The Image of Russian Literature in Czech Literary Monographs of the 1920s

Abstract

The article deals with the first Czech monographs on Russian Soviet literature, including in the context of classical Russian literature, published in the 1920s. With exceptional political and cultural pluralism in this golden era of Czech history, Russian writers were often perceived by Czech critics and researchers through the prism of the political views of the latter, as a result of which very different, if not opposite, interpretations of their works appeared. This is clearly seen in publications in periodicals of different orientations, which has been shown in our previous studies. The aim of this article was to find out how the views of the authors influence the vision of Russian literature and how the approaches to its study differ in this regard. The ideological orientation of the authors affected not only the interpretation of the work of Russian writers and the literary process as a whole, but also the structure of their works. František Kubka in the book Poets of Revolutionary Russia (1924) gave a philosophical vision of revolutionary poetry as a representative of the Slavophile nationalist wing considering poets of different ideological views. Jiří Weil in the book Russian Revolutionary Literature (1924) gave the Czech reader a panorama of Russian revolutionary literature as a bearer of socialist ideas, viewing Russian contemporary writers in terms of how well they managed to become genuinely in praise of the revolution. Augustin Alois Vrzal, being a Catholic priest, in the book A Brief History of New Russian Literature (1926) showed the history of Russian literature of the twentieth century, mainly from a religious position.