Prague-Zizkov reserve hospital, was called upon to deal with. He experimented and tried to develop new methods of treatment. Milena told me how pleased her father had been with the success of one of his experiments. He had patched up a wounded man, a good part of whose lower jaw had been shot off. But as he had been unable to make the man’s salivary glands function normally, he had suspended a rubber bag from the patient’s neck for the saliva to drip into. Milena could imagine the life that awaited these poor devils, But Jesensky was proud of his handiwork. He discharged the man as “cured” and sent him home for Christmas. A few days later, a telegram came from the man’s parents. Their son had shot himself on Christmas Eve.
After a few terms Milena dropped out of medical school. She tried her hand at music, but though gifted, she didn’t get very far; though musical to the fingertips, she did not play very well. In those days it was by no means taken for granted that the daughters of the Prague bourgeoisie should learn a profession. They got married, and in the meantime their fathers supported them. In spite of her emancipation, Milena found it perfectly normal to live at her father’s expense, or to put it bluntly, to make free with her father’s money. She herself did not live in luxury, she did not have expensive habits. But money flowed through her fingers like water. She made presents, she gave unostentatiously where it was needed or would be enjoyed. No doubt her attitude toward money was one more form of protest against one of the basic tenets of her society, namely, the sanctity of property. In her opinion, anyone who accumulated money for its own sake was inhuman and deserved no consideration.
When I asked about her looks as a young girl, she replied hesitantly, “I didn’t think much of them, but other people thought I was beautiful, though not in a classical sense like Sataša.” A friend, who knew her in her youth, wrote, “Milena was very beautiful, slender, not delicate, but wiry like a boy. The most striking thing about her was her gait; it was never vulgar, she never swayed her hips. That lovely rhythmic gait seemed to cost her no effort at all, she seemed unaware of it. It was not walking, it was a gliding to and fro. You couldn’t help seeing how spontaneous it was; her movements were not so much ‘graceful’ as fluid and immaterial. Her hands were eloquent too; they were rather large with almost bony fingers and expressed her state of mind even more clearly than her words. Her movements were reserved, economical, but that made her slightest gesture all the more expressive. She loved beauty and couldn’t live without it. In long, floating robes a la Duncan, with loose hair and an armful of flowers, she was vividly, stirringly beautiful despite her almost exaggerated disregard for what people thought. Milena loved flowers more than anything else; she had a gift for arranging them in a vase with almost Japanese lightness and grace. On flowers she was capable of spending her last groschen, and not always her own. She loved fine clothes but hated overdressing. She was able to devise costumes which, without being fashionable or sexy, were womanly, soft, flowing, and in rich unusual colors, You could say that she dressed her spirit more than her body. Milena loved nature, trees, meadows, water, and sunshine, but she was far from being a nature lover; she wasn’t one to investigate nature; she simply needed it in order to live.”
Milena was one of those people who spend themselves without stint. But she was far from being unique in her rebellion and wild urge to live. The same was true of other Minervans, especially those who were not markedly intellectual. Ready for any escapades, they gadded about, scandalizing the staid Prague bourgeoisie. This urge to break away from the old social patterns can be explained at least in part by the then prevailing atmosphere in Prague, The whole Czech nation was living in hopeful anticipation of national independence. Prague was a creative center. The young people were avid readers; they devoured the poems of the French symbolists and the Czech “vitalists”; they read Hora, Jsramek, and Neumann as well as the great Russians. In addition, a minority at least of the young Czechs were beginning to form ties with the German and German-Jewish writers living in Prague. National boundaries were giving way. It was a magnificent, though brief, period of intellectual fertility, a period fuil of expectation and promise.
The writer Josef Kodicek remembered a meeting with Milena in those years: “A sunny scene—I can still see it as clearly as if it were today. Sunday, shortly before noon, on the Pfikope. Prague is still a provincial town…. And provincial towns tend to have their corso. The Prague corso was the Prikope. I see fashionably dressed Germans, I see students promenading, Austrian officers pausing to exchange greetings, smiling, making appointments. On Sunday morning the Pfikope was old-Austrian territory. The commanding figure of Count Thun, the six-foot, eight-inch governor of Prague, towers over the crowd. He’s as thin as a stork and the best dressed man on the continent. He stands serenely, in celestial calm, with one foot tucked into the crook of his other knee, surveying the ebb and flow of the crowd through his black-rimmed monocle. Just then two young girls stroll by, arm in arm. They are both something to look at. The first Prague girls to give themselves a deliberately boyish look. Their style is perfect. Their hairdos are modeled on the English Pre-Raphaelites; they are as slender as willow withes, and there is nothing petit bourgeois about their faces or figures. They are probably the first Czech girls of the prewar generation to extend their world from the Czech promenade on Ferdinand Street to the Pfikope’ corso, thus making contact with the younger generation of German literati. They are genuine European women, a sensation! Count Thun swivels on one leg to look at them, and a wave of enthusiasm and curiosity passes through the crowd. Then Willy Haas, Kornfeld, Fuchs, and a few others of Werfel’s circle appear and introduce the two girls to us: Milena and Miss Sataša. Clearly, it’s Milena who sets the tone.
