Authors

Viliam Nádaskay¹;  ¹ Institute of Slovak Literature of SAS, Slovakia

Discussion

Normalisation – the period following the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia – manifested itself in many aspects of public life, including cultural politics. In an attempt to steer and control the literary culture, the political daily Nové slovo (lit. New word) would publish a special section introducing aspiring poets, advising them on their technique and themes, and organising competitions like “best engaged poem” in 1972 or “at the occasion of 25^th anniversary of the victorious February” in 1973. The section “Z najmladšej poézie” (From the youngest poetry) was published in 1972 – 1977 and for several years it was curated by a devoted member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia and the director of a large state publishing house and a key Slovak poet at the same time, Vojtech Mihálik. Later, the daily devoted a separate weekly literary supplement to young writers (1978 – 1983). This publication space, consisting in its beginnings of two standard newspaper pages, together with the telegraphic feedback from the editor published at the margins, was a sort of a young writer’s workshop and served as the sole officially mandated creative hive for young literature. Majority of young writers in the official cultural circles of the 1970s and 1980s published in Nové slovo. And yet, only a handful entered the Slovak literary canon after the fall of state socialism, mostly due to overall poor quality of their writing, aesthetic uniformity and (often) ideological imprint in lieu of socially engaged literature and socialist humanist framework. This should not be surprising as the workshop itself did not necessarily strive to discover new talents and remodel the socialist literary canon, but primarily to saturate the literary field with cooperative individuals and create an illusion of an integral literary field and a new exciting canon being formed. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s model of the literary field, the paper will outline the workshop's history and significance, with special attention dedicated to its gatekeeping function, symbolic prestige and alignment with the cultural policies of Normalisation. The paper will also look at the form of feedback provided by the editors, who mostly encouraged writers (and especially poets) to perfect their formal skills and ideological unambiguity within the boundaries of preferred topics. The contribution aims at showing how the workshop resonated with the party politics and social atmosphere of Normalisation when conformism and cooperation was exchanged for peaceful life as well as benefits and prestige of a writer's status, a common notion in today's Czech and Slovak (literary) historiography.