Literary Politics of the Radio Free Europe in Czechoslovakia in the Period of “Normalization”

• Název práce v češtině: Literární politika Rádia Svobodná Evropa v Československu v období „normalizace“
• Název v anglickém jazyce: Literary Politics of the Radio Free Europe in Czechoslovakia in the Period of “Normalization”
• Klíčová slova: Rádio Svobodná Evropa|literární kánon|literatura studené války|kulturní hegemonie|transnacionalismus|cenzura|literárnost
• Klíčová slova anglicky: Radio Free Europe|literary canon|Cold War literature|cultural hegemony|transnationalism|censorship|literariness
• Akademický rok vypsání: 2021/2022
• Typ práce: diplomová práce
• Jazyk práce: angličtina
• Ústav: Ústav anglofonních literatur a kultur (21-UALK)
• Vedoucí / školitel: doc. Justin Quinn, Ph.D.
• Řešitel: skrytý - zadáno a potvrzeno stud. odd.
• Datum přihlášení: 28.02.2022
• Datum zadání: 28.02.2022
• Schválení administrátorem: zatím neschvalováno
• Datum potvrzení stud. oddělením: 08.03.2022
• Datum a čas obhajoby: 07.09.2022 00:00
• Datum odevzdání elektronické podoby: 11.08.2022
• Datum proběhlé obhajoby: 07.09.2022
• Odevzdaná/finalizovaná: odevzdaná studentem a finalizovaná
• Oponenti: Mgr. Františka Zezuláková Schormová, Ph.D.

Zásady pro vypracování

The American Radio Free Europe began with its regular daily program on the 1^st of May 1951 – in Czechoslovakia, the country which seemed most suitable as a target for Western propaganda, because of its ties with the West and its significant liberal democratic tradition.[1] Adding to this that the most important figure of the Czech Broadcasting Department of the Radio Free Europe since its foundation was the pre-war journalist Ferdinand Peroutka, what shaped the politics of the radio towards Czechoslovakia can easily be assumed – the culture of the post-1948 era was conceived as a disruption of the “real” tradition of the Czechoslovak liberal democracy as it was practiced in the interwar period.[2]
Based on the analysis of the activities of Radio Free Europe (its internal accounts, correspondences, etc.) as well as on the analysis of the promoted and analyzed works aired in a series of shows on the Radio, such as “Uncensored Literature” (Literatura bez cenzury) or “Radio University” (Rozhlasová univerzita), the aim of the MA thesis is to reconstruct the political and aesthetical framework based on which the Radio created its own “literary canon” and interpreted literature and society in the period after the Prague Spring, usually referred to as “normalization”. Considered as a propaganda outlet by the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, but as “a window to the world” by the regime’s opponents (the interpretation which would become the consensus after the fall of communism in 1989), the RFE occupied an ambiguous position, on which the reconstruction of its cultural activities can shed a new light. The contextualization of its literary activities within the late Cold War transnational dynamic could show not only whether the RFE promoted US soft power or rather built upon the liberal-democratic tradition of interwar Czechoslovakia, but can also reveal how cultural values change more generally.
The introductory chapter of the thesis provides the historical and theoretical background of the activities of Radio Free Europe, based on the critical overview of existing literature on the Radio’s cultural activities during the late Cold War, with the emphasis on funding, its role in international politics, its underlying ideology and internal structure. The special focus is put on the internal dynamic between the general goals of the RFE as part of the “free world” in the Western part of the Iron Curtain and the aims of the Czechoslovak editorial board who understood their activity as part of the Czechoslovak cultural space. In addition to that, the introductory chapter aims to contextualize literary activities of the Radio within the Czechoslovak cultural space of the period of “normalization” by comparing the Cold War understanding of culture within Czechoslovakia with that of the Czechoslovak editorial board of the RFE, which was strongly influenced by the American and Western concepts of culture.
The second chapter discusses the issue of censorship in Czechoslovakia and how it was treated in the RFE’s shows, and tries to answer the question of whether the selection of works was conditioned by censorship at home or if it rather shows what the world would have looked like had it not been for censorship. In other words, the chapter will try to answer the question of whether the Radio tried to create its own alternative canon which affirms or reflects Anglophone “Western” values, or whether the selection of works was merely based on the reproduction of already existing editions, such as 68 Publishers or Edice Petlice. Created on purpose or not, a canon always presupposes a selection, and selection means exclusion, thus the chapter will strive to detect what the restrictions and limits of “uncensored literature” were and what the basis for the exclusion was. For instance, whether the broadcast literature was political – overtly anti-communist, for instance – or apparently “non-political”, and how politics was manifested in literature. Also, the chapter tries to answer the question what genres and topics the Radio favored and what the influence of its American background was, both institutionally and intellectually.
The theoretical assumptions of the Radio’s activities will be reconstructed on the basis of the views expressed in the internal documents of the RFE (such as Antonin Kratochvil’s accounts “Literature and Theater: The Cultural Policy of the CPCS in 1980” and “Ten Years of the “Process of Normalization” in Czech and Slovak Literature”) as well as in the broadcast texts’ (such as Květoslav Chvatík’s essay “The Function of Criticism in a Society in Crisis”).
The third chapter of the thesis discusses the issue of what makes a work a literary work according to the editors of RFE. Summarizing the traditional formalist view of the literary work, the Russian theoretician Boris Tomashevsky singles out its two basic features: it does not depend on real-life circumstances in which it was pronounced and it is fixed by the unchangeable text.[3] Although this definition is deficient, for it excludes the millennia-long tradition of oral literature, it is a convenient starting point for the discussion of the literary works broadcast on the RFE, particularly because most of the works and the circumstances in which they were consumed undermine this definition. For instance, Karel Kryl, a poet, musician and an employee of the RFE, considered it important to emphasize in the opening note of the anthology of his texts aired on the RFE that “the radio text” requires a different treatment than a literary text.[4] On the other hand, Tomashevsky’s definition raises the question of what the literary text is. Therefore, this chapter will discuss the influence of the radio as a medium on the reception and creation of the broadcast literary works - how the medium shapes the devices employed in the construction of a literary work (the emphasis of sound and repetitions, for instance). Works printed and “fixed by the unchangeable text” had to be adapted and cut in order to be aired, which led to a paradoxical situation in which the works which were censored (or not published) in Czechoslovakia reached the recipients for the first time in an altered form. In other words, the chapter will aim to answer the question of the extent to which the medium through which literature was communicated shaped the aesthetics of literature.
The fourth chapter deals with the main points of critique of the Czechoslovak socialist system by the works aired on the RFE, such as the critique of bureaucratic socialism (seeing its economic and social structure as infeasible) and the critique of suppression of individual liberties. At the same time, it will reconstruct and discuss the values affirmed by the broadcast literary works, such as market capitalism, the affirmation of individual liberties and individualism. Thus a “prototype” of a censored literary work deemed valuable for broadcasting by the editors of the RFE will be sketched - was it a political (criticizing communism, authoritarianism and bureaucracy), or a non-engaged piece of literature which affirms the values of the world which would have existed had it not been for communism in Czechoslovakia?
Finally, the chapter tries to provide an insight into the ideological and literary sources and influences of the vision of the world represented by analyzed works. In this part, a special emphasis is put on the inter-war Czechoslovak culture and the Anglophone cultures (particularly with its concept of totalitarianism(s)).
The final chapter sums up the reconstruction of the political and aesthetic framework of Radio Free Europe’s literary activities and its contextualization within the Czechoslovak cultural space. Traditional comparative research is usually concerned with how cultural values or materials travel from one culture to another. This research deals with how a corpus of works is mediated from the outside to be included in the national cultural memory – how a dialogue of a culture with itself, conditioned by the Cold War, was conducted and how profound the effects on its cultural tradition were. The reconstruction of those processes could yield a new insight into the transnational circulation of knowledge in the Cold War era in a very peculiar way, because it is not about the transfer of cultural material from one national culture to another, but about two different and parallel developments of the “same” culture. The comparison of the two would particularly deepen the understanding of the Anglophone influence on the Czechoslovak cultural space. Finally, the chapter follows the changes in the literary canon after the political changes in 1989 which reveal the process through which “underground” values became mainstream and the mainstream values of the official culture of “normalization” became marginal. But not only that, the change in the dominant cultural values shows the relation of the canon of literature with the “common sense” of a certain culture in a certain period, because the works belonging to a canon, describing the world according to the laws of probability, define to a certain extent the limits of possible in a society.



