Abstract
Dealing with a so far unknown part of Czech translation history, the paper uncovers traces of communist ideology in Czech translations of poems written by a Russian and Soviet poet Sergey Jesenin (1895-1925). First, it focuses on the Jesenin translations by Josef Hora (1891-1945), whose renderings of classical Russian verse have been and still are considered as canonical.
Second, based on various translation-related facts, the article goes on presenting Jesenin as one of the politically and ideologically most controversial poets both in the Soviet Union and the former Czechoslovakia.