COURAGE

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Legend says József Fodor was a prominent guide and organizer of religious festivals for a long time. When he appeared, he soon became the main figure of the events, beyond the liturgy proper. The old pilgrims had already known him and expected his entrance on these occasions.

Žarana Papić’s correspondence in this folder documents how she was trying to bring some of the most important names of European feminism to Belgrade - among them Simone de Beauvoir, Sheila Rowbotham, Luce Irigaray and Juliet Mitchell. For this occasion, Papić compiled an impressive list of accompanying texts, which were supposed to familiarize the domestic audience with the key works of Western feminism, but also to provide foreigners with an insight into the specific position of women in Yugoslavia’s self-managing socialism. The featured item presents a translation of a text by Žarana Papić from Serbian into English. It was provided as background reading for the participants of the Drug-ca žena International Symposium. As the typescript is hardly legible, COURAGE transcribed the text in the enclosed word document.

Participant Rada Iveković pointed out the importance of the conference: “Before the conference, we did not exist, we came into being during that conference, we did not know each other. Žarana brought us together in one place, and we were not a group yet, we did not know that we could represent something. We realized that we are many, and that each of us is doing something for feminism.”

That is how the conference came to be remembered as an event which stimulated the development of feminist consciousness among young women in Yugoslavia at that time. Drug-ca opened two key issues, for which Žarana Papić’s activism and position were of crucial importance. The first question was on the reception of feminism in the socialist state. In the approach drawn up for the conference, Papić writes “What are the elements of a practical, social and individual new feminist consciousness, what is new in public behavior and what are its characteristics? […]  It is also necessary to ask the question of what happened to women, and what changes in the gender balance disappeared after the shaky socialist revolutions. What is the real position in socialism that has been achieved by striving for emancipation and what problems remain unresolved?”

The second question was related to the situation of Yugoslav feminists between the West and East. This question was linked to the non-aligned position of Yugoslavia since the Tito-Stalin split in 1948. The general topics of the conference were the experiences and specificities of the Yugoslav situation with regard to the results and achievements in problematizing the “female“ issue.

The Drug-ca Symposium made it possible to speak about the imbalance between the positions of female and male compatriots, and through it the word feminism gained significance in the former Yugoslavia.

Translated in 1945 by Teresa Jeleńska, Orwell’s Animal Farm was first published in Polish by the Radio Free Europe in 1956, and later by Jerzy Kulczycki émigré Odnowa press in 1974. Jeleńska met Orwell in London during World War 2 and corresponded with him until his death in 1950. In 1979, NOWA, the emerging giant of Polish samizdat, re-published the London edition with the illustrations and cover page designed by Andrzej Krauze (1947-), a Polish and British political cartoonist known for his damning portrayals of the communist party nomenklatura. Krauze’s contribution to the NOWA publication cost him his job in the Kultura weekly in Warsaw. In the same year, Krauze emigrated to the West and eventually settled in Great Britain where joined the team of The Guardian, reviving the art of political cartoon in the British press. A copy of the NOWA edition of Animals Farm participated in the 1984 British Library exhibition on George Orwell’s works in the languages of Eastern Europe. 

The founding statement of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS) of April 27^th, 1978, signed by seventeen signatories on the Charter 77, who posted their addresses so that people could find them. VONS's goal was to track the cases of people who had been prosecuted or imprisoned for their opinions and beliefs or who had become victims of police and judicial arbitrariness. VONS, by means of numbered communications, familiarised the domestic and international public with these cases and asked the Czechoslovak authorities for remedy. They helped to provide legal representation and mediate financial assistance to the unjustly persecuted and imprisoned.

The impulse for the creation of VONS was, among other things, the events associated with the Railroad Ball in January 1978, in which the signatories of the Charter 77 wanted to attend to. However, three of them were detained by the state security. In support of them, the Defence Committee was formed by Václav Havel, Pavel Landovský and Jaroslav Kukal, who gathered documents for their defence and informed the Czech and foreign public about the whole case. The accusations were released after six weeks and the prosecution was halted. This was a great success for committee members and other dissidents, so VONS was founded in May 1978.

In some film and television works, director and screenwriter Niksa Fulgosi developed a subversive critical discourse that has the features of opposition. Sto ljepotica na dan [A Hundred Beauties per Day] is one of three films from his critical- feuilletonist trilogy of 1971 (which also includes  Sto kletvi na sekundu [A Hundred Curses per Second] and Sto zaduženja Betike Gumbas [The Hundred Duties of Betika Gumbas]). It was broadcasted in abridged versions "approved for presentation."

Sto ljepotica na dan is a satirical and multi-layered presentation of Yugoslav society, which presents the novelty of beauty contests in a humorous way. The film is characterized by the sharp social and political satire of socialist society; under the guise of an event, the author critically interprets the current social problems such as faulty administration, social differences, backwardness, low standards and so forth. The original film is held in the Documentation Centre of Croatian Television in Zagreb.