The Remote Nation of Czechoslovakia as Visited by Mr. Gulliver on one of his Voyages
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In some of his plays Shakespeare positions the Czech lands next to the sea. The loose adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, shot by the Czech director Pavel Juráček and called Případ pro začínajícího kata (Case for a Rookie Hangman, 1969), features information that is more up-to-date. Of course, Juráček rather than Swift has to be made responsible. Unlike in Swift’s novel, however, the film’s protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, lands in a country named Balnibarbi, which is modelled on 1960s Czechoslovakia. In my paper, I will examine that way in which Juráček’s film presents a poignant analysis of the world of socialism based on “make believe”– a convention of pretending accompanied by permanent and obtrusive police surveillance, and how the adaptation, based on an eighteenth-century text, ultimately shows the irreversible decay of the Communist regime. |
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