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At the beginning of the 1990’s, after a period of momentary confusion, when Czech literature seems to have temporarily lost its way in the newly establishing democratic society which emerged after the fall of communism a number of rather interesting and important writers appeared. Holding the memories of recent communist past and experiencing the historical turning point when Czech society rejoined the capitalist West, they produced an image of cultural and political initiation. They bore witness to the arrival of chaos, associated with regime change, to a crisis of personal values and a search for new ways of existence. This thesis analyzes the literary work of two contemporary Czech writers, Emil Hakl and Jan Balabán. It explores the way the reality of their narratives is shaped. It investigates the reality these narratives reflect, the reality these narratives create and the reality that the reader of these narratives re-creates on the basis of his/her knowledge of the world. The thesis considers the value judgments which are being made by Czech society through its contemporary literature about its post-communist present. The thesis also examines the question to what extent these narratives construct an image of contemporary Czech society. The thesis deals with the complete fiction written by Emil Hakl (b. 1958) and Jan Balabán (1961-2010), two popular and critically acclaimed Czech writers. The first part of the thesis analyzes Hakl’s fiction, in particular his debut Konec světa (The End of the World), a work which opens the world of Jan Beneš (Hakl’s real name), the narrating character of this text and also the narrating character of almost all the other texts written by Emil Hakl. The second part of the thesis focuses on the constructed and deconstructed world of Jan Balabán’s fiction. It deals with themes and motifs that appear and re-appear in the lives of Balabán’s male and female characters and explores individual characters whose lives have been shaped by their own personal breakdowns as well as by changes in the social and political conditions of the external world. The thesis analyzes Hakl’s and Balabán’s narratives from a narratological point of view. The thesis uses the semiotic and narratological approach (H. Porter Abbott, Mieke Bal, Seymour Chatman, Tomáš Kubíček and Gerald Prince), the post-structuralist approach (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva), the psychoanalytical approach (Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek), the postmodern (Steven Connor), the theories dealing with the typology and the mythology of the novel and the city (Daniela Hodrová), the cultural approach (John Storey) and the approach of New Historicism (Louis A. Montrose, Hayden White).

This study investigates the presence of the genre of psalms in Tsvetaeva's poetry by means of Alastaire Fowler's theory of the historical persistence of literary genres throughout history. The main argument is that in her intertextual use of psalms Tsvetaeva develops further some of their typical features such as the expression of bafflement at God's passivity or an over-familiarity in addressing God; although these features are already present in psalms, they are not given a full-blown realisation because of the religious restrictions reigning at the time and context in which they were written. Chapter One presents the theoretical tools used in this research, namely the concomitant concepts of intertextuality and genre: intertextuality focuses on how texts differ from one another, while genre theory highlights the resemblance existing between a set of texts. Taken together these concepts offer a balanced and multisided approach. Chapter Two presents the psalms and outlines its importance in Russian poetry. It also discusses Tsvetaeva's spiritual outlook. Chapter Three demonstrates that the integration of the generic intertext of psalms into Tsvetaeva's poetry results in the modification of their praying function: Tsvetaeva's psalm-like praises to God contain a veiled expression of doubt that is absent from the Psalter; another change of the praying function of psalms performed in Tsvetaeva's poetry consists in the implicit denunciation of the absence of a feminine voice. Chapter Four shows that Tsvetaeva's mixture of the psalmic intertext with the genre of diary-writing, epistolary writing and folk songs create a fruitful interaction between the universal tone of the psalmist and the private concerns voiced in diary, letters or folk laments. Chapter Five shows that in her poetry Tsvetaeva develops further some typical features of psalms such as the theme of the sacred land and that of God's passivity.

Translated by David Welsh. / Translation of Czarny potok.

Translated by David Welsh. / Translation of Disneyland.

