Hogyan váljuk szocialista realistává
How to become a social realist

Rewriting One’s Own Work

Summary/Abstract: Many Czech writers whose first books were published during the First Republic (1918–38) revised those considerably for re-edition after the Communist takeover in 1948. Using a vast range of examples this paper track types of changes and aspires to characterize the literary norms of the 1950s. Revisions of these works led to a fundamental shift of the genre that could be described as ‘journalistic prose fiction’, and served as an ideological variant of the historical novel. The study argues that a novelist could become a Socialist Realist by abandoning the perspective of the engaged witness, and narrate stories with the task to legitimize the present. The present was to be depicted as a necessary consequence of the whole course of history until the point of publication.

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