Open AccessCzech Samizdat Archives – the Past and the Present
Author(s) -
Alena Přibáňová
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
poznańskie studia slawistyczne
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2450-2731
pISSN - 2084-3011
DOI - 10.14746/pss.2020.19.4
Subject(s) - czech , communism , political science , socialist republic , communist state , work (physics) , publishing , history , law , economic history , politics , engineering , philosophy , mechanical engineering , linguistics
In the former Czechoslovakia, samizdat was not limited just to the dissident community: the big “publishing houses” like Vaculík’s Petlice soon became a model for many local followers. Under communism, they naturally made effort to keep their activities secret; after 1989 vast majority of them did not find a reason to claim credit for their work and their production remained buried in their personal archives. Therefore, the lexicographic and bibliographic research in Czech samizdat faced a lengthy problem: while a representative part of the (mostly Prague) dissident publications had been smuggled out of the CSSR and collected in specialized archives in Scheinfeld (Germany) in the 1980s, it took quite a time to identify the local samizdat publishers and get access to their production.