State and Authority in the Literature of Socialist Czechoslovakia Ladislav Mňačko’s “The Taste of Power”

Abstract

This article focuses on attitudes towards state power in Czechoslovak literature in the period 1948–1989, which can be divided into three stages of development. The first decade (from the late 1940s to the late 1950s), when the state actively intervened incultural life and developed methods of artistic creation management, was characterised by an unconditional acceptance and praise in literature of the gains of socialism (including the “industrial novel” and those about collectivization, such as by Alena Bernášková with her novel The Way Is Open; V. Řezač, who vividly expressed the pathos of socialist construction, his dilogy Offensive and Battle; Bohumil Říha; and the poets Jozef Kajnar, Jan Pilář, Vlastimil Školaudi). The second stage (from the late 1950s to the late 1960s) was marked with criticism of dogmatism and the search for a model of “socialism with a human face”, with the dream being a kind of “Czech” or “third way” for Czechoslovakia which could overcome the negative aspects of both Communist and Capitalist systems (Jiří Marek, Josef Nesvadba, Jiří S. Kupka and others). The third stage (1969–1989) was the era of “Normalization”, with the parallel existence of official subcensored literature serving the interests of the state, as well as “samizdat” and émigré literature with harsh criticism and condemnation of totalitarianism (Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký, Egon Hostovský, Karel Pecka and others). The majority of attention is paid to the first and second stages since they are less known. The life and work of Ladislav Mňačko, a prominent Slovak journalist and writer is also examined. His work, undeservedly, is little studied. His novel A Taste of Power — is a political pamphlet and a psychological analysis of power and the mechanism of its decay; a harsh and uncompromising judgment of totalitarianism.