„Miř přesněji!“. Korejská válka jako černý bod socialistického realismu

• Authors: Vít Schmarc

Title variants

EN

‘Take Better Aim!’: The Korean War as the Bull’s-eye of Socialist Realism

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

This article explores the representation of the Korean War as a fundamental event in the print media and belles-lettres f Stalinist Czechoslovakia from 1950 to 1952. It focuses on the special features of the mechanism of producing the image of the ‘enemy’ and the ‘hostile’ space, as well as analysing the interaction of period journalism and poetry. The author analyses the central phenomena, which created a cornerstone of the contemporaneous image of the Korean War the figure of the leader and the mythology of the origin of the ‘enemy’), and correlates them with more general mechanisms of creating reality in the first half of the 1950s. He also points out the interlinkage and mutual influences of he pointed propagandistic rhetoric and poetic imagery. The article draws on collections of verse, which contain poems reacting to the war in Korea, and on occasional poems, journalism, and caricatures published mainly in the daily Rudé rávo and the weekly Tvorba. In method, the article is in the tradition of research on ideology as a system of representing the real conditions of existence (as in the work of Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek) and the tradition of semiotic analysis of culture and society in the Stalinist period (as in the work of Vladimír Macura), identifying the very active, productive relationship between literature and the powers that be, which creates the very essence of socialist realism as a system (as discussed by Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko).

Keywords

EN

Korean War; Socialist Realism

Discipline

• HISTORY: HISTORY

• Publisher: Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
• Year: 2014
• Issue: 1-2
• Pages: 44-78

Contributors

author

Vít Schmarc

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