Literary translator Árpád Göncz at work, Visegrád, Hungary, early 1970s

Together with the famous Croatian philosopher Milan Kangrga and other intellectuals, Rudi Supek founded a philosophical school that was held every summer in Korčula from 1963 to 1974. Originally conceived as an academic exercise, the School soon became an international event with free critical discussion on a different subject put to the fore each year. It was a gathering of philosophers and sociologists from all around the world (for example, Erich Fromm, Lucien Goldmann, Henri Lefebvre). However, after a time the ruling state-party structures turned against the School and the intellectuals who were called “praxisovci” (Praxis intellectuals, or Praxis thinkers) (Lešaja 2014, 246). The writing of Komunist, the official newspaper of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY), is an example of the regime's attacks on the Korčula Summer School and the Praxis intellectuals. In 1973, Komunist publicly branded the School as "political opposition" and “philosophy outside of the Party”, alluding to the open character of the School and the participation of foreign intellectuals. Supek responded in a letter addressed to the editor-in-chief of Komunist, Milan Rakas, in which he pointed out, among other things: “It is understood that the open character of an institution means at the same time willingness to discuss with people who have different and opposite opinions. Although it cannot be a 'conflict of opinions' among disciplined minded ones, ... I admit that I was surprised to see an attack on 'open Marxism' and 'creative Marxism' in your publication, because I have lived in the belief that they ['open Marxism' and 'creative Marxism'] are part of the LCY Programme and components of the spirit of self-management.” He also pointed out that the openness of a school does not mean “left-liberalism.”

In 1948, when the Czech poet Ivan Blatný emigrated from Czechoslovakia, the State Security confiscated his property including belongings, such as family photographs, official documents, correspondence and manuscripts of poems. After the investigation of Blatný’s emigration had been closed, these materials were acquired by an employee of the Pedagogical Faculty of the University in Brno, who was in contact with the State Security. He placed these documents in a cupboard at the Department of the Czech Language and Literature, where they remained, unnoticed, for many years. In 1973, when another employee of the Faculty, Jiří Rambousek, had to leave the University because of political reasons, he decided to hide these document in his own apartment. At that time, the building of the Faculty was renovated and Blatný’s documents risked being destroyed or thrown out. These documents were hidden in Rambousek’s flat for nineteen years. In 1993, Ivan Blatný’s materials which were confiscated by the State Security in 1948 were purchased by the Museum of Czech Literature from Blatný’s cousin Jan Šmarda.

The three artists’ main concept was to problematize the characteristics of avantgarde art by raising the question in the title of their work What is Avantgardism? Can it be considered an avantgarde act that Miklós Erdély, György Jovánovics and János Major exhibited a coat? As they state in the text accompanying János Major’s coat (exhibited on June 24–July 7 1973, together with other artworks by Miklós Erdély, György Jovánovics, János Major), their aim was to liberate the avantgarde from its charges, as it indicated prohibitions from the beginning of its history. The coat considered as a symbol of the bureaucrat referred to the state officials, the only people who came to the Chapel in a coat. Questioning if exhibiting the coat is an avantgarde act is at the same time a concept artwork, as the coat can be considered both a readymade object and the illustration of the idea of the act of exhibiting that. Tamás Szentjóby reconstructed and exhibited the coat in 1995 at the Víziváros Gallery as his own artwork, thereby appropriating the work from his partner contributors and contextualizing the meaning of avantgarde on a new level.

Baász almost never chose the actual political situation or oppression specifically as a theme. Even the work entitled File, which depicts the typical layout of the surveillance dossiers made by the Securitate (Departamentul Securității Statului, the secret police of Romania, between 1948 and 1989) to find and target dissidents. The dossier is old, stained, and dirty and the pages are pinned together with a safety pin, which is also one of the key signs of the artist, dominating The Wounds of the Earth series.

The Reformatory School in Aszód has undergone many changes since its foundation in 1884, and a lot has happened between its walls. The institution is still in operation today, having survived two world wars, the communist dictatorship, and even a tragic homicide. In 1973, Tamás Urbán took around 500 touching, shocking, and honest pictures about the lives of the residents of the reformatory school as his graduation project.

