Samizdat Past+Present

Tomáš Glanc, Melvyn Clarke

• Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9788024640334
• eBook ISBN: 9788024640396
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Much of what we now consider the canon of twentieth-century Czech literature—the work of authors like Bohumil Hrabal, Ludvík Vaculík, and Jáchym Topol, among many others—has, in fact, just recently become widely available to readers. Long published only in censored form or in secret among political dissidents, this body of underground literature is collectively known as samizdat. Samizdat Past and Present provides an expert introduction to these writings and their history, offering insight into both the current wave of literary rediscovery and translation and contemporary debates over censorship. In a diverse array of chapters, Tomáš Glanc gathers together texts from representative figures of Czech samizdat and underground culture of the 1960s to '80s and provides a useful comparison of Czech, Polish, and Russian samizdat. From literary historians to former samizdat publishers and writers with firsthand experience of communist censorship, secret police, fake trials, and imprisonment, the authors of Samizdat Past and Present illuminate the complexities of a literature written under censorship and the struggle for freedom of thought in a totalitarian regime.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Tomáš Glanc: Long live samizdat — Editorial note
• Miroslav Červenka: The semiotics of samizdat
• Miroslav Červenka: Two notes on samizdat
• Josef Jedlička: Samizdat
• František Kautman: Question marks over unpublished literature
• Petr Fidelius: The forgotten question mark over ‘unpublished’literature
• Jiří Gruša: Censorship and literary life beyond the mass media
• Tomáš Vrba: Independent literature and freedom of thought1970–1989
• Jiří Gruntorád: Samizdat literature in Czechoslovakia duringthe 1970s and 1980s
• Martin Machovec: How underground authors and publishersfinanced their samizdats
• Martin Machovec: The group of writers around the Půlnocseries (1949–1955): a specific example of underground culturalactivities
• Alena Přibáňová – Michal Přibáň: Sixty-Eight Publishers in contactwith domestic samizdat and competition in exile
• Petr Šámal: Parallel circulation as a consequence of censorship
• Weronika Parfianowicz-Vertun: Post-Gutenberg revolution?On the Polish ‘second circulation’ and Czech samizdat
• Tomáš Glanc: Samizdat as a medium
• Commentary
• Bibliography
• Profiles