Vonalak konstruálása
Constructing lines

The Situation and Function of Literary Criticism at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s

Summary/Abstract: A significant part of Slovak literary historiography uses „schematism“, a notion introduced in the early 1950s for marginalizing the literary production of the late 1940s and the turn of the decade – a notion that served as a literary parallel for the criticism of “certain political mistakes” of the same years. Reflections on the „childhood diseases” of socialism from the 1950s on contributed to the disentanglement of post-Stalinist regimes from Stalinist ones. These interpretation that found their methodological grounds in historical materialism, enables critics to construct the history of modern Slovak literature as a linear and continuous movement. Alternatively, the 20th century history of Slovak literature could be understood as a series of discontinuous shifts of the dominant aesthetic units. This study follows the changes of criteria which in the activities of literary criticism helped to establish the primary values of the new political power at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s: the doctrine of socialist realism. It argues that this period is one of the key turning points in the history of Slovak literature.

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