The Writer's Retreat
Pavel Dvořák does not believe in writer's block. He believes in writer's congestion — a state in which the words are there, somewhere, but the channels through which they flow have become clogged with the debris of daily life: deadlines, emails, social obligations, the incessant noise of Prague's literary scene. When this happens — and it happens, he admits, more often than he would like — he packs a small bag and takes the bus to Marienbad.
He has been doing this for twelve years, since he was twenty-nine and struggling with the second act of his debut novel. A friend suggested he try writing somewhere quiet. Pavel chose Marienbad on impulse — it was the first place that came to mind, a town he associated with Goethe and Kafka and a certain old-world stillness that seemed conducive to thought.
"Prague is wonderful for living. It is terrible for writing. Too many cafes, too many friends, too many distractions. In Marienbad, there is nothing to do but think and walk and drink the water. For a writer, that is paradise."
The Routine
Pavel's Marienbad routine is as precise as a medical prescription. He arrives on a Monday, always a Monday, and checks into a modest pension near the park. He unpacks, arranges his notebooks and pens on the desk, and goes for a long walk through the forest. He does not write on the first day. The first day is for decompression — for letting the noise of the city drain away and the silence of the town fill the space it leaves behind.
On Tuesday, he begins. He writes in the morning, from seven until noon, in his room or — when the weather permits — on a bench in the Skalníkovy sady park. He writes by hand, in Czech, in a series of hardback notebooks that he buys in bulk from a stationery shop in Vinohrady. No laptop, no phone, no internet. Just the pen, the page, and the quiet.
Afternoons are for walking. He follows the same circuit every day: along the colonnade, past the Singing Fountain, up through the forest to the Geological Park, and back via the Ferdinand Spring. The walk takes about ninety minutes, and he uses it to think through whatever he wrote that morning — to test the sentences in his mind, to rearrange the architecture of a scene, to listen for the rhythm of the prose.
"Walking is thinking. The body moves, and the mind follows. I have solved more plot problems on the path to the Ferdinand Spring than at any desk."
Three Novels and Counting
Pavel has started three novels in Marienbad. The first, Skleněné město (The Glass City), was published to critical acclaim and won a minor literary prize. The second, Hodiny pod vodou (Hours Underwater), was longlisted for the Magnesia Litera. The third is still in progress — he is reluctant to discuss it, as writers often are, but hints that it involves a spa town not unlike Marienbad and a cast of characters who meet, by chance, at a mineral spring.
He is quick to point out that he does not write about Marienbad — or at least, not directly. The town does not appear by name in his fiction. But its atmosphere, its rhythm, its peculiar combination of beauty and melancholy, permeates everything he writes here.
"Marienbad is not my subject. It is my instrument. Like a pianist needs a good piano, I need a good place. And this is the best place I know."
The Literary History
Pavel is deeply aware of the literary history that surrounds him. Goethe visited Marienbad three times in the 1820s and wrote the famous Marienbad Elegy — a poem of unrequited love composed in the carriage as he left the town for the last time. Kafka came in 1916, seeking relief from the tuberculosis that would eventually claim him. Gogol, Ibsen, Twain, Kipling — the guest lists of Marienbad's golden age read like a syllabus of world literature.
Pavel does not claim to belong in such company. But he feels a kinship with these writers — a recognition that they came here for the same reasons he does: for the silence, for the beauty, for the way the town seems to exist slightly outside of time.
He once found, in an antiquarian bookshop on Hlavní třída, a first edition of Goethe's Marienbader Elegie. He did not buy it — it was far beyond his means — but he stood in the shop for twenty minutes, holding it carefully, reading the familiar lines, and feeling the strange, electric connection that occurs when you stand in the same town where a great work was conceived, holding the physical object in which it was first set down.
"Every writer who comes to Marienbad walks in Goethe's footsteps. You cannot help it. The paths are the same, the springs are the same, the light is the same. Only the language changes."
Why He Keeps Coming Back
Pavel is forty-one now and increasingly well-known in Czech literary circles. He could afford grander retreats — a villa in Tuscany, a cabin in Norway, a residency at an American university. Friends suggest these alternatives regularly. He smiles and declines.
Marienbad, he says, has everything a writer needs and nothing a writer does not need. The water clears the head. The walks clear the mind. The silence clears the page. And the town, with its faded grandeur and its enduring beauty, provides a backdrop against which stories seem to want to be told.
His next visit is already planned. A Monday in October. A modest pension near the park. A stack of blank notebooks. And the quiet certainty that somewhere between the colonnade and the forest, the words will come.
"People ask me for writing advice. I give them one word: Marienbad. They think I am joking. I am not."