Socialist Dandies International: East Europe, 1946-1959

This article maps the looks and lifestyle choices of small groups of young, like-minded people who emerged in the postwar Soviet Union and East Europe in the background of huge political, social, and cultural changes. With their androgynous bodies wrapped in drape jackets and narrow trousers, and their love of jazz and swing, these young men stood in a sharp contrast to the official ideology that promoted socialism as a new, pure, and highly rationalized project, its ideal robust and strong man, and its mass culture that insisted on educational and restrained forms of entertainment. Through the categories of dress, body, and big city, the article investigates the clashes, and the eventual truce, between the socialist streamlined and rationalized master narrative and the young dandies' fragmented and disordered narrative. The article argues that the socialist dandies were not politically minded, and that their challenge to the officially proclaimed values was informed by their adolescent recklessness and a general postwar desolation. They were declared state enemies because the socialist regimes did not allow for alternative types of modernity. Consequently, the authorities condemned the young dandies' looks and interests as cosmopolitan, because they originated in the West, and as artificial, since they belonged to the culture that had preceded a new socialist world

The Bass Saxophone

Print Edition: 150 copies.Print Pages: 1 broadsidePrint Illustrations: ill. Note: photoengraving and stenciled pigmented paper pulp, rubber stamps, and glitter.Printing: LetterpressPaper: Handmade paper (abaca and cotton linter)Typography: Handset Univeres; Goudy InitialsPhysical Dimensions: 46.5 x 30.5 cmPrint Original Price: 60 U.S. dollarsColophon: This keepsake handmade at the Logan Elm Press & Papermill on the occasion of Josef Skvorecky's residency in the Program in Creative Writing at The Oho State University, Fall 1990. This selection was taken from The Bass Saxophone (Alfred E. Knopf, Inc.) copyright 1977 by Josef Skvorecky. Of 150 signed and numbered copies, this is number

Karel Čapek i „renesansa“ češke kriminalističke proze 1958 – 1969.

After an entire decade (1948-1957) of being strictly forbidden and anathematized, Czech crime fiction gained sway in the post-February literary life at the end of the fifties. There were several impulses that led to this occurrence: (1) fatigue of the constructive novel as a representative prose genre of the first half of the fifties, (2) the Moscow conference on Sci-Fi and crime fiction in July of 1958, and (3) a series of essays, Marsyas of the US, published in the beginning of 1958 by L. Dorůžka, F. Jungwirth and J.Škvorecký in Světová literatura revue. In addition to that, works of Czech literary classic writer Karel Čapek carried imense importance in the process of affirmation of crime fiction in the period 1958-1969, which can also be seen in the works of writers and literary critics of liberal (pro-western) orientation. This article analyzes Čapek's contribution to the “Rennaissance” of Czech crime fiction on two different levels. The first level is a review of connections between his book of essays Marsyas or On the sidelines of literature and essays by Dorůžka, Jungwirth and Škvorecky in Marsyas of the US. The second level aims to detect the Čapek motifs in crime fiction produced between1958 and 1969

The first need: hunger in Jan Němec's Diamonds of the Night

This article analyses the semiotic grammar of food in Jan Němec's surreal film Démanty noci/Diamonds of the Night (1964). After first locating Diamonds within the Czechoslovak New Wave and a tradition of Holocaust literature and cinema, I explore the film's representation of hunger and thirst. My analysis synthesises the film with Primo Levi's evocative meditation on the victims of the Holocaust, arguing that Němec's protagonists become a form of ‘living hunger’, and enter into a ‘condition of pure survival’. The film thus comments on the totalising Nazi mission and its attempt to desubjectify its victims by laying claim to their bodies