He was able to take photographs in the institution because he was working together with Youth Magazine (Ifjúsági Magazin), and he did not have face any particular challenges or have to deal with unusual complications while working on the project, though he visited the institution several times a week for two or three months. As Urbán sees it, this was because of his discrete style, especially when he did reports. He consciously avoided splurge, he brought only the most necessary equipment with him, and he did not force anything. As he recalled in 2015, “Suddenly I was in the community and everything came naturally.” He spent days among the residents, closely observing their everyday lives, including how they worked, played, and took drugs. Urbán maintained contact with a number of the residents of the institution even after he had finished the project. These letters, however, had to be smuggled out.

In 1975, Urbán’s first exhibition was held at the Reformatory School, and it featured the pictures he had taken there. The event was opened by Éva Keleti, one of Urbán’s teachers, but the plan to exhibit the pictures to a larger audience could not be realized: the authorities did not allow the photos to be taken from the institution because of their content. A representative of the ministry who was present for the opening ceremony made this decision clear. The pictures were impounded and the remained at the Reformatory School. While Éva Keleti and others tried to prevail on the authorities to change their decision – (even going as far as György Aczél in the process), they were not successful. Nevertheless, in 1978, Urbán brought this photo series to the first display of the Studio of Young Photographers. Despite the prohibitions, the photos brought him success, both from the audiences and in the profession. As Urbán recalls, because of this photo report, he was accepted into the Association of Hungarian Journalists. The photos taken at the Reformatory School are also the direct antecedents to his major topics of the 1980s: the photo series about prisoners and people on the margins of society, such as drug users.

This dossier consists of the State Security file on Sevdalina Panayotova, created in the early 1970s. It shows how the state observed and persecuted critically minded members of the intelligentsia, even when their actions had hardly become public. It is also evidence of dissenters’ strategies to create room for critical thought, based on social networks and private spaces.At the beginning of the 1970s, Sevdalina Panayotova became the center of a group of people with dissident inclinations. The group included former fellow students from Sofia University and colleagues from the March 8 Factory, where she worked as a librarian at that time. They read forbidden literature (such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward, Thomas Mann's A Sketch of My Life, Nikolay Raynov’s Mysticism and Faithlessness, and others), discussed the mistakes of socialism from a philosophical and socio-political point of view, and criticized the nomenklatura and others. Sevdalina Panayotova tried to establish a literary and philosophical workshop in the March 8th Factory and worked out a plan for the topics to be discussed. In parallel, she had two of her closest friends take a survey among their colleagues on Youth and Socialism. The idea was to write a critical account of the situation of Bulgarian youth, which was to be exported to the West (on a ship) and published there. For this purpose, she contacted a sailor from Burgas.

In 1972 the State Security opened a so-called “Terrorist Operational development case” against a close associate of Sevdalina Panayotova, Georgi Konstantinov Georgiev. Georgiev had been "sentenced to death in 1953, commuted into 20 years' imprisonment, as an organizer of a terrorist organization that committed various bombings, including the one in the 'Park of Freedom' on 3 March 1953, at the Stalin's monument..." (according to the State Security file).

Sevdalina Panayotova was then also put under surveillance by State Security. Sevdalina Panayotova and Petar Peev were accused of being anarchists. Some months later, in July 1973, Georgi Konstantinov Georgiev emigrated from Bulgaria. Petar Peev was sentenced in September 1973 to the forced labor camp in Belene for 3 years as “an irrepressible enemy of the people's republic and socially dangerous".

Sevdalina Panayotova was subjected to day-to-day pressure from the State Security including a search of the apartment and a series of interrogations for "reading and disseminating literature directed against the socialist system". State Security accused her of “conversations in which you expressed slanderous information about the public and state system”. In September 1974, she was detained for 14 days as “accused under Art. 108”, i.e. “Anti-government propaganda and agitation, spreading defamatory claims and literature affecting the state and public order”. Further on, the file reads: "It was found that Sevdalina Panayotova did not commit any criminal activity because of which she was released on 18 January [1974]”. However, because of her "bad influence" on the youth, State Security found "it expedient [for her] to be expelled from Sofia". Thus, Sevdalina Panayotova was forced to move with her family to the small town of Chepelare in the Rhodope Mountains. Due to a lack of evidence, her investigation was terminated in the spring of 1974.

