From Svejk's example derived the fictional Jara da Cimrman, a kind of kitsch anti-Svejk, concocted by a group of writers and actors partly as a protest against authority during the Communist era. In a country that claims no towering inventors or explorers, Cimrman became the quintessential Czech hero, a Zelig who trekked to the North Pole but missed it by several yards, who advised Chekhov, but failed to get credit. ("Two sisters?" he asked the Russian. "Isn't that too few?")
"It's the difference between us and the Soviets," Ladislav Smoljak, one of Cimrman's creators, said one recent morning in his apartment, where an imitation Vermeer hung on the wall. "The oppression under which we lived was mostly mild so our reaction has been mild too. Mystification is a part of it."
"Mystification is too strong a word," Knizak, the gallery director, responded. "It's more nebulous: important and unimportant at once, not aggressive, light, distant, not black-humored. Czechs don't start revolutions in the streets. We settle things over beer in pubs."
Which, as it happened, was where Jiri Rak held forth the other night. A specialist in Czech smallness and a historian of culture, he summed up Ztohoven's larger meaning in a neighborhood bar. "When people make fun of something, they are making themselves free of it," he said. "That's the condition of the small nation. It's a defense for everyone today in the globalized world.
"I think the goal of Czech mystification is to show us that we live in a world continually mystifying us - the politicians, the advertisers." He paused over his Pilsner, then raised the glass. "Thank God for Ztohoven."
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