BiblioVault

Samizdat Past+Present

Edited by Tomáš Glanc

Karolinum Press, 2019

Much of what we now consider the canon of twentieth-century Czech literature—the work of authors like Bohumil Hrabal, Ludvík Vaculík, and Jáchym Topol, among many others—has, in fact, just recently become widely available to readers. Long published only in censored form or in secret among political dissidents, this body of underground literature is collectively known as samizdat. Samizdat Past and Present provides an expert introduction to these writings and their history, offering insight into both the current wave of literary rediscovery and translation and contemporary debates over censorship. In a diverse array of chapters, Tomáš Glanc gathers together texts from representative figures of Czech samizdat and underground culture of the 1960s to ’80s and provides a useful comparison of Czech, Polish, and Russian samizdat. From literary historians to former samizdat publishers and writers with firsthand experience of communist censorship, secret police, fake trials, and imprisonment, the authors of Samizdat Past and Present illuminate the complexities of a literature written under censorship and the struggle for freedom of thought in a totalitarian regime.

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Saturnin

Zdenek Jirotka

Karolinum Press, 2016

On its initial publication in Czech in 1942, Saturnin was a best seller, its gentle satire offering an unexpected—if temporary—reprieve from the grim reality of the German occupation. In the years since, the novel has been hailed as a classic of Czech literature, and this translation makes it available to English-language readers for the first time—which is entirely appropriate, for author Zdeněk Jirotka clearly modeled his light comedy on the English masters Jerome K. Jerome and P. G. Wodehouse. The novel’s main character, Saturnin, a “gentleman’s gentleman” who obviously owes a debt to Wodehouse’s beloved Jeeves, wages a constant battle to protect his master from romantic disaster and intrusive relatives, such as Aunt Catherine, the “Prancing Dictionary of Slavic Proverbs.” Saturnin will warm the heart of any fan of literary comedy.

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Saturnin

Zdenek Jirotka

Karolinum Press, 2013

On its initial publication in Czech in 1942, Saturnin was a best seller, its gentle satire offering an unexpected—if temporary—reprieve from the grim reality of the German occupation. In the years since, the novel has been hailed as a classic of Czech literature, and this translation makes it available to English-language readers for the first time—which is entirely appropriate, for author Zdeněk Jirotka clearly modeled his light comedy on the English masters Jerome K. Jerome and P. G. Wodehouse. The novel’s main character, Saturnin, a “gentleman’s gentleman” who obviously owes a debt to Wodehouse’s beloved Jeeves, wages a constant battle to protect his master from romantic disaster and intrusive relatives, such as Aunt Catherine, the “Prancing Dictionary of Slavic Proverbs.” Saturnin will warm the heart of any fan of literary comedy.

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Seven Days to the Funeral

Ján Rozner

Karolinum Press, 2024

A dissident's deeply personal and unflinching view of Soviet oppression in Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1968 invasion.

Seven Days to the Funeral is the fictionalized memoir of Ján Rozner, a leading Slovak journalist, critic, dramaturg, and translator. Rozner and his wife Zora Jesenská were champions of the Prague Spring and were blacklisted after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When Jesenská died in 1972, her funeral became a political event and attendees faced recriminations.

A painstaking account of the week after his wife’s death, Seven Days to the Funeral is a historical record of the devastating impact of the period after the invasion. Through ruthless portraits of key figures in Slovak culture, the book provides a fascinating cultural history of Slovakia from 1945 to 1972. It is also a moving love story of an unlikely couple. Although Rozner began the book in 1976, it was left unfinished upon his death. The book was published posthumously in 2009 by his second wife Sláva Roznerová.

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Seven Letters to Melin

Essays on the Soul, Science, Art and Mortality

Josef Šafarík

Karolinum Press, 2020

Josef Šafařík’s Seven Letters to Melin is an exploration of man’s alienation from nature—and from himself—in the modern technological age. Conceived as a series of letters to Melin, an engineer who believes in the value of science and technical progress, the book grows skeptical of such endeavors, while also examining mankind’s search for meaning in life. To help uncover this meaning, Šafařík posits a dichotomy between spectator and participant. The role of participant is played by Robert, an artist who has committed suicide. The spectator, embodied by the scientist Melin, views the world from a distance and searches for explanations, while the artist-participant creates the world through his own active engagement.