All quotations are from the file "Investigation Case No. 6965 Anarchists", Central Archive of the Commission for the Disclosure of Documents and Declaration of Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian People's Party Army (CRDOPBGDSRSBNA), Arh. No II sl.d. 6965; III raz. 32666r.

The photo shows probably the first artistic mural in Poland, made by Christian Wabl in 1973, during the Fifth Biennial of Spatial Forms Cinema Laboratory (Kino Laboratorium) in Elbląg. The mural showing "a letter to the people" made of flowers' pictographs instead of letters of the alphabet was painted on the wall of the Mechanical Works Zamech company. Tomasz Sikorski made the photo during the Biennale in 1973.

Report "The status of counter-intelligence work of the State Security to unveil and suppress the subversive activities of the enemy among the artistic intelligentsia and measures for its improvement", Sofia, April 20, 1973.

The report presents the state security's vision of how "the enemy" tries to win over wavering members of the artistic intelligentsia (whose majority is said to support and promote the party line). It is reported that among the intelligentsia groups of friends are formed in so called ‘microstructures’ opposing the policies of the party. Typical examples of this are said to be the writers Hristo Ganev, Valeri Petrov, Marko Ganchev, Gotcho Gotchev and Blagoy Dimitrov. The report is a good example for the assessment of the political attitudes of the intelligentsia by the state in the early 1970s, and also of the way how such assessments were rhetorically framed.

Exhibition Szövegek / Texts, August 19–25, 1973, organized by Dóra Maurer and Gábor Tóth. Conception: Dóra Maurer

Szövegek / Texts was the first international exhibition of visual experimental poetry in Hungary including concrete texts, visual poetry, text-based conceptual artworks, and other poetry related experiments. The conception of the exhibition came from Dóra Maurer who, with the help of Gábor Tóth, has worked on an international collection of text based works for years. The exhibition at Balatonboglár was accompanied by concrete poetry actions, such as Hommage à Tristan Tzara by Dóra Maurer, or Fire/Ice by Tibor Gáyor.

Brigitte Reimann was unable to complete what is regarded as perhaps her most important work, the novel "Franziska Linkerhand“ which details the failure of a jaded, young female architect to embrace socialism. She worked on the novel from 1963 until her death 10 years later in 1973. In 1974 the fragments were published by the Berlin-based New Life publishing house and translated quickly into multiple Eastern European languages. Additionally, the work was licensed for publication in West Germany and adapted for the stage and television. The final page of the original manuscript remained unreleased until the unabridged new edition was published in 1998. [Transcription of the scanned masterpiece] He was only as fair as a man could be

(…) Consideration (…) his judgement. They bound the two drafts on the table – Kowalski and his humpbacked little pal had submitted a collective work -, and Schafheutlin insisted (…) his estimation, that they, although somewhat hampered, since the voice of the boss remained unwavering, revealed no inkling as to whether he approved or rejected the work.

Fr. had lost the duel, before she even entered the competition.

"Morový sloup", a collection of poetry by Jaroslav Seifert, was published in the samizdat edition Edice Petlici in 1973. The book is supplemented with illustrations by Jan Bauch. Inside is the dedication by the author to Ludvík Vaculík, who was the founder and organizer of Edice Petlici. And in 1986 he made another dedication, "Transforming into the National Archives", referring to the newly-exiled Czechoslovak Documentation Center of Independent Literature, founded by historian Vilém Prečan together with other personalities of Czechoslovak exile. In the seventies, the collection was published several times abroad, and in Bohemia for the first time in 1981.

The Private collection of Sándor Olasz, editor of Tiszatáj, a journal banned in the 1980s, about critical, nonconformist literature. The collection is owned by Sándor Olasz’s family: his widow and son.