Original scientific paper
How Josef Škvorecký Sought and Could Not Find a Path to Socialism
Michal Přibáň
; The Institute for Czech Literature
Abstract
The article focuses on the writer Josef Škvorecký and follows the development of his civic and political attitudes after the defeat of German Nazism, i.e., approximately from 1941-45. In the context of Škvorecký’s literary writings it concerns a period in which culminates the inevitable phase of the author’s youthful poetic creativity and his early prose writings, while simultaneously his most important novel, The Cowards, is in the making. (Still, Škvorecký in the said period didn’t publish, his entire work remained in manuscripts and could be read only by his closest friends.) After 1945 Škvorecký’s natural Christian-social orientation confronted ideas of state socialism, buttressed by the political prestige of the Soviet Union and the Czech Communist Party, but also the social degradation of conservative values and the status of the bourgeoisie. The evidence that Škvorecký sought a personal path towards an authentic “worldview”, independent of the obviously prevailing social trends, is provided principally by Škvorecký’s manuscript published only in the 1990s (The New Canterbury Tales), and were often published only fragmentary (the epic poem Do Not Despair!, the collection February Tales) or were never published (fragments of the novel The Sons of the Just, the poem Things of Life); some of which are here presented the first time ever. The significant source in the articles subsumes also Škvorecký’s published and unpublished correspondence from the 1940s and the 1950s. Although Škvorecký was considered an explicit political opponent to the most of his peers from the Youth Union, the cited sources demonstrate that in difficult times he kept his faith in the idea of socialist humanism, but would not bow to its being vulgarized by communist ideology and its means of coercion.
Keywords
Czech literature; socialism; Josef Škvorecký; artistic license; the youth movement after 1945
Hrčak ID:
249458
URI
Publication date:
29.12.2020.
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