Od normativní negativity k empatickému narativismu?: portréty československých komunistů v kontextu vývoje biografického psaní

• Authors: Stanislav Holubec , Vojtěch Čurda

Title variants

EN

From normative negativity to empathetic narrativism?: portraying Czechoslovak Communists in the evolving landscape of biographical writing

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

The study situates the biographies of communist elites within the broader evolution, transformations, and possibilities of the biographical genre. The first part traces the historical development of biographical writing in Western historiography, while the second focuses on the genre's application to leaders and representatives of the Czechoslovak communist movement, from the 1930s to the present-day boom in PhD dissertations and book-length biographies. The authors demonstrate that although biography is one of the most traditional forms of historical narrative, it has faced significant critique since the late nineteenth century. Influential schools such as the Annales movement, along with other historiographical trends that emphasize the primacy of social and economic structures over individual agency, have challenged the genre's foundations. The traditional conception of biography as constructing a meaningful whole of a human life was also challenged in intellectual circles by poststructuralism. Nevertheless, the biographical genre has enjoyed a renaissance since the 1970s, driven by the so-called biographical turn, aided by the development of microhistory and memory studies, the ability to respond to the linguistic turn in historiography, and the interest of the social sciences in the fate of representatives of marginalized classes, ethnicities or other minorities. Within the genre of Western biography, portraits of the leaders of the communist movement became a widespread, if traditionally conceived, field during the twentieth century. In the Czech historiography of the communist elites, however, the methodological inspirations of Western biography did not apply much, and "positivist" biographies, based primarily on a detailed study of the source base, were more successful. The development of this genre, however, had its own dynamics: in the 1990s, instead of classical biographies, shorter "medallions" of top Communist Party officials and figures within the repressive apparatus were produced, often marked by a strong moral accent, condemning their actions, and by a focus on the Stalinist era of the early 1950s. Around the turn of the millennium, historians began adopting a more distanced, analytical approach. Their work expanded to cover later periods of state socialism and incorporated a wider range of sources, including testimonies of living descendants and other relatives of communist elites.

EN

A significant milestone came with Jiří Křesťan's 2013 biography of Zdeněk Nejedlý (1878-1962) - historian, musicologist, and politician - which catalysed a wave of biographies focused on communist actors, mainly intellectuals and often reformist communists from the 1960s, whom some of the historical community is trying to approach in a more empathetic way, attempting to grasp the motives behind their actions and to understand the complexities of life under state socialism. Since then, Czech biographical writing has increasingly drawn, somewhat selectively, on Western influences. These include an interest in the "second lives" of historical figures, the use of oral history and life writing that blend personal testimony with archival research, and a tentative dialogue with social science theories, albeit in a rather declarative form. Authors have also increasingly turned their attention to personalities of the communist movement with ambiguous identities and complex trajectories, moving beyond black-and-white categories of good and evil.

Keywords

CS

Československo; česká historiografie; západní historiografie; žánr historické biografie; komunismus; Komunistická strana Československa (KSČ); komunistické elity; teorie a metodologie historiografie

EN

Czechoslovakia; Czech historiography; Western historiography; genre of historical biography; communism; Communist Party of Czechoslovakia; communist elites; theory and methodology of historiography

Discipline

• HISTORY: HISTORY

• Publisher: Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
• Year: 2025
• Volume: 32
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 17-67
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Stanislav Holubec

• Soudobé dějiny, redakce, Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v.v.i., Vlašská 9, 118 40 Praha 1, Czech Republic

author

Vojtěch Čurda

• Soudobé dějiny, redakce, Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v.v.i., Vlašská 9, 118 40 Praha 1, Czech Republic