Zbabělci

The Cowards

First edition cover
Author	Josef Škvorecký
Original title	Zbabělci
Translator	Victor Gollancz
Country	Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
Language	Czech
Set in	Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
Publisher	Grove Press, 68 Publishers
Publication date	1958
Media type	Print
Pages	418 pp
OCLC	45347424

The Cowards (originally Zbabělci) is a Czech novel by Josef Škvorecký. Written in 1948–49 but not published until 1958, it is a story from the very end of the Second World War in Europe. Narrated in the first person by a Czech at the end of his teens, Danny Smiřický, it takes place in the week 4–11 May 1945 in his home town, a fictional town called Kostelec in northeast Bohemia, close to the frontier with then-German Middle Silesia (now part of Poland).

Škvorecký's prose is mostly narrative and immediate. This is interspersed with introspective passages in which Danny thinks in long sentences of many clauses representing the movement of his mind from one related thought to another.

Škvorecký modelled Kostelec on his own home town of Náchod, and Smiřický is a semi-autobigraphical character based on the author. Like Náchod, Kostelec is a border town on a river and overlooked by a castle. Like Škvorecký, Smiřický is the educated, middle-class son of a bank clerk, loves jazz music and has spent two years as a forced labourer in a Messerschmitt aircraft factory. Danny belongs to a jazz and swing band of middle-class young men that plays in a local café and tries to impress the local girls. But everyone knows that Danny's love for the beautiful Irena is unrequited, and instead she loves Zdenek who shares her enthusiasm for mountaineering.

The novel opens with Kostelec still under German occupation, and ends a week later after the Red Army has liberated the town. The town's German garrison plans to retreat west in the hope of surrendering to the US Army rather than the Soviets. Kostelec's Czech civic authorities, who had cooperated (and in some cases possibly collaborated) with the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia authorities, want to keep the town calm and avoid bloodshed. They fear that local Czechoslovak Communist (KSČ) partisans are planning a revolution not only against the retreating Germans but also to prevent restoration of the pre-war capitalist order. The local elite thus organize "revolutionary troops" only to disarm Czech population and keep the young men under control. Groups of disarmed youngsters are sent to patrol and to prevent the communist resistance from raiding the German ammunition train. Danny and his friends have lost the illusions and deserted.