Orchestrace jedné denunciace

In 1950, the cultural weekly magazine Tvorba launched a defamation campaign against Jaroslav Seifert. The impetus for this was the poet’s Song of Viktorka, but the literary arguments were largely based on political reasons. Party officials wanted to silence Seifert because of his negative attitude towards the new regime. Writer and literary scholar Vratislav Maňák (Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University) examines the case from a broad perspective of literary, media, and political history, describing the mechanisms of cultural life in which literary criticism did not promote poetry, but rather served as a tool of propaganda and censorship.