Dystopian tendencies in Polish and Czech literature on the background of Yengeniy Zamyatin's novel We

Abstract

This work follows dystopian tendencies in the Polish and Czech literature in from the '20s and '30s of the 20th century compared with the canonical Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We. Based on this novel I would like to allocate several peculiar features of the dystopian fiction word:

1. the distribution of the fictional characters into two "camps";

2. petrification of the fictional world;

3. efforts to remedy social injustice;

4. the inscription weighted components of plot;

5. the discovery of the Newspeak. I try to analyze these features both in the Czech and Polish literature in the 20th and 30th years in last century. For the analysis of the Czech dystopian literature I would like to use the following titles: Dům o tisíci patrech (1929) by Jan Weiss, Velkovýroba ctnosti (1922) by Jiří Haussmann, Továrna na Absolutno (1922) by Karel Čapek and Pán světa (1925) by Emil Vachek. All these novels were released after the publication of Zamyatin's book. Czech dystopian novels in the beginning of the 20th century can be divided into two types. The first type consists of those novels with the dominant role of individual heroes, the second type focuses more on structure. None of the analyzed novel does not have the Newspeak in terms of the Zamyatin's concept. Syuzhet lines of Polish novels Pożegnanie jesieni and Nienasycenie made a big step from the Zamyatin's We. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's first novel, published seven years after the edition of the Russian fiction, therefore contains a large number of similar description of the dystopian fiction. In the second novel Nienasycenie more dominates the internal dystopia.