This article analyses two literary texts: Barbara Radziwiłłówna z Jaworzna-Szczakowej by the Polish author Michał Witkowski (2007) and Sakharnyi Kreml’ by the Russian author Vladimir Sorokin (2008) in the context of postcolonial studies. I treat the terms coined by post-colonial critique, such as orientalism, orientalization, subversion or mimicry as not only ideological categories, but also as aesthetic and narrative ones. These tools turn out to be useful in the interpretation of both these texts which, despite the differences between them, may be read as examples of post-dependence narration, which articulate issues in connection with identity-related problems of modern Polish and Russian cultures. Both Witkowski and Sorokin subversively employ auto- and heterostereotypes and avail themselves of the strategy of self-orientalization, which enables the play on foreign notions regarding, respectively, Polish and Russian culture and collective identity. The novel by Michał Witkowski ironically, perversely addresses national complexes associated with the systemic transformation of 1989 and takes the floor in the discussion on post-communism. In turn, Sakharnyi Kreml’ by Vladimir Sorokin is an example of a futuristic dystopia, in which criticism of Putin’s Russia commingles with reflections on the non-autonomous and non-independent status of own culture which, in the year 2028, continues to reproduce foreign discourses and finds it difficult to articulate its own position.

The novel “Anděl / Angel Station” delivers an another example of the unusual writing style of the Czech author Jáchym Topol after “Sestra / City Sister Silver”. In his early narratives the author deals with the harrowing times after 1991 not only thematically, but also on a structural and linguistic level. This troubling thriller, driven by the search for happiness in threatening static times, unfolds into an allegory – and proclaims a story of salvation both psychedelic and from an “unreliable” perspective. The paper shows how this allegory is produced through a specific poetic of transpositions, by examples of displacement figures on the spatio-temporal level, on the level of motifs and the specific development of the story. In doing so, a glance is cast on the changes that are made through translation (drawing on the example of the

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My research answers the need for a comparative approach in the research of the history of Eastern Europe. In this respect I will compare the relationship between the writers and the power wielders in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia during the first twenty years of communist power in the two countries (1948-1968). My main idea is firstly to trace the influence of the international context on the domestic scene in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, and then to show how writers in the two countries answered the challenges posed by their political context. In terms of the international context, I will outline the role of the Soviet Union in the political development of the two countries. In connection with the domestic context, I will illustrate the two models of relations between the power wielders and the writers, exemplified by the Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov and the First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Antonín Novotný. The second trajectory of the research focuses on the conflicts conducted in the highest organ of control in the writers’ sphere - the Praesidium of the Writers’ Union. On the basis of primary sources, I will demonstrate the different approach exhibited by the writers in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia in a period of political unification. As a result of this comparison the thesis will contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between the politics and the arts in Eastern Europe during the Communist period.

This thesis is concerned with the thoughts of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818-83) on the development of the arts in his native country and the specific problems facing the Russian artist. It starts by considering the state of the creative arts in Russia in the early nineteenth century and suggests why even towards the end of his life Turgenev still had some misgivings as to whether painting and music had become a real necessity for Russian society in the same way that literature clearly had. A re-appraisal of "On the Eve" (1860) then follows, indicating how the young sculptor Shubin in this novel acts as the author's alter ego in a number of respects, in particular by reflecting Turgenev's views on heroism and tragedy. The change in Shubin's attitude towards Insarov, whom the sculptor at first tries to belittle before eventually comparing him to the noble Brutus in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar", can be said to anticipate Turgenev's own feelings about Bazarov in "Fathers and Children" (1862) and the way that this 'nihilist' attained the stature of a true tragic hero. In this chapter, too, the clichéd notion of Turgenev's alleged affinity with Schopenhauer is firmly challenged - an issue that is taken up again later on in the discussion of "Phantoms" (1864) and "Enough!" (1865). Other aspects of Turgenev's portrayal of Shubin are used to introduce the remaining chapters, where the problems of dilettantism, originality, nationalism and Slavophilism - among the most acute problems which Russian artists had to contend with in Turgenev's eyes - are explored through various works of his, especially the novel "Smoke" (1867), as well as by reference to his observations of such contemporaries as Glinka, the painter Ivanov, Tolstoi, and the composers of the 'Mighty Handful'. The springboard for the final chapter on the tragic fate befalling so many Russian artists is once again Shubin, whose voluntary exile in Rome at the end of the novel allows for certain parallels to be drawn with Gogol'. Despite Turgenev's own 'absenteeism' from Russia, for which he was much reproached, it is emphasized in the conclusion that healways remained devoted to the cause of Russia's civic and cultural development, especially in the realm of the arts, whose national, and at the same time universal, value he upheld so compellingly in his Pushkin speech of 1880.