Introduction: The Chosen Heirs of National Traditions

Looking at the most influential manifestos of socialist realism in Czechoslovakia after the communist takeover in 1948, one may come to the conclusion that it was poetry that occupied a privileged place in the literary policy of the new regime. In his presentation at the preliminary conference of the Czech Writers’ Union in 1950 Ladislav Štoll, a key figure of post- 1948 cultural politics, literary historian and renowned communist official – aiming to give a more precise formulation to the official Party conception of the new literature – touched upon the development of socialist poetry over the previous 30 years. In this speech, published a few months later under the title ‘Třicet let bojů za českou socialistickou poezii’ (‘Thirty Years of Fighting for Czech Socialist Poetry’, 1950), Štoll turned to poetry as material for constructing a new narrative of the historical development of Czech culture and society. The second keynote speech of the conference, given by another member of the new cultural establishment, the poet, translator and literary critic Jiří Taufer, was an aggressive attack against what the speaker considered to be regressive, decadent and pornographic tendencies of contemporary culture, and aimed directly at poets like realist Jiří Kolář and his colleagues.

Yet when we turn to official models for Czech socialist realism, we find among them many influential Soviet novels such as Fadeev's The Young Guard, Pavlenko's Happiness or Azhaev's Far from Moscow. Of course, the Czech authorities fully accepted the Soviet canon, from Gorky's Mother and Gladkov's Cement, with its heroic thrust, to contemporary ‘instant classics’ of post- war fiction.