Elegantne zvládnutá biografia
An Elegantly Handled Biography

Summary/Abstract: Zdeněk Doskočil’s biography, "V žaláři a vyhnanství: Ladislav Novomeský v éře stalinismu a poststalinismu" [In Prison and Exile: Ladislav Novomeský in the Era of Stalinism and Post-Stalinism], presents the fate of the Slovak and Czechoslovak poet, journalist and politician Ladislav Novomeský (1904–1976). In interwar Prague, Novomeský was involved in the activities of the Slovak left-wing cultural group DAV. During the Second World War he became a member of the illegal leadership of the Slovak Communist Party and after the war he was a deputy of the National Assembly and, as Commissioner (povereník) of Education and Enlightenment, also a member of the Slovak government. In 1951 he was arrested and, in 1954, in a political trial together with Gustáv Husák (1913–1991) and other so-called Slovak bourgeois nationalists, he was sentenced to ten years in prison. Having been released a year later, however, he returned to public life and eventually to high political office during the 1960s. In the reviewer’s opinion, in the key chapters that deal with Novomeský’s imprisonment and his journey towards political rehabilitation, Doskočil succeeds, using all the relevant sources, to create a well-informed, balanced, empathetic and readable picture of one of the most important (Czecho-) Slovak communist intellectuals. He thoroughly analyses the preparation and course of the “bourgeois nationalists” trial and describes the reactions of the Slovak intellectual milieu. Doskočil’s book thus ranks among the best biographical works that Czech (and Slovak) historiography has produced in recent years.

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