COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The Central Press Supervision Authority files, stored at the Security Services Archive in Prague, contain materials documenting the control of press and newly issued publications in Czechoslovakia from 1953 to 1968. Examples of censorship with extensive transcriptions from ‘defective’ literary works are very valuable as they include unknown information on the ways authors and editors negotiated with the censors, reveal the origins of the works, provide information on the alterations that were imposed and the existence of text variants, and they even cover prominent authors’ previously unknown works.

The Dan Petrescu and Thérèse Culianu-Petrescu collection includes representative Western books that offer critical analyses of the communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, brought semi-clandestinely into Romania and used as alternative sources of intellectual formation. An example of moral resilience in the face of communist dictatorship, this collection illustrates the cultural nonconformism of an informal grouping of young intellectuals known as the Iaşi Group, out of which, at the end of the 1980s, in a period of profound despair, the critical discourse, lucid and courageous, of Dan Petrescu made an impression through the intermediary of the Western mass-media. The story of dissidence in Iaşi, in particular that of Dan Petrescu, was until 1989 that of a confrontation between the truth of critical intellectuals and the lies of dictatorship. The dichotomous story of dissidence during communism turned after the opening of the files of the former Securitate into confrontation between each of the protagonists with the collective past of the group. Preferring marginality to stardom, Dan Petrescu and Thérèse Culianu-Petrescu are among the few heroes who did not lose this status even after the files of the secret police brought to light betrayals and complicities hitherto suspected but unproven.

The extensive Czechoslovak Writer Publishing House Collection deposited in the Museum of Czech Literature illustrates the publishing activities of one of the most important postwar Czech publishers from its establishment in 1949 until its end in 1997. The materials allow for the reconstruction of the negotiations between authors, editors and publishing managers, and it frequently provides the only evidence of literary works that were never published. This collection provides a picture of censorship in socialist Czechoslovakia and how the publishing industry functioned under a Soviet-style communist dictatorship.