Tom Stoppard’s Rock’n’Roll and Socialist Realism

Abstract

The goal of the paper is to study Tom Stoppard’s one of the major plays Rock’n’ Roll. From literary, socio-political and artistic standpoints analyze the author’s relation to Socialist Realism in Sovietized Czechoslovakia. Stoppard’s Rock’n Roll is a good example of intertextuality and metafictional technique. Creative mixture of the historical truth, playwright’s biography, contemporary reality and Anglo-American rock music artistically expressed in the play. Examination of these things will enable us to talk about concrete literary-aesthetic connections and differences, which finally clarify the author’s relation to Socialist Realism. Considering this, I would like to discuss several issues:

1. Tom Stoppard, Vaclav Havel and Sovietized Czechoslovakia
2. Rock music and Prague in 1968;
3. Intertextuality of the play – Milan Kundera’s fictional reality.