COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The collection of manuscript magazines at the Estonian Cultural History Archives reflects the samizdat activities of writers and other cultural figures during Soviet times. It was formed in the 1990s after several donations, mostly from Jaan Isotamm. Nevertheless, the ‘almanac movement’ had numerous authors, outsiders as well as those recognised by the authorities whose works are now available in this collection. The collection contains manuscript magazines, poetry written in refugee camps, and material about religious movements and groups dealing with esoteric issues, etc. It also includes underground almanacs from Soviet times. These handwritten journals were not censored, and contain literary essays and poems, as well as socio-critical writings.

The Matica hrvatska Collection is an excellent historical source for Croatia's cultural and political history. It is an archival collection created by the work of Matica hrvatska, a non-profit and non-governmental cultural organisation which became the central Croatian cultural institution in the Croatian national reform movement – the Croatian Spring. Matica gathered the Croatian intelligentsia that was dissatisfied with the status of Croatia within the Yugoslav federation. That is why the communist government began to treat Matica as an oppositional institution, a driver of oppositional political ideas and a rival to the League of Communists.

The collection is about the life, work and activities of the famous Lithuanian humanist Meilutė Lukšienė. Although she is well known in Lithuania as the initiator and creator of the concept of the Lithuanian National School, and as an active member of Sąjūdis (the national movement) in the late 1980s, Lukšienė was also involved in cultural opposition during Soviet times. She was a key figure who promoted lithuanianisation at Vilnius University as early as the 1950s. Accused of 'bourgeois nationalism', she was dismissed from the post of head of the Department of Lithuanian Literature in 1958.

The Michael Shafir Collection represents a significant part of the personal library of its founder, who selected and accumulated items while in exile, in accordance with his academic and professional interest in what was known during the Cold War as East European politics. As he held various positions in Radio Free Europe (RFE), the collection also includes many documents relating to the activity of this institution, most of them from the late 1980s, but also some from the 1990s.