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5The Dynamic 1960s, Part One Significant New Plays The 1960s represent the high-water crest of Czech theatre of the twentieth century. The many repressed talents of the postwar generation began to assert themselves as the contra-artistic ideology and practices of the Communist regime entered a slackened phase after the death of Stalin and other hardliners and, later, the official denunciation of the worst excesses of the Stalinist era. As already indicated , notable creative work began to appear in the late 1950s. It spread and grew in vitality in the 1960s and had the promise of a bright future embodied in the 1968 ideal of “socialism with a human face,” the motto of the Prague Spring, the significant liberalizing movement from within the Communist Party which we associate most clearly with the name of Alexander Dubček.1 This liberalizing creative surge was cut off abruptly and harshly with the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies under Soviet leadership . Fearful of the infectious spread of democratic ideas and projects throughout its empire, the Soviet leadership felt compelled to stamp out the Czechoslovakia experiment, as it had previously done in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956). For Czech theatre, the experience was a trauma similar to those of 1938 and 1948; once again, its organic evolution was, if not aborted, at least deformed. The Czech theatre’s achievements, which reached world-class status by the mid-1960s, were the products both of playwrights and of those who produced their works: theatre companies, directors, and designers. I believe that this rich period of Czech theatre and drama may best be discussed by focusing first on the new playwrights and then on those who embodied their work in the theatre. This chapter emphasizes the notable plays of this peak era, with only occasional attention to how they were staged.2 [94] m o d e r n c z e c h t h e a t r e As already suggested, many playwrights as well as other theatre people were in favor of the socialist ideals underlying the 1948 change of regime, or at least sympathetic to the lofty moral ideals expressed by the Communist Party. Before long, however, the very humanism that prompted the intellectuals’ and artists’ rejection of a bourgeois capitalistic society with its seemingly inherent disregard for spiritual and cultural welfare led them to become progressively distressed by the realities of the new socialist order. The phrase that symbolized the liberating surge of 1968 known as the Prague Spring — “socialism with a human face” — implicitly condemned a regime that had lost sight of virtually all human-centered values. The efforts culminating in 1968 in Czechoslovakia were directed at restoring integrity and credibility to socialist ideals that had been increasingly ignored over the previous twenty years. The year 1956 was decisive in marking the beginning of the reversal of the march of dismal years of forced social engineering. The denunciation of Stalin by Khrushchev at the 1956 Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union sent powerful signals to the Czechoslovakian CP apparatus. In 1956, also, the Second Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union was held in Prague, and for the first time several writers questioned or even spoke against certain policies and practices affecting their profession as well as against certain general social abuses. From then until roughly 1963 additional liberalizing measures alternated with arbitrary acts of repression: what was given with one hand was taken away with the other. Nevertheless, increased opportunities for artistic expression became available , and a degree of questioning of previously near-sacred sociopolitical premises was tolerated. Coupled with these gradual, tentative improvements was a growing awareness of and interest in existential philosophy: the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus and the plays of Jean Anouilh, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett became more available and could be discussed, although rarely performed before the 1960s. On a less intellectual level, increased interest began to be paid to the everyday personal problems of the ordinary individual as distinct from schematic figures derived from ideological formulae. Although some Czech plays began to reflect existential themes, the plays as plays still remained rooted in variations of traditionally realistic forms throughout the 1950s. A few novels at least partly critical of life since 1948 were published, and some Czech plays also reflected the growing spirit of questioning and skepticism, although direct criticism of the...

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