The Imperative of Moral Integrity in Tereza Boučkova’s »Indian Run«
The Imperative of Moral Integrity in Tereza Boučkova’s »Indian Run«

Author(s): Libora Oates-Indruchová
Subject(s): Gender Studies, Czech Literature
Published by: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti
Keywords: Pavel Kohout; Václav Havel; dissident movement; charta 77;
Summary/Abstract: It is the placement of the specificity of women’s experience within the political context that made the book stand out from other literary productions by women at the time of its publication, when questions of women’s identity and their different experience of political issues were not part of a general public discussion. Also, the book is a contribution to the emerging discourses of feminism in the post-1989 era. The dominant issue underlying the entire narrative is the woman-narrator’s effort to find her place in the world and her search for her ‘female identity’. Feminist concerns come to the fore especially in the narrator’s contextualization of her personal and moral experience: her world is often the world of the male dissident heroes/martyrs, here represented by her father and, presumably, by Vaclav Havel (called ‘Monologue’ in the narrative). She exposes the cost to the family, and women in particular, of both the communist system and the men’s pursuit of their ideals while disregarding their families. Although the daughter shares her father’s hatred of the system and herself signs Charter 77, she confronts his moral character and removes the aura of the dissident martyr from him. The final de-heroization comes in the post-1989 episodes, in which Monologue’s moral integrity with respect to the women in his life is brought into question. Boučkova, probably without much knowledge of feminist literature, highlights the fact that the personal is also political (while the political, in her account, is always personal, too)

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