Through these exchanges, Šafařík argues for the primacy of artistic creativity over scientific explanation, of truth over accuracy, of internal moral agency over an externally imposed social morality, and of personal religious belief over organized church-going. Šafařík is neither anti-scientific nor anti-rational; however, he argues that science has limited power, and he rejects the idea of science that denies meaning and value to what cannot be measured or calculated.

Šafařík’s critiques of technology, the wage economy, and increased professionalization make him an important precursor to the philosophy of deep ecology. This book was also a major influence on the Czech president Václav Havel; in this new translation it will find a fresh cohort of readers interested in what makes us human.

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Sherabad Oasis

Tracing Historical Landscape in Southern Uzbekistan

Edited by Ladislav Stanco and Petra Tušlová

Karolinum Press, 2020

Sherabad Oasis: Tracing Historical Landscape in Southern Uzbekistan is the second volume of the series examining the Czech-Uzbek archaeological expedition in southern Uzbekistan. While the first book was devoted to the excavations at the central site of the Sherabad Oasis called Jandavlattepa, this volume analyzes the development of the settlement throughout this oasis based on important new data gained in the recent expedition. The methodology used includes extensive and intensive archaeological surveys, revisions of previously published archaeological data, historical maps, and innovative satellite images. Apart from the dynamics of the settlement of the research area, spanning from prehistoric to modern time, the development of the irrigation systems in the lowland steppe is also assessed.

Edited by Ladislav Stančo and Petra Tušlová, this volume continues the significant work of Czech researchers in Uzbekistan, a key Central Asian republic at the crossroads of history and culture.

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The Shop on Main Street

Ladislav Grosman

Karolinum Press, 2019

Written by a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, The Shop on Main Street is the story that inspired the highly successful Academy Award–winning Czechoslovak film of the same title. Looking at the Holocaust through the eyes of a complicit individual, the narrative follows a good-natured carpenter living in a Slovak town in 1942 who unwittingly becomes a participant in a moral crisis involving the abuse and persecution of Jews. Describing the film adaptation of Ladislav Grosman’s novel, the New York Times declared that it is a “human drama that is a moving manifest of the dark dilemma that confronted all people who were caught as witnesses to Hitler's terrible crime.” The review continues: “‘Is one his brother's keeper?’ is the thundering question the situation asks, and then, ‘Are not all men brothers?’ The answer given is a grim acknowledgement. But the unfolding of the drama is simple, done in casual, homely, humorous terms—until the terrible, heartbreaking resolution of the issue at the end.”

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Signs from Silence

Ur of the First Sumerians

Petr Charvát

Karolinum Press, 2015

The Royal Tombs of Ur, dating from approximately 3000–2700 BCE, are among the most famous and impressive archeological discoveries of the twentieth century. Excavated between 1922 and 1934 under the direction of Leonard Woolley, this site is one of the richest sources of information we have about ancient Sumer—however, many mysteries about the society that produced these tombs remain. Based on primary research with the Ur materials at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, and paying particular attention to the iconography found in what Woolley referred to as the “Seal Impression Strata of Ur,” this book works to reconstruct the early history of Sumer. What was this society like? What social structures did this society build? What were its institutions of authority? The answers Petr Charvát proposes are of interest not only to archeologists, but to anyone fascinated by early human history.

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Small Towns in Europe in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Heritage and Development Strategies

Lud'a Klusáková et al.

Karolinum Press, 2017

Always in the shadow of their more famous urban neighbors, small towns are consistently overlooked in historical research, especially in Europe. This book investigates the ramifications of that tendency for development initiatives. Paying particular attention to the marketability of towns’ cultural heritage and of the diverse ways local culture has been influenced by national and regional history, an international team of urban historians, sociologists, and historians of art and architecture present case studies of towns in England, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the Czech Republic, and Russia to explore new methods for motivating development and renewal.

