The Story of a Communist Ideologue and the Shaping of Czechoslovak Culture in the 20th Century

This publication traces the influence of the journalist, literary critic, politician and communist ideologue Ladislav Štoll (1902-1981) on the formation of Czechoslovak culture in the 20th century. The life of Ladislav Štoll is depicted in the form of a political biography that shows his activities in the context of the debates, polemics and political development of the Czechoslovak cultural left. Key chapters focus on Štoll's political involvement in the cultural politics of the 1950s, including the influence of his best-known paper, Thirty Years of Struggle for Czech Socialist Poetry. The book chronicles Štoll's political rise and the period of critical evaluation of his political-aesthetic concepts during the destalinization of the second half of the 1950s, the fall from power during the Prague Spring of 1968, and his return and activities in the 1970s.