COURAGE

connecting collections

The collection of the D-fund of Prohibited Literature (1945-1991) is located in the National and University Library in Ljubljana and forms an integral part of the Slovenian Press Collection Outside of the Republic of Slovenia. The D-fund mostly contains books and periodicals published outside of socialist Yugoslavia and those primarily pertaining to the Slovenian émigré scene. However, a smaller part of the same fund encompasses the émigré literature of other Yugoslav peoples. In this sense, the D-fund also belongs to the culture of dissent.

The Danilo Kiš collection contains the estate of one of the most important non-conformist writers of socialist Yugoslavia. Kiš's collection is kept at the Archives of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU). His anti-authoritarian stance triggered attacks on his writing, which brought him to court. "Nobody did more to prove that Europe's twentieth-century experiments in fiction can take the measure of its experiments in totalitarianism, without curbing the liberties of the one or blurring the crimes of the other." asserts Mark Thompson in "Birth Certificate. The Story of Danilo Kiš" (2013, xi).

The records of Croatian-American sociologist Dinko Tomašić are deposited at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University. In accordance with its own themes and periodization, it covers Tomašić's public work after the Second World War, when he settled in the United States as a political émigré. The collection testifies to Tomašić's sociological research, in which he critically examined political and social phenomena of post-war communist society in Croatia and Yugoslavia. The main thesis of Tomašić's sociological theory was that the revolutionary transformation of society and the huge growth of the party-state’s power destroyed political, economic, social and cultural pluralism in the public life of the Yugoslav nations. Based on his sociological methods, and making use of results the fields of ethnography and anthropology, he believed that the source of the Yugoslav revolution derived from the specific Dinaric culture, which belonged to economically passive territories, regions where the Partisan movement secured the great support, such as Montenegro, Dalmatia, Lika, Bosnia and Herzegovina.