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Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

A Humorous – Insofar as That Is Possible – Novella from the Ghetto

J. R. Pick

Karolinum Press, 2018

Compassion, levity, and laughter can be found in the darkest of places—and even in the smallest of creatures. Set in 1943 Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, J. R. Pick’s novella Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals tells the story of Tony, a thirteen-year-old boy who is deported from Prague to the infamous Terezín ghetto for Jews—the horrific, overcrowded concentration camp where one in four prisoners died of starvation or disease, and a way station on the way to Auschwitz. But it is not the atrocities Tony experiences that make his tale remarkable. It is his ability to find comedy in the incomprehensible.

Tony suffers from tuberculosis, and, lying in his hospital bed one day, he decides to set up an animal welfare organization. Even though no animals are permitted in the camp, he is determined to find just one creature he can care for and protect—and his determination is contagious. A group of older boys, including Tony’s best friend, Ernie, aid him in his quest. Soon they’re joined by Tony’s mother—and her coterie of boyfriends. Eventually, they find Tony his pet: a mouse, which he names and carefully guards in a box hidden beneath his bed. But in the fall of 1944, the transports to Auschwitz begin.

As moving as it is irreverent, Pick’s novella draws on the two years he spent imprisoned in Terezín in his late teens. With cutting black humor, he shines a light on both the absurdities and injustices of the Nazi-run Jewish ghetto, using his literary artistry to portray in stunning shorthand an experience of the Holocaust that pure histories could never convey.

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The Soviet Army and Czechoslovak Society 1968–1991

Marie Cerná

Karolinum Press, 2024

Analyzes the historical significance of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

This book addresses different aspects of the Soviet army’s twenty-year presence in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1991. It explores the circumstances of the Soviet settling in the country, immediately related to the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968; its active interference in the political developments in the early stage of the “normalization” era; and the universal support provided by the normalization era regime. It examines the darker side of this support when the constant favoring of Soviet interests—often to the detriment of the local population and the environment—went hand in hand with the resignation of the Czechoslovak state to lawfulness and the execution of effective administration on its territory.

Based on extensive local and national primary sources, the volume describes the often problematic coexistence of the Soviet garrisons and local inhabitants, who did not have sufficient protection at the central level. In this context, it points out the contradictory logic that framed the mutual coexistence: the official policy of friendship on the one hand and the counter-intelligence protection of Soviet military premises on the other. Marie Cerná records the traces that the presence of the Soviet army left in the collective memory and examines the circumstances of its departure from the country in 1990 and 1991, which began immediately after the change of the political regime. She presents the long-term presence of the Soviet army as a fundamentally political and politicized matter, which was first the subject of power controversies and later of propaganda and intentional manipulation.

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Spartakiads

The Politics of Physical Culture in Communist Czechoslovakia

Petr Roubal

Karolinum Press, 2018

Every five years from 1955 to 1985, mass Czechoslovak gymnastic demonstrations and sporting parades called Spartakiads were held to mark the 1945 liberation of Czechoslovakia. Featuring hundreds of thousands of male and female performers of all ages and held in the world’s largest stadium—a space built expressly for this purpose—the synchronized and unified movements of the Czech citizenry embodied, quite literally, the idealized Socialist people: a powerful yet pliant force directed by the regime.

In this book, Petr Roubal explores the political, social, and aesthetical dimensions of these mass physical demonstrations, with a particular focus on their roots in the völkisch nationalism of the German Turner movement and the Czech Sokol gymnastic tradition. Roubal draws on extensive interviews and archival research to investigate the many facets of this sporting tradition, from the reactions of ordinary, non-political gymnasts who appropriated and challenged official rituals to the organizational demands of the Spartakiads, such as the incredible finances involved and the knowledge and skills required from hundreds of former Sokol officials. Featuring an abundance of archival photographs, Spartakiad takes a new approach to Communist history by opening a window onto the mentality and mundanity behind the Iron Curtain.

