Svätý za katrem: Cesta buržoazního nacionalisty tam a zase zpátky
A saint behind bars: A bourgeois nationalist’s journey there and back again The possibilities and limits of contextual biography as a historiographical genre

Summary/Abstract: Through an analysis of Zdeněk Doskočil's monograph on a key period in Ladislav Novomeský’s life and work, this essay attempts to examine the possibilities and limits of biography as a historiographical genre. The author relies on attempts to reformulate biography as a distinct but traditionally convention-bound genre of “writing about the past” so as to bring it closer to what is known as contextual biography (Hans Renders, Binne de Haan). The text places Doskočil’s book among a number of other monographs published in recent years on luminaries of the Czech and Slovak Marxist intellectual elite (e.g. Zdeněk Nejedlý and Gustáv Husák). It focuses on the dilemmas faced by the author, who chooses a line of interpretation that differs from the chronological and holistic kind, as well as on the “Novomeský case”, suggesting the opportunities that can be followed up by a researcher in an endeavour to contextualize an individual “fate”. Rather than coming to specific conclusions, the text thus aims to formulate the questions that contemporary biography ought to be raising.

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