COURAGE

connecting collections

Nikolić asked Radica, as an outstanding Croatian writer in exile, to be an associate in the newly founded Croatian Review. Later Radica would be his closest collaborator, given his correspondence with Nikolić, as well as his articles and essays in the journal. Nikolić extended his offer of cooperation to Radica because his main goal was to bring together the Croatian intelligentsia irrespective of the partisan, political and ideological differences which otherwise harrowed and fragmented it. The common end was to continue the free cultural development of the Croatian nation when the homeland was under communist rule in order to affirm the Croatian national question through the journal’s pages. In the same letter, Nikolić asked Radica to convince Ivan Meštrović to accept collaboration in his review. Nikolić believed that Meštrović could influence the unity of Croatian emigrant communities with his authority as a great and renowned artist.  

The ‘Inmate Work Log’ is a booklet containing brief notes about the jobs that Grgo Šore, or any other detainee, had to perform on a daily basis during his stay in the prison camp on Goli otok. The entries in the log are dated from February 27 through October 20, 1951. Šore wrote with a pencil and pen, and the log consisted of heading: date, type of work, norm or rating, comment and supervisor’s signature. Queue rules or ratings and supervisor’s signature were completed in Cyrillic by the supervisor, while the comments were left empty. It is evident from the booklet that on Goli otok Šore, apart from heavy physical labour, also worked as a construction technician on the design of industrial facilities and accommodations for inmates (Interview with Dubravka Peić Čaldarović). The document testifies to the torture of inmates in this ideologically motivated camp.

At the very beginning of the 1950s, Valerija Čiurlionytė-Karužienė (1886–1982), a sister of the famous Lithuanian painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911), wrote a letter to the Lithuanian Communist Party Central Committee. She proposed establishing a personal museum about M.K. Čiurlionis in the house where the Čiurlionis family lived. Jonas Zinkus (1917–1990), the deputy head of the Department of Art and Fiction of the Lithuanian Communist Party Central Committee, in a letter to Vladas Niunka (1907–1983), the secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party, rejected the idea. According to Zinkus, the museum would promote art which was alien and harmful to Soviet-Lithuanian society and culture.