If Václav Havel, the recently deceased playwright and former
president of the Czech Republic, claimed that Prague’s great
writers only exist because of the city’s cafés and bars, who
am I to argue?
“
Café Slavia [
cafeslavia.cz
]
is connected with my youth,
my intellectual development and a big part of my adult
life,” said the great man once, while sitting in the grand old
coffee house overlooking the Vltava river, just across from
the National Theatre. Prague’s great cafés, he’d continued,
function as essential spaces for artistic growth, as places to
compare and challenge artistic works with others.
If anyone was qualified to say this, it would be Havel. The
problem is, right now, sitting at his favourite table in the
Slavia, I’m not really getting a strong sense of that. A few
people are chatting — are they writers? Someone is scribbling
notes – a novelist perhaps? Turning my attention from the art
déco surroundings, I put my energies into planning my task
for the day. I’m off to track down Prague’s literary watering
holes – places featured in great Czech novels or frequented by
novelists or poets – in order to ascertain just how important
they are to the identity of the city.
The fact that this amounts to a crawl between locations
serving some of the things that the Czech capital does best –
beer and hearty food – is, of course, just a happy coincidence.
Awakened by my cappuccino, I start to feel the need for
something stronger. Fortunately, I have Havel’s own words
to guide me. “I suppose that drinking beer in bars has been
a good influence on the behaviour of Czech society,” he said,
“
because beer contains less alcohol than, for example, wine,
vodka or whisky, and therefore people’s political chat in
bars is less crazy.”
Maybe so, but it’s certainly colourful at times, and in the
case of one of the greatest Czech writers, Jaroslav Hašek,
also incredibly funny. His great comedic novel,
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