Socialist Realism in the Context of Existentialism: D. Tatarka and his Novel The Birthday Cake
Socialist Realism in the Context of Existentialism: D. Tatarka and his Novel The Birthday Cake

Summary/Abstract: This study is a free continuation of our monograph Dominik Tatarka in the context of existentialism, the aim of which was to grasp the central work of D. Tatarka through the perspective of existentialism. Within the interpretive analyzes, however, we did not deal with the writer’s key works of the so-called socialist realism in the mentioned publication, which means the works The First and Second Strike, The Years of Companionship and The Birthday Cake, because they required a separate approach due to their specificity and their relation to the communist regime. We gradually began to compensate the mentioned deficit, the elimination of which will enable a more comprehensive grasp of the existentialism issue in the author’s work, in the form of partial studies. In them, through the view of existentialism, we deal with the works The First and Second Strike and The Years of Companionship. The presented study solves the mentioned problem in the last novel from this line, meaning in the novel The Birthday Cake, and in this direction closes the question of existentialism in Tatarka’s key works of socialist realism.

• Details
• Contents