The Plague Column
by Jaroslav Seifert
Summary
The Plague Column is a poetry collection built around one central image, the baroque monument that stands in Prague to commemorate the dead of a historical plague, which Jaroslav Seifert uses across the book as a figure for grief the state around him would rather see forgotten. Written between 1968 and 1970, in the years immediately after the Soviet invasion crushed the Prague Spring, the collection moves through several sections, one of which gives the book its title, before closing with an epilogue. The column of the title is one of the baroque plague columns raised in Prague in thanks for the end of an epidemic, and Seifert treats it as the city's standing reminder that suffering passes and is still worth remembering.
The poems inside move between memory, erotic recollection and a plain, unhurried meditation on mortality, written by a man well into old age looking back on both his own life and his city's long history of survival. Seifert's late style here marks a real break from his earlier, more formally patterned verse: these poems favor free verse and a stripped down, conversational directness, saying plainly what his younger self might once have said only obliquely. Grief runs through nearly every section without ever curdling into despair, and Prague itself, its stones, its old monuments, its accumulated losses, functions almost as a character in its own right.
Reading it means slowing down for a book written by someone no longer interested in disguising what he means, and it suits a reader drawn to late career poetry that treats aging honestly, without either sentimentality or bitterness, alongside a real, specific attachment to one city's long and difficult history.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Jaroslav Seifert the 1984 Nobel Prize in Literature for poetry which, endowed with freshness, sensuality and rich inventiveness, provides a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man. The Plague Column could not be published openly when Seifert finished writing it: Czechoslovak authorities blocked its planned 1971 release, and it circulated first only in manuscript and through the underground Petlice samizdat press starting in 1973, reaching official publication abroad through exile presses years before it could appear freely at home.
Seifert signed Charter 77, the dissident human rights declaration, in 1977, and Czechoslovakia's state controlled press gave his 1984 Nobel win only the briefest mention, a silence that spoke for itself. Poor health kept Seifert from traveling to Stockholm himself; his daughter accepted the prize on his behalf. He died in Prague in January 1986, and his funeral reportedly drew a heavy presence of the state security police, sent to suppress any public show of dissent at the grave of a poet the state had never quite known how to handle.