"Cigánsky román" Josefa Sekeru Děti z hliněné vesnice a problematika literárneho kontextu

This article reflects on the issue of literary context, particularly on the increasing efforts to reconceptualize it in recent years. Using the example of Josef Sekera’s novel Děti z hliněné vesnice (1952), set among Slovak Roma, it progressively reconstructs the contexts of social history, exoticism and the reception of the work in Communist Czechoslovakia and of its German translation in East Germany. In doing so, it starts out from the assumption that different levels of contextualization can help explain the sujet tensions that Sekera’s novel fails to aesthetically alleviate in any productive way, even though it does to some extent get beyond the schematism of socialist realism.