Good-bye, samizdat : twenty years of Czechoslovak underground writing

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Czechoslovakia's Communist government banned writers, but it couldn't silence them. Unable to publish openly, these writers secretly exchanged works, of which 35 samples are offered in this intriguing and remarkably diverse collection, ranging from fairy tales to philosophical and political essays. Alexander Kliment tells a story of a shrewd tailor and his unusual house guest--Death. Petr Fidelius's essay discusses the self-justifying "discourse of Communist power" and its destructive impact on language and thought. Ivan M. Havel, musing about knowledge, finds that the conventional scientific community accepts comfortably only what "fits well into the mosaic of previously accepted pieces of cognizance." Such works offer a glimpse of what people wrote to sustain themselves and one another in times of artistic and intellectual repression. Unfortunately, aside from general introductory essays and a few explanatory notes, Goetz-Stankiewicz ( The Silenced Theater ) provides pk little assistance in clarifying the subtler or culture-specific aspects of the more complex pieces.--Anotace … full description

Bibliographic Details

Other Authors

A. G. Brain
Timothy Garton Ash, 1955-
Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz, 1927-2022

Document Type

Books

Physical Description

XXI, 309 s. ; 22 cm

Published

Evanston : Northwestern University Press, 1992

Subjects

česká literatura > samizdatová literatura > český disent > Charta 77 > česká filozofie > Československo > politický vývoj

sborníky

Item Description

Pozn. o autorech a překl. sborníku
Vl. jména překl. jsou Alice a Gerry Turner
Pozn
Odkazy na lit

ISBN

0-8101-1035-0