Země sovětů očima a perem československých intelektuálů
The land of the Soviets in the eyes and described by the pen of Czechoslovak intellectuals

Summary/Abstract: Davidová Glogarová, Jana and Jaroslav David: Obrazy z cest do země sovětů: České cestopisy do sovětského Ruska a Sovětského svazu 1917–1968. Brno and Ostrava: Host and Ostravská univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, 2017, 255 pp., ISBN 978-80-7577-225-1 and 978-80-7464-934-9; Šimová, Kateřina, Daniela Kolenovská, and Milan Drápala (eds.): Cesty do utopie: Sovětské Rusko ve svědectvích meziválečných československých intelektuálů. Prague: Prostor, 2017, 871 pp., ISBN 978-80-7260-331-2. The reviewer introduces and compares two books dedicated to literary texts based on travel experiences of writers, artists, journalists, politicians and other Czech, or Czechoslovak, citizens to the Soviet Union. In her opinion, they as a whole bring a very rich testimony, diverse as to its genres, topics, and opinions, on how the visitors, most of them intellectuals, were perceiving the situation in the newborn Soviet state and how they informed the domestic public about it. The two authors of Images from travels to the land of the Soviets: Czech travelogues from Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union 1917–1968 present excerpts from dozens of such texts, analyze and interpret them from various perspectives, and monitor their transformations over a long period of time, since the formation of the Soviet state until the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (which meant a profound disillusionment of the SovietUnion for Czechoslovak people). In doing so, they devote special attention to the language of the analyzed texts, which typically use Russian expressions, toponyms or abbreviations. The anthology Travels to Utopia: Soviet Russia in testimonies of interwar Czechoslovak intellectuals is an extensive edition of texts written and published during the existence of the First Czechoslovak Republic and provided with two historical studies clarifying the international and Czechoslovak context of travels of Western intellectuals to the Soviet Union at that time, and a final chapter outlining the symbolical structure of Utopian image of the Soviet reality, plus many explanatory editorial comments and other additions. The relatively complex, but well-thought-out structure of the book combined with the inter-textual approach of the editors’ trio allow the reader to perceive and confront remarkable contrasts and mutually contradictory effects of testimonies about the inter-war Soviet Russia.

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