O vině, nápravě a zapomnění. Ideová eroze stranických intelektuálů
Of guilt, reparation and oblivion the 1950’s and 1960’s in Czechoslovakia

Summary/Abstract: Renowned literary historian Petr Hrubý describes the stories of nineteen intellectuals who succumbed to the persuasion of communism, took an active part in the consolidation of the totalitarian communist regime, ignored all signs of its illegality during the 1950s, only to sober up gradually in the ‘thaw’ during the years after Stalin’s death and try more or less to join the process of democratisation in the 1960s. And it is especially this contrast between saying almost idiotically ‘yes’ to the communist power and the subsequent efforts at amending their evident mistakes, at least in part, that can help us to view personalities such as economist Ota Šik, philosopher Karel Kosík, and writers Pavel Kohout and Milan Kundera more soberly. It was them who intellectually covered the back of the regime that imprisoned thousands of other intellectuals without any apparent guilt. Nowadays many of them still form a common opinion of the era they lived in and also of themselves.

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