3 - Common experience: Mrożek, Havel, Örkeny… Chekhov

Summary

The limitations and distinctiveness of the Eastern absurd was determined on the one hand by the system of direct, “real” references to external reality, often camouflaged against censorship in a comfortable corset of absurd form. The system was identical in this respect everywhere—which was demonstrated in different years on the stages of Warsaw, Prague and Budapest theatres. Just as the often quoted Mrożek used to say that: “For us, it was not life that was absurd, it was the system,” also Vaclav Havel showed a similar understanding of the sense of absurdity (it should be reminded here that it was Havel who was named by Esslin as one of the most promising European playwrights of his generation):

“It is not reality that is fake, but its context—a system of [social] relations that is supposed to make sense of the reality, but fails to do so.”

Havel and Mrożek were often paired due to a similar understanding of the surrounding reality. As Tadeusz Nyczek commented: “The plays of both Slavic dramatists, filled with vivid socialist absurdity, turn out to be much more firmly anchored in reality than the usually completely abstract (…) plays by Western absurdists.”

One also ought to mention at this point a Hungarian dramatist, Istvan Örkeny, who in almost identical way explained the behavior of one of his dramatic protagonists, Lajos Tót: “he simply lived in absurd times and situation.” “I believe there is only one real thing—a situation,” wrote Örkeny, which is “a system in which we live and function voluntarily or against our will and out of which we try to escape in a good or bad direction.”

Havel, Mrożek, and Örkeny—the most outstanding absurdist playwrights of their times in their respective countries—agreed in their diagnoses and initial observations as to the nature of the Soviet system, but they created their own, separate and easily recognizable models of the theatre of the Eastern absurd.

Havel's model (described in detail by Tadeusz Nyczek57) was probably the most influenced by Western absurdists, from whom Havel consciously adopted the following practical rules:

First of all—characters that are not psychological types, but rather puppets (Nyczek wrote about the “game of thoughts” in Havel's works that “is similar to the game of chess, where it is always the protagonist who turns out to be the loser”);