Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [6]
The prodigals were often writers. To this day, Prague contains a Puškinovo namstí for Aleksandr Pushkin and a Gogolova street for Nikolai Gogol, but namstí Maxima Gorkého has been consigned to the cartographical dust bin. It would be nice to think that the retained street names were the result of a lengthy and passionate debate over which writers best represented the artistic ethos of the city, but Czechs are pragmatists: it is likely the streets named for Gogol and Pushkin were allowed to return due to their suburban locations, where they could exist without posing a threat to notions of Czech cultural identity, while Gorky remained banished due to his formerly central location in Old Town. This practical bent is evinced in the other Soviet hangers-on, which tend to be located in the city’s more distant corners and include Sibiské namstí (Siberia Square), which, with its whiff of exile and gulag, is appropriately located at the far northwestern corner of town.
Some of the new names aren’t up to their assigned tasks. Namstí Kinských (Kinsky Square) is a case in point. Until 1991, the square was called namstí Sovtských tankistů (Soviet Tank Personnel Square), because it displayed—in what might have functioned as the city’s longest-held parking space—the first Soviet tank to enter Nazi-occupied Prague. As resentful as Czechs are of their captivity under Communism, Russia’s liberation of Czechoslovakia from the terror of the Nazis still resonates in the country’s historical memory: to this day outside Prague’s central train station, there stands a startling statue depicting a Czech resistance fighter passionately embracing his Russian liberator. While the tank in Soviet Tank Personnel Square certainly represented the military might that kept Prague under Soviet control, it also symbolized the ephemeral period in Czech history when the Russians were liberators and not oppressors. And so, two years after the ousting of the Communists, the tank in Soviet Tank Personnel Square remained, a symbol of Russia the Czechs seemed reluctant to abjure.
Then, in 1991, artist David erný painted the tank pink. His action was greeted by its immediate repainting by the authorities, but erný’s statement so inspired the city that the tank was soon repainted pink—and not by erný but by six members of the new Czech Parliament. Soon afterward the tank was removed to a military museum and the square renamed for the nearby Kinsky Gardens. Then in 2001, after a decade of vacancy, erný proposed that the pink tank be returned to the empty square as a symbol of the progress the Czech Republic had made since 1989. It was a controversial idea. Some welcomed the prospect of the tank’s return, seeing it as a fitting symbol of Prague’s transformation, but when the Czech prime minister called erný’s proposal arrogant and ill-conceived, popular support for the project waned. Perhaps in order to head off further initiatives by erný, the Czech government decided they needed to fill the square themselves.
The fountain that now burbles at the center of Kinsky Square is unmarred by a single stripe of spray paint. It is so new that workmen still dig at its edges and the park benches surrounding it are pristine. Jets of water encircle a disk of rock, which is bisected by still more plumes of water. These water plumes are still being adjusted, and like an adolescent trying and rejecting several outfits the morning of the first day of school, the fountain waffles between ostentation and humility as it runs through its various test patterns. The jets spurt to alarming heights, a trick done in sequence like a watery