Jan Mukařovský and Frank Wollman between structuralism and Stalinism : two pillars of Czech structuralism at the turn of the 1950's

The paper summarises the literary thought of two great men of Czech structuralism at the turn of the 1950s – the aesthetician and literary historian Jan Mukařovský (1891–1975) and the Slavonic scholar Frank Wollman (1888–1969). While the former was already in the 1930s a radical supporter of structural aesthetics, the literary historical researches of the latter enriched the structuralist method with novel approaches (phenomenology, sociology, etc.).These attitudes then determined their "reactions" after the second world war: whereas Mukařovský entirely detached himself from structuralism, accentuating the Marx-Lenininst theory of reflection (Stranickost ve vědě a v umění, 1949 [Partisanship in science and art]), Wollman in his hitherto unpublished text Uvedení do methodologie literarněvědné a do theorie literatury (presumably 1949) [An Introduction to the methodology of literary research and to the theory of literature] did not have to abandon his concept of structuralism even in the Stalinist era. In this work he offers a coherent system of literary scholarship with emphasis on methodological issues, comparative studies and Slavonic literary studies.