[1]Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty ( Kentucky: The University of Kentucky Press, 2000), 1-3.
[2]Oldřich Tůma, “Czechoslovakia” in Dissent and Opposition in Communist Eastern Europe: Origins of Civil Society and Democratic Transition, ed. Detlef Pollack and Jan Wielgohs, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004), 42.
[3]Бори́с Ви́кторович Томаше́вский, Теория литературы: Поэтика (Москва: Аспент Пресс, 1996), 23.
[4]Karel Kryl, Krylogie: Autorské pořady vysílané v letech 1975-1989 rozhlasovou stanicí Svobodná Evropa (Praha: Academia, 1994), 8.

Seznam odborné literatury

Selected Bibliography:

· Cummings, Richard. Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe. 1950-1989. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2009.
· Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. London: Zer0 Books, 2009.
· Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, 1992.
· Havel, Václav. Moc bezmocných a jiné eseje. Praha: Knihovna Václava Havla, o.p.s., 2016.
· Hammond, Andrew. “From rhetoric to rollback: introductory thoughtson Cold War writing.” In Cold War Literature: Writing the global conflict. Edited by Andrew Hammond.1-15. London & New York: Routledge, 2006.
· Junek, Marek. Svobodně! Rádio Svobodná Evropa 1951-2011. Praha: Radioservis, 2011.
· Kolář, Pavel, Michal Pullmann. Co byla normalizace?: Studie o pozdním socialismu. Praha: Nakladatelství Lidové Noviny, Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, 2016.
· Puddington, Arch. Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Kentucky: The University of Kentucky Press, 2000.
· Quinn, Justin. Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
· Rakušanová, Lída. Svobodná v Evropě. Praha: Book Dock, 2020.
· Smejkalová, Jiřina. Cold War Books in the ‘Other’ Europe and What Came After. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011.
· Tůma, Oldřich. “Czechoslovakia” in Dissent and Opposition in Communist Eastern Europe: Origins of Civil Society and Democratic Transition. Edited by Detlef Pollack and Jan Wielgohs. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004.
· Tomek, Prokop. Československá redakce Radio Free Europe: Historie a vliv na československé dějiny. Praha: Academia, 2015.
· James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.