The State Archive of Literature and Art was established in 1968, when a branch of the Central State Archive was made into a separate archive. All the documents relating to literature and art (including the Union of Writers collection) were transferred to the new archive. 

The pirate records of Led Zeppelin’s first concert constite a special part of the holdings of the music collection. Péter Hont acquired the recording as private property when the collection was eliminated in the early 2000s.

This photograph is from the ‘Red University’ series that shows scenes of the clashes between militia and students in 1968. On June 3, 1968, students from Belgrade University set off from New Belgrade towards the building of the rector’s office located in the old part of the city with the intention of demonstrating and stating their demands. They were soon stopped by a militia cordon. Veljko Vlahović and Miloč Minić, top officials in the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, spoke to the students and tried to convince them not to rally. However, militia and students clashed, resulting in injuries to at least four people. The following day, the students occupied the building of the rector’s office and proclaimed their programme. One of their demands called for changing the university’s name to the ‘Karl Marx Red University’. The occupation lasted seven days, while the protests spread to Yugoslavia’s larger university centres. It was ended by a television address by Josip Broz Tito in which he allegedly supported the students, acknowledging that irregularities did exist and should be removed. At that time a photo reporter with the Belgrade weekly ‘NIN’, Tomislav Peternek recorded the shocking scenes of the riots at the overpass in New Belgrade.

The Jan and Meda Mládek collection is the core of Museum Kampa exhibition. Besides works by František Kupka, an “undesirable artist” during the communist era, there is a broad collection of other works by artists from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland that do not follow the official socialist style.

Gábor Klaniczay traveled to Paris for the first time in 1967, when he spent one year in the city. This journey was followed by more. During his travels, he collected an array of different material: leaflets, proclamations, and posters about alternative cultural life and student movements. These documents reveal the kind of ideas, trends, performances, and exhibitions he was interested in at the time. This particular item is a leaflet of Bread and Puppet Theater’s performance in Paris, entitled “Notre résurrection américaine.” 

Ivan Blatný emigrated to England in 1948. In Czechoslovakia, he was labelled a “traitor” and became a banned author. Later, the Czechoslovak Radio even falsely announced that Blatný had died in England. In 1968, during the era of the “Prague Spring”, the interest in Blatný and his poetry grew in Czechoslovakia. An example of this increasing interest, there was a programme dedicated to Blatný’s poetry called “The Smells of Brno”. This programme, advertised by a small poster from the Ivan Blatný Collection, was organised by the Czech director and artist Karel Fuksa in the Brno House of Arts. Blatný’s poems were recited by Czech actors Ladislav Lakomý and Helena Kružíková. According to Fuksa, the hall was full. In the same year, the Blok publishing house issued the second edition of Ivan Blatný’s “Melancholic Walks”, and Blatný’s poems sporadically appeared in Czechoslovak press or on the Radio. Then, Blatný’s texts could be officially published in Czechoslovakia only after 1989.

Adrian Marino had an ample correspondence with Romanian intellectuals in exile, a correspondence that is preserved in his collection. It is worth noting the volume and content of his correspondence with the literary historian and critic Matei Călinescu, who defected to the USA in 1973, and went on to teach at Indiana University Bloomington. The letters received by Marino from Matei Călinescu can be found in the original in the files of his personal archive donated to BCU Cluj, while those received by the Călinescu from Marino were copied after 1989 and archived carefully in the collection. In these letters, Marino criticised Romanian literary life, the fierce competition among writers for positions in state cultural institutions in Romania, and the censorship practised by the publishing houses of the time. As their correspondence was monitored by the Securitate, Marino avoided formulating any critical political opinions and confined himself to cultural topics.

The Czecho-Slovak poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher and “guru” of the Czechoslovak underground, Egon Bondy (real name Zbyněk Fišer, 1930–2007), is well known as the author of dozens of collections of poems and novels. His philosophical texts, however, are an equally significant part of his work. Bondy, who graduated in philosophy from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, was also interested in Eastern philosophy, in particular Buddhism. He wrote several academics studies on this topic in the first half of the 1960s, and published the book “Buddha” under his real name in 1968 through the publishing house Orbis. This significant study on the founder of Buddhism and his teachings caused a sensation in Czechoslovakia. The book was later republished twice (1995, 2006) in the Czech Republic and still remains topical.Bondy’s manuscript of his study of Buddha and his teachings was bought by the Museum of Czech Literature (PNP) in 1986 and is now part of the Egon Bondy collection deposited in the Literary Archive of PNP.

