Prophets of Revolution: Culture, Communism, and the Czech Avant-Garde, 1920--1960

This project analyzes the relationship between Czech avant-garde intellectuals and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCS) from the early 1920s through the 1950s. The goal is to demonstrate how the avant-garde, associated with international artistic movements such as Constructivism and Surrealism, played a central role articulating the values and goals of communism. Beginning with the interwar era of the Czechoslovak democratic republic and continuing through the establishment of Stalinist rule after 1948, my research demonstrates how the avant-garde fostered a sustained bond with communist functionaries through political cooperation and intellectual crossfertilization. From a broader perspective this allows us to understand communism in Czechoslovakia as an organic phenomenon with roots in the interwar First Republic, as opposed to an alien ideology imposed from outside. The boundaries between Party functionaries and their intellectual "fellow travelers" were fluid and porous. The Czech avant-garde---including a range of influential writers, actors and artists---helped build communism much as a later generation of intellectuals tore it down in 1989.;Through its analysis of intellectuals and their contributions to the development of communism, my work focuses on the various ideas and organizations that shaped avantgarde understanding of socialist aesthetics and role of art in politics. Such a focus, heretofore lacking in political studies of the CPCS, allow us to understand the popularity of the communist movement, and how intellectuals helped legitimize the communist regime after 1948. Although Czechoslovakia offered a vibrant climate for leftist politics, thanks to strong traditions of democratic rule, advanced industrial development, and influential workers' movements, the popularity of the CPCS and its seizure of power did not rely on such factors alone. Intellectuals performed a crucial task by promulgating the ideological discourses of the communist worldview. By focusing on these intellectual contributions my work offers a major reinterpretation of avant-garde, positing an analytical framework that elucidates its many contributions to communist aesthetics and after 1948 to socialist realism. In other words the distinction between "good" avant-garde art and "bad" socialist realist art is both anachronistic and misleading, occluding how both movements interacted and overlapped.