The introduction to this study describes the genesis of Vladislav Vančura’s novel The End of the Old Times (1934), which was based on a film script about Baron Munchausen. This is followed by an outline of its critical reception at the time and its historical background. It involves both the phenomenon of emigration from Russia after 1917 and the land reform carried out in Czechoslovakia from 1919 onwards. The core of the study is an analysis of Jan Mukařovský’s study of the novel, published in 1934 in the journal Listy pro umění a kritiku (Art and Criticism) and Mukařovský’s afterword to the fourth edition of The End of the Old Times, published in 1958. The author also considers both analysed texts in the context of the relevant literature.
This article deals with the aesthetic views that Vladislav Vančura formulated in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Vančura sympathetically followed the emergence of Prague structuralism and its concepts. The dominant role of the aesthetic function in art met his requirement for “poeticity”, while in Vančura’s works the structuralists found suitable material to support their concepts. Jan Mukařovský wrote about Vančura in a positive light not only in the 1930s and 1940s, but also later on, when Vančura’s works found themselves in potential conflict with the demands of “realism” and “the people”. An example of the reverse case, i.e. a fundamental misunderstanding based on different ideas about literature, can be found in the criticism of Vančura’s novel The Last Judgement by Ferdinand Peroutka.
This study describes the origin and development of the friendship between the literary scholar Jan Mukařovský (1891–1975) and the writer Vladislav Vančura (1891–1942). Mukařovský’s interpretations of Vančura’s literary works are the main focus of the study. Both Mukařovský’s published works and texts that were never published (e.g. university lectures) are analysed. On the basis of archival research, the author of the study proves that Mukařovský analysed Vančura’s work much earlier than he published his first-ever work on Vančura in 1934. In the course of the 1940s to 1960s, Mukařovský published many texts on Vančura in which he remembered Vančura as a friend, poet, Communist and anti-fascist activist.
The work of Vladislav Vančura has attracted the attention of literary theorists from the very beginning. Among other attempts to get a theoretical grip, those offered by Jan Mukařovský and Lubomír Doležel provide us with two different but methodologically connected approaches to the author’s work. These represent two phases of Czech structuralist thought about literature. This study critically compares both approaches and highlights their similarities and dissimilarities.