Journal article

Publication year: 2019

Pages: 17-29

Journal: Slavia: časopis pro slovanskou filologii

Volume number: 88

Issue number: 1

ISSN: 0037-6736

URL: https://kramerius.lib.cas.cz/view/uuid:24bd2a2d-7a21-4452-a19b-bdf7a4b9ee6d

Publisher: Slovanský Ústav

Abstract: 
This article argues that the identification of the forgotten Czech author Norbert Fryd with Socialist Realism is only partially appropriate. The plot of his most widely recognized text, the concentration camp novel Krabice zivych (A Box of Lives, 1956), actually fails to substantiate the compulsory teleology of growing ideological awareness. Instead, the novel's manifold characters engage in disparate renegotiations of the gender identities that they held outside the camp. Drawing on R. W. Connell's Gender and Power (1987), it is argued that the narrator of the alleged Socialist-Realist concentration camp novel is more fascinated with gender shifts than with ideology. The former are depicted as caused by the interaction of different patterns of femininities and masculinities in the camp.The most significant element of reductionism which can be diagnosed in this intriguing disparateness of gender interactions and shifts in Fryd's A Box of Lives is the fixation on power relations (not so different from that in Connell's theory). In the case of one single female figure (the gracile Hungarian girl Jolan), Fryd's narrator discards his own rule that everybody's gender identity undergoes a renegotiation in the concentration camp. This exemption betrays a rather conventional sympathy for shy and innocent femininity. Consequently, the de-eroticized mutual responsibility that the main character, Zdenek, and Jolan develop for each other is the only instance when Fryd's unideological focus on unpredictable gender dynamics retires behind the "political (anti-)erotics" of Socialist Realism.This, however, does not preclude the author from concluding that Fryd's A Box of Lives deserves a new reading from the point of view of literary anthropology and Holocaust Gender Studies - and maybe also a new critical edition of the novel.

Harvard Citation style: Uffelmann, D. (2019) Genderová dynamika v koncentračním táboře. Krabice živých od Norberta Frýda, Slavia: časopis pro slovanskou filologii, 88(1), pp. 17-29. https://kramerius.lib.cas.cz/view/uuid:24bd2a2d-7a21-4452-a19b-bdf7a4b9ee6d

APA Citation style: Uffelmann, D. (2019). Genderová dynamika v koncentračním táboře. Krabice živých od Norberta Frýda. Slavia: časopis pro slovanskou filologii. 88(1), 17-29. https://kramerius.lib.cas.cz/view/uuid:24bd2a2d-7a21-4452-a19b-bdf7a4b9ee6d