“Wild stories were told about them: Milena spent money like a drunken sailor; to avoid being late for an appointment, she had swum across the Vltava with her clothes on; she had been arrested in the city park at five o’clock in the morning for picking the ‘municipal’ magnolias so dear to her lover. Her generosity was as boundless as her extravagance. Bursting with vitality, she burned her candle at both ends.
“To look at them—how shall I put it?—with a somewhat critical eye, there was something stylized, slightly affected about both of them. But how could they have helped it? Those were the days when the Klimt and Preisler period in painting was breathing its last, when the ‘Silvery Wind’ of the poet Frana” Sramek was blowing over the fields. The Jugendstil of Ruzena Svobodova was giving way to a new trend that was a lot more earthy and robust. Young people were beginning to laugh again. Werfel’s Friend of All the World decreed the joy of living and the brotherhood of man. Decadence was giving way to robust vitality. Werfel was at work on his second volume of poems. A short while later, Milena became the magnetic pole of a whole generation of literary Czechs and Germans, among them a few who had already acquired a European reputation.” *
Milena felt drawn to German and Jewish intellectuals, not only because they were new to her, but also because among them she encountered an old culture that was very different from the narrow, petty provincialism in which she had grown up. The longing to break away from the Czech culture in which she was still rooted and become a part of a more cosmopolitan movement was characteristic of Milena.
The development of German literature in Prague was an extraordinary phenomenon, for it occurred, as it were, in a vacuum. These German writers had no roots in the country and found no audience among the great mass of Czechs surrounding them. Franz Kafka once wrote to Milena: “I have never lived among the German people. German is my mother tongue and consequently natural to me. “f This encapsulation in the German language was especially true of the Jewish writers such as Kafka, but also to a lesser degree of the few German writers living in Prague. Of Rainer Maria Rilke, for example. He found no audience among the Czechs, which makes his poetic achievement all the greater. Perhaps it is the encounter between two alien worlds that accounts for the strong mutual attraction between the lively Czech girls and these sensitive writers, an attraction favored as much by the divergence as by the similarities in their ideas, and further encouraged by the fact that all concerned, the Prague Germans and the Czech women, had grown up in the same surroundings, in this city with its ancient streets and bridges and sleepy squares, with its red, gray, and green roofs at the foot of the proud Hradcany castle, in the same Czech landscape, under the same trees, on the gentle banks of the same twining river, the Vltava. In this sharply divided city, they came from very different environments. But now—and this was the new factor—young people on both sides of the divide dropped their deep-seated prejudices and found their way to one another. But for all her interest in new things and people, Milena always remained independent and never imitated anyone. However many Germans and Prague Jews may have attracted her and shared their thoughts with her, she always remained the same warmhearted, thoroughly Czech girl.
Among the girls at the Minerva School, there were quite a few strong personalities, quite a few shining lights, but Milena outshone them all. What distinguished her most was her strong feeling for others, thanks to which she won the affection of all sorts of people, men as well as women. She recognized no social barriers; she made friends in all walks of life, but she was gifted with a sixth sense that enabled her to detect pretense, to see through the veneer of acquired habits to the heart and core of the human being. Social forms and conventions mattered little to her, least of all those of the narrow bourgeois society in which she had grown up.
The Minervans were in no sense a formal or exclusive group. They never engaged in organized activities on the order of the German Youth Movement. They were all such out-and-out individuals that the mere thought of forming a group would have struck them as absurd. Up until the early thirties, when she joined the Communist party, Milena belonged to no group whatever, though there were several among the Prague intellectuals. She moved freely among artists and writers of all trends and schools, and was likely to turn up anywhere.
While most of her girlfriends were unduly given to sensual pleasures, Milena, though quite capable of enjoying herself and often accused of amorality, was more intellectual in her ways. The others, the “Bacchantes,” regarded her as a kind of bluestocking.
Milena, the most daring and most anarchistic, was almost the only one who was able, thanks to her energy and vitality, to fulfill the expectations justified by her great gifts. Thanks to some secret force within her, she was able, after sinking to the lowest depths, to rise again and find her way back to normal life and the pursuit of high ambitions.
