EXPERIMENT A 50. LÉTA
1950S AND EXPERIMENT

Summary/Abstract: From the moment of its emergence, the totalitarian regime of Communist Czechoslovakia began to justify its right to exist. One of the basic norm-creating events in Czech post-1948 literature and literary criticism was the working conference, and specifically the plenary meeting, of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers (Svaz československých spisovatelů), which took place in January 1950. The author primarily attempts to define the basis and form of the totalitarian-autocratic system on a general level and in its concrete manifestations in the 1950s. He devotes attention to events taking place in the interwar period which paved the way for the changes in Czech society and in Czech art of the 1950s, especially considering events in the Soviet Union. The central part of the book is devoted to limiting and codifying normativity in Czech literature of the 1950s, to an attempt to define the binding rules of artistic creation and its interpretation, which however continued to change and thus escaped definitive stabilization The greatest polemic against this norm-creating approach was the concrete artistic work itself. Part of the book is a commented edition of the stenographic record of the plenary session about poetry, which became a site of enunciation of norms for artistic creation.

• Details
• Contents