The Soviet World of the 1930s in Czech Literature: Jiřн Weil and His Novel Moscow — the Border

Abstract

This article considers the work of the Czech writer J. Weil (1900–1959) and, in particular, his novel Moscow — the Border (1937) in a broad cultural and historical context. Weil’s fate and work were closely connected with Soviet Russia. Like other leftist Czech intellectuals, Weil was attracted by communist ideas and interested in the new Soviet Russia which claimed to rebuild the world. Weil’s relationship with the Soviet state was not easy — having gone to work in Moscow in 1934, he was already repressed in early 1935 during Stalin’s purges, and at the end of 1935 miraculously returned to Prague. The clash with Soviet reality was unavoidable. As a result, the Czech writer captured the complex impression of what he saw and felt in the USSR in his novel Moscow — the Border. The novel was one of the first (if not the first) works of fiction dedicated to the Soviet reality of the 1930s; it sees Soviet life from the perspective of foreign characters trying to find their place in Stalinist Moscow, following the second five-year plan. Their fates in the novel, on the one hand, demonstrate possible ways of interacting with the Soviet world, and on the other hand, reveal the deep contradictions of the Soviet state. In his novel, Weil does not try to give an unambiguous assessment of the Soviet system; the artistic form of the work allows the author to avoid direct assessments and conclusions and convey the complexity of the Soviet reality of the 1930s. In Czech criticism, the novel caused and still causes controversy; it is given different, often opposite assessments, largely determined by the political and cultural situation.