The Story of John Steinbeck in Communist Czechoslovakia

Figure 1.

Steinbeck, Adolf Hoffmeister, and Edward Albee together in Prague, 1963

It would not have occurred to me to write an article on this subject had it not been for the time I spent researching at San José State University as a visiting Fulbright scholar. It was only there, surfing the bookshelves in the Center for Steinbeck Studies, browsing through the translations into a host of languages, that my curiosity about Steinbeck's literary conquest of my native country, Czechoslovakia, was aroused.¹ I wondered why Steinbeck's popularity in Czechoslovakia arguably surpassed that in his own "country" of California.² More importantly, I was interested in the way Steinbeck was (mis)interpreted by literary scholars, journalists, and editors in the communist era (1948-1989), which is the focus of this study. Afterwords, dictionaries, and reviews thus form the body of critical resources upon which I draw here.

American Literature in Totalitarian Czechoslovakia

Before scrutinizing Steinbeck himself, it appears necessary to outline the environment in which the publication of Steinbeck's work took place. Geographically landlocked, Czechoslovakia was politically locked into the eastern bloc—the key was in the Soviet hands. The only permissible ideology was communism as postulated by Marx and Lenin. The capitalist world west of the Czechoslovak frontier was portrayed as corrupt and evil. The country that symbolized all the vices of the West was America. As Joseph McCarthy's America persecuted everything "un-American," communist Czechoslovakia went after the American as well. A small American flag on a T-shirt could bring the wearer a lot of trouble.

The state-controlled media systematically drew a very bleak picture of America. The anti-American propaganda was not necessarily mendacious but it showed just one side of America, especially its crime, unemployment and obscenity. In an age when the world-wide web was not yet woven, it was hard even for the inquisitive citizen to get access to reliable information about American reality. The lack of facts about American society, the American economy and related fields was compensated for by literary accounts. Consequently, American literature was not studied only for literary purposes but also provided useful insights into the life of real America. That would not have been possible without the effort of the translators who made the best works of American literature accessible to readers in Czechoslovakia.

The years following the communist takeover in 1948 were characterized by the all-permeating ideology of Marxism and Leninism, which naturally affected the critical reception of literature. In practice, it was Stalin's ideological guidelines as formulated in his essays that caused considerable damage in publishing. In 1952, a remarkable ideological guide to Western literature was published in Czechoslovakia. It bore the suggestive title Trubaduři nenávisti: Studie o současné západní úpadkové literatuře (Troubadours of Hatred: A Study of the Contemporary Decadent Literature of the West). Its author, Jaroslav Bouček, aimed to reveal "the close relationship between literature, whose goal is nothing but to sully and degrade man, and the prolonged degeneration of the capitalist order which is currently coming into a monstrous fascist bloom" (Bouček 7). In his attack, Bouček did not even spare Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck.

Despite "critics" like Bouček, American literature remained largely popular with Czech readers. As the preeminent Czech Americanist, Josef Jařab, states in his afterword to the Czech translation of Ruland's and Bradbury's From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature, "the editors of English and American sections [in publishing houses] enjoyed a certain 'protection' from the directorate; that, however, was gone once an 'ideological mistake' happened" (Jařab 402). The publishing house which deserves the greatest credit for introducing quality American literature was undoubtedly Odeon. Yet the good taste of its editors was often "corrected" or wholly marred by the censors from the ideological department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, to which all the yearly editorial plans had to be submitted. In fact, the publication of every...