COURAGE

connecting collections

This second edition of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar was published in Kharkiv in 1933, as famine raged in the Ukrainian countryside following rapid collectivization of agriculture. Vasyl Sedliar provided images for the volume (first published in 1931). His paintings appear to be autonomous representations of the enduring leit motif of Shevchenko’s poetry—the subjugation and suffering of universal man and the plight of Ukrainians, specifically, in the Russian Empire—paired with powerful lines from Shevchenko’s poetry.

Art historian Myroslava Mudrak notes that the works are executed in the embattled Boichukist style, which borrow directly from Byzantine religious imagery—both icons and, most particularly, mural painting—and also incorporate contemporary secular subject matter that drills deeply into the psyche of a subjugated nation. Sedliar’s individual approach infuses these works with an ethereal quality. Figures are not grounded solidly, but tend to be suspended, like spirits.  Moreover, there is a preponderant anonymity, which appeals to the larger existential issues of the human condition under oppression. Sedliar was keenly aware of what was going on around him, but as an artist he expressed it transcendently. Both he and the editor of this volume were arrested and executed during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, along with many of their colleagues who had helped create what became known as Soviet culture.

The collection of the prose memoir “Všecky krásy světa” (All Beauties of the World) originated from the initiative of the photographer Ondřej Rakovec, who asked Seifert to accompany his poetic pictures of Prague in the winter with words. Seifert’s memoirs were commissioned by the publishing house Albatros at the beginning of 1970s, but the manuscript was removed from the publishing schedule on request of Ministry of Culture in February 1972. Even after the rejection of his manuscript, Seifert continued writing his memoirs and offered them to publishing house Odeon in 1976. In the same year, his memoir’s texts were recited by the actress Vlasta Chramostová in front of three dozen guests in her flat. Extracts of Vlasta Chramostová’s recitation with Jaroslav Seifert’s introduction were later released in Stockholm on gramophone records by the Charter 77 Foundation with support of the publishing house Šafrán in Uppsala. “Všecky krásy světa” was also printed in exile, in 1981, to mark Seifert’s eightieth birthday. The book was published by Index in Cologne and by Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto. In the same year, the memoirs were also published in samizdat edition Kvart. “Všecky krásy světa” was later officially published also in Czechoslovakia, in years 1983 and 1985 by the Československý spisovatel (Czechoslovak Writer) publishing house. This “official” version was, however, censored – some chapters or names of “undesirable” people were left out. When Jaroslav Seifert was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1984, the manuscript of “Všecky krásy světa” was, with both exiled and official Czechoslovak editions as well as a list of the censored erasures, put on display in the hall of the Royal National Library in Stockholm. The third official Czechoslovak edition was published in 1992 and was based on the uncensored exile version of the memoirs. The book was later published several times in the Czech Republic, as well as translated into many other languages.

The manuscript of “Všechny krásy světa”, written between 1970 and 1975, is currently in the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature; the manuscript was officially bought by the Museum from the antiquarian bookshop on Wenceslas Square 41 in Prague in 1978.

Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert was an example of an author affected by the communist regime, mainly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Although he was a designated “National Artist”, and was awarded many state prizes, he was not allowed to publish, with some exceptions, especially during the 1970s. Thus, his poems were often illegally transcribed as a samizdat or published in exile. This was also the case of his collection of lyrical poems “Morový sloup” (The Plague monument) written in the late 1960s and early 1970s, thus at the beginning of the so-called “normalization”. The collection “Morový sloup”, which also reflected the actual political situation in Czechoslovakia, was published in Washington by the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences in 1980. This edition was illustrated by Czech artist Jiří Kolář and translated by American poet Lyn Coffin.

"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.