Of all the covers that appeared on the many, many expat publications to come out of Prague in the 1990s, one has always stood out to me as maybe the most iconic. It's a simple image of the curved back of a woman posing nude, her hair swirled up in a bun, which appeared on the front of Jáma Revue’s Summer 1995 edition. Slightly racy for a literary review, perhaps, but subdued and tasteful at the same time. It was unlike anything else on the newsstands.
I’m not entirely sure what about it captured “Prague” or made it so meaningful to me. After all, there's no Charles Bridge or Prague Castle in sight. Maybe it was the juxtaposition of a nude figure with a literary review, and the implied suggestion of freedom of expression after decades of state control. Or maybe it was the sense of playfulness -- the idea that intellectual life could come with a dose of humor and a willingness to not take itself too seriously.
Or perhaps it was simply the style of the image itself: its distressed texture and earthy tones. Prague in the 1990s was beautiful, but not yet polished in the way it is today. The roughness of the image spoke to something about the city as it was at the time.
I confess I hadn't thought too much about that cover, or the publication itself, for many years, until a couple of months ago when I began doing some research for a three-part blog post on the many expat publications that appeared in Prague in the 1990s.
Once I saw the cover again, it immediately worked its old magic and evoked those old feelings about the city that I thought had been lost to time and memory. That said, I knew nothing about the details of the cover or how it had come together. The Jáma Revue's masthead for the issue credited the artist as Valerij Narbekov, a name which brought back no particular memories. I couldn’t recall if our paths had ever crossed. The model herself was not named in the issue.
I assumed the story behind the cover had been forgotten, like so many small details from that period. I wrote the blog series, published it, and then shared the link to various Facebook groups, including the group Ex-Pats in Prague in the 90s, to let people know it was out there. Not long after, I got a surprise.
A couple weeks after publishing the blog series, I found a message waiting for me on Facebook Messenger. I didn’t recognize the sender's name. The message read as follows:
“Hello, I don’t know if you will even see this or it will go to some spam box, but I have a question about the image you have from the 'Jáma Revue.' I think that may be me. I have been searching for this picture for years and years. This is literally like finding a needle in a haystack for me.”
The message turned out to be from the model herself, an American named Ivy Allen. Her story goes like this: In the summer of 1995, she arrived in Prague with a friend, Veronica, while on a months-long backpacking trip across Europe. The two had traveled through London, France, Amsterdam, and Berlin before reaching Prague. Like many young travelers back then, Ivy was 24 at the time, they were short on money, staying in pensions and hostels, and making decisions day by day.
Prague had apparently made a strong impression on the two women. In our correspondence, Ivy wrote that they found the city affordable and easygoing. It was full of cafés, bars, expats, and fellow wanderers. She wrote that meeting people came easily, and one of the best places to make new friends was the popular bar, Jáma (see map, below), owned by the American expat Max Munson.
By coincidence, not long before Ivy and her friend arrived in Prague, Max and some of his friends had founded a new literary journal called Jáma Revue.
Through that Jáma friendship circle, Ivy met the Russian artist Valerij Narbekov, who was a regular at the bar. She wrote that at some point he asked if she would pose for a sketch for Max’s new publication. The payment would be a free burger or something like that (in fairness, Jáma's burgers back then were pretty good). The session took place in a Prague studio somewhere, though Ivy can no longer recall exactly where. She does remember, though, that she posed with her hair pinned up in a loose bun. Valerij made a large pencil drawing as the first version of the image and gave it to her as a keepsake. She kept the sketch for many years before eventually losing it.
What Ivy never saw, however, was the finished cover itself. In fact, she didn't even know the drawing had ever appeared in print. Ivy and her friend left the city for Greece not long afterward. Only after spotting the Jáma Revue cover on Facebook decades later, did she put it all together: her fleeting encounter with Prague had somehow become part of city’s cultural record. For me, it makes an already memorable cover even better.
I’ve included here photos of the Jáma Revue, images Ivy sent me from her 1995 trip to Europe, and a few samples of Valerij’s work from his Facebook page. Ivy is doing fine, living in Texas and caring for her daughter. FB shows Valerij as living in Saint Petersburg, though his profile there hasn't been updated in several years. I reached out to him and will update this post if I hear back.
Max Munson wrote to me that he'd originally tried to purchase the cover drawing from Valerij, but it had already been sold. Max commissioned a second, similar drawing, but said it just wasn't the same.
Click this link to read my three-part series on the lost world of Prague's expat print media.
(Did you like this story and want to add your own comments -- or maybe correct something I didn't get right? Please write me at bakermark@fastmail.fm. MB)