The young people of those years were molded not only by literature, but also by the feminist movement, which in Bohemia could boast of a particularly romantic tradition. A good friend of Milena once said, “I always thought of heron horseback with a pistol in her belt.” He may have been thinking of the “war of the maidens,” a legend often invoked by the members of the Bohemian feminist movement. The story is that long, long ago, when Princess Libusa ruled over Bohemia, women were held in high esteem. Wishing to maintain her dynasty, she cast about for a prince consort and chose Pfemysl, a simple peasant, sur-named Pfemysl the Plowman. When the princess died, Pfemysl became ruler over Bohemia, and it was all up with the women’s power and prestige. But the women insisted on their old rights and rejected the rule of the new prince and the men. They left Pfemysl’s castle of Vysehrad and built one of their own on the Vltava, which they named “Devin,” the Maiden’s Castle. They then made war on the male sex by force of arms and by guile, but were finally defeated in a decisive battle, in which their leader Vlasta and several hundred maidens lost their lives.
One of the most remarkable Bohemian women and a pioneer of the faninist movement was the writer Bozena Nemcová (1820— 1862), whose beautiful book The Grandmother is still popular today. Apart from her own writing, she collected and transcribed Czech folktales. Milena has often been likened to her, and in speaking of Milena’s style Franz Kafka once said, “In the Czech language I know (with my limited knowledge) only one music, that of Bozena Nemcová; here I see a different music, but comparable to the other in determination, passion, tenderness, and above all a clairvoyant intelligence.”* There is also a certain similarity in the two women’s lives. Both overstepped the bounds of bourgeois morality, both loved with all their hearts, both suffered deep and repeated disappointments, and both subscribed, for a time at least, to the radical political left.
Since Bozena Nemcová there have been other outstanding women in Bohemia who have made a name for themselves either in literature or in public affairs. Two of these were Ruzena and Marie Jesenská, Milena’s aunts and her father’s sisters. Marie Jesenská, the younger, was known for her translations of Dickens, George Eliot, and other English novelists. Ruzena, the elder, was one of the best-known woman writers of her time. Her early works were sentimental, neoromantic poems, often suggestive of folk songs. Later, she turned to prose, love stories, at which she was more successful. She had the courage to deal with erotic problems, a novelty at the time, especially for a woman writer. She never recovered from her first unhappy love affair. The search for true happiness in love is the main theme of her work. What the well-known Czech literary historian Arne Novak has to say of Ruzena Jesenská seems almost to foreshadow the life of her niece. He speaks of her “steadily improving work …”and, in connection withher later novels, of’lovingly delineated figures of courageous women who, whether in happiness or in shipwreck, follow only the prompting of their hearts.”
For years Aunt Ruzena and Milena disapproved of each other. Horrified at Milena’s wild life, her rigidly bourgeois aunt kept trying to mother her. But Milena rebuffed her aunt and made fun of her old-maidishness and sentimental books. Later on, when life had dealt Milena cruel blows, when she had proved herself as a writer and shown political courage as well, mutual respect developed into loving tenderness. Milena fled to Aunt Ruzena when in need of comfort and support. In her she found boundless devotion; Ruzena loved her despite, or possibly because of, all her faults. Once, when Aunt Ruzena was seventy-three years old, she remarked sadly, “I fear I’m growing old; I haven’t fallen in love for three years now.”
Throughout the history of Bohemia, women distinguished themselves by their courage and combativeness. The same longing for freedom from convention that inspired Milena and the Mi-nervans, the same courage to swim against the stream, runs like a red thread from generation to generation.
Milena may have inherited her spirit of independence. As Jan Jesensky never wearied of pointing out, he was descended from an old Czech family. There is still a memorial tablet in the Old Town Hall listing his ancestor Jan Jessenius among the martyrs of the Czech nation. Born in 1566, Jessenius studied in Breslau, Wittenberg, and Padua, where he took his degree as a doctor of medicine. He then returned to Breslau, became an instructor at the university, and at the same time personal physician to the elector of Saxony. In 1600 he was called to Prague, where the astronomer Tycho Brahe recommended him as physician to the emperor Rudolf II and later to the emperor Matthias.
In Prague, Jan Jessenius soon became a celebrity, both in scientific circles and among the people. In June 1600 he was the first man in Central Europe to dissect a cadaver. In 1617 when a new rector of Charles University was to be elected, the name of Jan Jessenius was put forward. Jessenius, who was a nobleman of Hungarian-Slovak descent, spoke no Czech but only German and Latin, and many thought it inappropriate that a foreigner unversed in the language of the land should be made rector of the Czech university. In the end, however, he was elected, the decisive factor being his Protestantism.
Jessenius fought fearlessly for the progressive ideas of his time, notably freedom of conscience and freedom of scientific investigation, against the opposition of the Church. He resisted the efforts of the emperor Ferdinand II to gain control of the Charles University.
After the “defenestration” of the Catholic councillors in Prague, the revolt of the Bohemian Protestants erupted. Jan Jessenius was among the rebels. After their defeat in the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, he was arrested along with more than twenty other leaders of the uprising and condemned to death. When the death sentence was read to him, he is quoted as having said, “You are treating us disgracefully, but I want you to know that others will come who will bury with honor our heads, which you will have desecrated and put on show.” The manner of his execution was cruel in the extreme; before he was beheaded, his tongue was cut out.