Lika Yanko was a Bulgarian painter, daughter of Albanian immigrants. She studied at the French College in Sofia. In 1946, Lika Yanko enrolled in the State Academy of Arts studying painting in the classes of Prof. Dechko Uzunov and Prof. Iliya Petrov but she was not allowed to do a diploma work. Her first independent exhibition in 1967 in Sofia was closed down prematurely. Lika Yanko continued to draw, choosing isolation and refusing to take part in art exhibitions and to be dependent on juries determining the limits of the permissible. Until 1981 when she received an invitation for exhibition by Lyudmila Zhivkova, her paintings had never been exhibited publicly. She managed to subsist due to the redemption of her paintings by foreign embassies and diplomats. Since those were "unauthorized contacts", Lika Yanko was under constant surveillance, observed and eavesdropped by the structures of the State Security; however, her record was destroyed.

At the beginning of her career, Lika Yanko drew landscapes, portraits, figured compositions. After the closing of her exhibition, she completely laid aside any restrictions in her painting. In the 1960s, Lika relinquished the landscapes and embraced the mythopoetic composition: she stylized the forms, shortened the spatial plans and distanced herself more and more from the principles of nature-resemblance defended by the authorities. Her self-portrait of 1968 shows a face half-covered by bars, a symbol of interdiction. Her paintings of the 1970s are dominated by themes from Christianity seen through the eyes of the author. Lika Yanko used the rope as a contour, incrusted beads, buttons, nuts, splinters, and pebbles interweaving astrology, Christianity, reflections on eternity and the initial things.

In the course of her entire life, Yanko had only 7 exhibitions; she died (of pneumonia) only a few days after the opening of the last one at the Cavalet Gallery in the city of Varna. While still living, Lika Yanko presented the National and the Sofia City Art Gallery with paintings.

In the absence of an organized rebellion which was present even among the Soviet artists, the most common form of resistance in Bulgaria, according to Iliev, was the self-isolation. Lika Yanko was an example of such type of opposition to the regime. 

In 1989, Lika Yanko received the Sofia Award.

Rudolf Mihle (1937-2008) was one of the most important Czech amateur filmmakers. Some of his films were critical of the communist regime and society, and so could not be publicly screened. This was also the case for the film “The First Hours of Occupation”, which was filmed during the first days of the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. The images of the dramatic events from the streets of Prague are accompanied by Czechoslovak Radio broadcasts from the time. The film was banned and could not be publicly screened until 1990. In the same year, Rudolf Mihle received several awards for this film, including at the World Nonprofessional Film Festival UNICA 90 in Sweden, and at the Amateur Film Festival in Hradec Králové, Czech Republic. In August 2018, the film with English subtitles was published on YouTube by Czech Radio as part of its “Project ʼ68”.

Artpool Art Research Center collects, archives, and makes available documents for researchers regarding marginalized art practices of Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s and contemporary international art tendencies. Topics in the archive include progressive, unofficial Hungarian art movements (such as underground art events, venues, groups, and samizdat publications between 1970 and 1990) and new tendencies in international art beginning in the 1960s.

In addition to functioning as a research center, Artpool considers itself an active archive. It organizes events in search of new forms of social activity, participates in the process in a formative way, and simultaneously documents and archives these process in order to promote the free flow of information.

The invasion of Warsaw-Pact troops and the defeat of the Prague Spring shocked Brigitte Reimann. At precisely this moment, she lost all trust in the leadership of the GDR. Reimann noted in her diary on the 21^st of August 1968:

 [Transcription of the scanned masterpiece] Hoy[erswerda], 21. August 68. Troops of the SU [Soviet Union] and five members of the Warsaw Pact have occupied the CSSR [Czechoslovak Socialist Republic]. Shocking. My phone has been ringing the entire morning, calls from all sorts of people who are horrified and drained. All day, I have sat next to the radio listening to the news. GDR-channels have not said a thing, repeating only the official TASS-release and the deceitful appeal of the SED-government to its citizens to show friendship, brotherhood and love to the Czech people, while at the same time tanks are rolling through Prague and Plzen and all of the other large cities of the CSSR. Once again German uniforms in Prague. Dubcek and the ringleaders have either been arrested or carried off, who knows, we have heard nothing about their fate. And what hopes we had for the ‚Model‘ CSSR! Unbelievable that Stalinism is still enforced with these methods. Supposedly, there is an “Outpouring of Declarations of Support” emanating from the GDR. We are so bitter, no longer able to trust (supposing we were ever able to trust this ‚sort‘.) My trip to N[eubrandenburg] has been delayed, I feel paralyzed.

The fourth New Tendencies event was held in Zagreb from August 1968 to August 1969. Tošo Dabac visited the event, where he took a photograph of one of the meetings of participants. The photograph shows Dušan Džamonja, Marija Braut, Božo Beck, Ivan Picelj and Victor Vasarely.