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THE IMPORTANCE OF IGOR HAJEK IN THE PROCESS OF ESTABLISHING THE CANON OF CZECH LITERATURE IN ANGLOPHONE WORLD

Karolina Slamova

Abstract

This paper deals with the conception of the Czech literary canon in English-speaking countries, which then functions as a profile of Czech literature intended for foreign specialists in Czech Studies and the general public. The article gives a brief overview of three stages of making the most important values of Czech literature accessible for English-speaking readers as they were presented by Martin Pilar, a Czech literary historian and theorist. The first stage beginning in the 1940s, transferred abroad the petrified Czech canon and the traditional Czech values of its national literature. It elicited the need for a more clearly nuanced methodology, which started to be applied in the early 1970s. This methodology consists in the choice of canonical writers on the basis of their reception, their importance in the Czech context, and their availability in English translation. The third stage extended from the 1990s to the beginning of the second millennium, when Czech literature found itself in a completely different cultural context after the fall of the totalitarian regime. Attention is focused on Igor Hajek, a literary critic and literary historian living in British exile after 1968, who played a significant role in the process of carrying over the Czech canon into the English-speaking countries. His main contribution in this regard is in preparing entries on Czech authors to several important English-language literary encyclopaedic dictionaries of world literature

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.35603/sws.iscss.2021/s09.54

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