John Steinbeck, ideology, communism, Cold War, American literature, reception, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Slovenia

The paper examines the ideological dimension of the reception of John Steinbeck in three post-communist countries, namely Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Slovenia. It discusses the prevalent mode of the writer?s interpretation in the Eastern bloc which was governed by the political doctrines of the time. It is therefore often Steinbeck?s politics, in the narrow sense of the word, that is scrutinized in the prefaces, afterwords, and reviews of his writings. The literary values are either marginalized or wholly ignored. Consequently, Steinbeck?s criticism is determined by political correctness. It fails to consider the complexities of his work and treats the writer as an expedient object employed in the ideological campaign on the literary front.