COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The Danilo Kiš collection contains the estate of one of the most important non-conformist writers of socialist Yugoslavia. Kiš's collection is kept at the Archives of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU). His anti-authoritarian stance triggered attacks on his writing, which brought him to court. "Nobody did more to prove that Europe's twentieth-century experiments in fiction can take the measure of its experiments in totalitarianism, without curbing the liberties of the one or blurring the crimes of the other." asserts Mark Thompson in "Birth Certificate. The Story of Danilo Kiš" (2013, xi).

The present collection comprises a series of archival materials relating to the activities of the Moldavian Writers’ Union (MWU) and spanning the period from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. The materials in this collection were selected from Fond No. P-2955 (Uniunea Scriitorilor din Moldova), which is currently held in the Archive of Social-Political Organisations of the Republic of Moldova (AOSPRM) in Chișinău. The collection files mainly focus on a number of Party meetings, writers’ congresses and national conferences which discussed significant issues related to the local cultural heritage, the “language question,” and the relations between the literary milieu and the Soviet regime.

The Doina Cornea Private Collection is an invaluable historical source for those researching the biography and especially the dissident activities of the person labelled by the Western mass media as the “emblematic figure” of the Romanian resistance to Ceauşescu’s dictatorship. This collection comprises manuscripts of her open letters of protest, her diary, samizdat translations, correspondence, drafts of her academic works, photos, paintings, video recordings, and her personal library. This private collection is by far one of the most significant and valuable collections reflecting the cultural opposition to the Romanian communist regime.