| uk.abstract.en | This study aims to describe the transformations of Vladislav Vančura’s image in his posthumous reception, with regard to contemporary critical and literary-historical works on the writer. This has much to do with the ‘discourse of celebration of the “classics”’ (P. Bourdieu), in the context of which the crucial turning point was the author’s (heroic) death. At this point, an author is ‘born’, one with a legendized biography, and whose work will be received and re-evaluated from the perspective of his tragic victimhood as dominant aspect of the discourse on Vančura — as in Ivan Olbracht’s Zavraždili nejlepšího českého spisovatele (‘They murdered the best Czech writer’), for example. Vančura’s authorial name is reduced accordingly, his work unambiguously classified and explained according to a unifying formula, thus acquiring symbolic validity: Vančura died as the most important representative of Czech culture, and as its true symbol (Jan Mukařovský). By 1948, this process, by which the poet was ‘pantheonized’ and his work classicized (and so made part of the Czech literary canon), thus transforming him into a symbol, was complete. Vančura, henceforth known as a martyr embodying the national narrative of martyrdom following the Christological model of resurrection and ascension, was introduced into the symbolic pantheon to serve as the subject of mythification. The author is thus transformed into a monument of Great History, which by its nature excludes any of the complexities posed by historicization and criticism. Starting in the second half of the 1950s, after years of disregard — or rozpaky (‘awkwardness’) — in the official reception due to certain ‘avant-garde’ aspects of Vančura’s artistic personality, the critical-artistic reception and discussion of the poet’s work has been on the rise. Vančura has been re-evaluated and examined, not as a symbol but for the vital value and perennial influence of his aesthetic project, within the context of contemporary artistic creation and its discussion. Various critical studies, including a monograph by Milan Kundera (1960) and articles by Jan Mukařovský, Jiří Opelík, Jan Lopatka, Zdeněk Kožmín, Mojmír Grygar, and Zdeněk Pešat, were part of a concerted effort to liberate the poet’s work from the simplistic ideological interpretations and sclerotic aesthetic reception that resulted from its political instrumentalization. Numerous adaptations of his work for radio, theatre and musical theatre, television and film (Marketa Lazarová, Rozmarné léto), as well as new stage productions, also testified to this effort. With the onset of normalization, the canonical image of the writer, reduced to a static unifying formula for the ‘progressive personality’ and petrified by ideological interpretation (Milan Blahynka), reasserted itself in Vančura’s reception. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, a younger generation of researchers (Jiří Holý, Alena Macurová, Jiří Poláček), finding themselves in a somewhat more open discursive field, gradually freed themselves from ideologically normative interpretations. Although a number of studies were published after 1989 that discuss subthemes of Vančura’s work and analyze specific aspects of the author’s poetics, there are only a few that manage to avoid traditional interpretive schemes to address Vančura’s work as a vital question (Milan Jankovič). | cs |
