Abstract
The paper is dealing with a topic of the genre of biography and its role in historical culture of Czechoslovakia. In this paper I will examine a very successful publishing serie of important publishing house Melantrich, which consist of about one hundred biographies during thirty years of its existence (1961 - 1991).
In this publishing serie there were published biographies of diffrent approaches and intellectual level and many of them are popular till today. There were publishe biographies of a persons from canon of czech literature like a Božena Němcová or Karel Čapek, but also a representats of history of communist movement in Czech lands.
The key question of my paper is: what kind of relationship to the past this serie established? What kind of arguments where used to legitimate the genre of biography in the socialist era? What was the relation between nacional narrative and socialist approach to the history in the debate around this publishing serie? How the books were chosen to be published in the serie? The research of this serie could be a useful insight not only into a history of a genre of biography, but also into a historical culture of socialist era in Czekoslovakia.