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Spoken Sibe

Morphology of the Inflected Parts of Speech

Veronika Zikmundová

Karolinum Press, 2013

At present, the Sibe language is the only still-active oral variety of Manchu, the language of the indigenous tribe of Manchuria. With some 20,000 to 30,000 speakers it is also the most widely spoken of the Tungusic languages, which are found in both Manchuria and eastern Siberia. The Sibe people, who live at the northwestern border of the present-day Sinkiang Uyghur Autonomous province of China, are descendants of the garrison men of the Manchu army from the eighteenth century. After annexing the area, the Manchus sent the Sibe’s predecessors there with the task of guarding the newly established border between the Manchu Empire and Russia. They remained isolated from the indigenous Turkic and Mongolian peoples, which resulted in the preservation of the language. In the 1990s, when the oral varieties of Manchu became either extinct or on the verge of extinction, Sibe survived as a language spoken by all generations of Sibe people in the Chapchal Sibe autonomous county, and by the middle and older generations in virtually all other Sibe settlements of Xinjiang. Spoken Sibe is a carefully researched study of this historically and linguistically important language.

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Studies of Homeric Greece

Jan Bouzek

Karolinum Press, 2018

Studies of Homeric Greece is a comprehensive companion to the archaeology and history of Late Mycenaean to Geometric Greece and the koine of Early Iron Age Geometric styles in Europe and Upper Eurasia, circa 1300–700 BC, in relation to their Near Eastern neighbors. Jan Bouzek discusses this pivotal period of human history—the transition from Bronze to Iron Age, from the pre-philosophical to philosophical mind, from myth to logos—in an attempt to combine archaeological evidence with the words of Homer and Hesiod, and the first Phoenician and Greek trading ventures. In doing so, Bouzek surveys the birth of autonomous Greek city-states, their art, and their free citizenry. Featuring numerous maps, drawings, and photographs, Studies of Homeric Greece is the capstone of a luminary in the field.

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Summer of Caprice

Vladislav Vancura

Karolinum Press, 2016

Summer of Caprice, a captivating comic novel first published in 1926, is a classic of Czech literature, yet it is little known elsewhere. Commonly considered untranslatable due to the complexities of the text, which is characterized by a playful narrative and an exceptional mastery of language, and its profound cultural context, it is rendered here in English that beautifully captures Vladislav Vančura’s experimental style—or, as the author himself called it, his “poetism in prose.” Mixing the archaic with the innovative, raw colloquialisms with biblical quotations, Summer of Caprice opens an uproarious window onto the Czech spirit, humor, and way of life.

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Summer of Caprice

Vladislav Vancura

Karolinum Press, 2006

Summer of Caprice, a captivating comic novel first published in 1926, is a classic of Czech literature, yet it is little known elsewhere. Commonly considered untranslatable due to the complexities of the text, which is characterized by a playful narrative and an exceptional mastery of language, and its profound cultural context, it is rendered here in English that beautifully captures Vladislav Vančura’s experimental style—or, as the author himself called it, his “poetism in prose.” Mixing the archaic with the innovative, raw colloquialisms with biblical quotations, Summer of Caprice opens an uproarious window onto the Czech spirit, humor, and way of life.

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Syntax - Semantics Interface

Eva Hajicová

Karolinum Press, 2017

Syntax-Semantics Interface is a collection of papers written by leading Czech linguist Eva Hajičová between 1973 and 2014 that draw on the theoretical framework of the functional generative description proposed by Petr Sgall in the early 1960s and developed since. The book reflects Hajičová’s research contributions to four main domains: the specification of underlying (deep) sentence structure (analyzed in terms of dependency relations); the information structure of the sentence (topic-focus articulation) and its relation to the specification of presupposition and negation and to other related phenomena; the building of a scheme for an annotated corpus of Czech to serve, among other things, in the verification of theoretical linguistic claims; and some fundamental aspects of discourse structure, namely the concept of the hierarchy of elements in the stock of knowledge shared by speaker and hearer. Through new introductory statements, Hajičová also compares her original findings with current state-of-the-art of linguistic theory at home and abroad.

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