normalizácia

During the period of so-called normalization in the former Czechoslovakia, the restrictive cultural policy ousted numerous oppositional artists, theoreticians, and writers from the public cultural sphere through bans on exhibitions and publications. As a consequence, the affected individuals developed their own means of enabling creative, scientific, and literary work beyond censorship. A key medium for the realization of officially banned texts, studies, and projects was illegal and clandestine self-publishing, also called “samizdat”.

During the recent years, we have witnessed an ever-growing nostalgia towards state socialism as well as continuing attempts to normalize the communist regime. The article examines one of the reactions to this phenomenon, namely the attempts to create an anti-communist grand narrative in historiography and the intrinsic contradictions of this endeavor. It demonstrates that, to a large extent, the new anti-communist canon uses explanatory models and rhetorical techniques borrowed from the communist historiography itself.

The study deals with the question of continuity between pre- and post 1989 Czech and Slovak historiography. This problem is demonstrated on cases of these two much criticized types of narratives - historical-totalitarian (Czech case) and nationalist (in Slovak case). The analysis is based on the recent discussions among Czech historians and attempts to apply some of the conclusions on the Slovak case.

The paper is aimed to explore possibilities of analysing popular culture of the era of the state socialism. There is demonstrated how the relationship between popular culture and the so­cialist society can be described by the same model as in West European societies - from the viewpoint of the Gramscian concept of hegemony. The paper deals with the role of popular culture in the Czechoslovak society, particularly with its participation in the process of reaching a con­sensus between the governing minority and subordinated majority.