Official Rehabilitation of Crime Fiction in Czech Literature from 1958 to 1969

Ivačić, Matija. (2016). Official Rehabilitation of Crime Fiction in Czech Literature from 1958 to 1969. Književna smotra, 179(1). pp. 43-52. ISSN 0455-0463

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Abstract

In the article the author analyses the phenomenon of the official rehabilitation of crime fiction in Czech literature in the period from 1958 to 1969. The article bypasses a discussion of literary production of the time, nor does it concern itself with the projections of the Western model of crime fiction coming from the circle of liberal literary critics. Instead, the author focuses on the efforts of the official cultural policy to establish the “new” socialist crime novel. The author discusses the key incentives fuelling this rehabilitation (the exhaustion of the constructive novel, the Moscow conference on the sci-fi and adventure fiction), as well as the goals set by the project of the rehabilitation (colonisation and instrumentalisation of the crime novel, its incorporation in so-called “high literature” of the socialist realist literary canon). The article concludes with the final achievement of the official rehabilitation of the crime novel in light of the claims of some literary critics that the rehabilitation of the crime novel resulted in the quantitative, and not so much in the qualitative “renaissance” of the genre.

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