COURAGE

connecting collections

As soon as their son was born, Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek started “using” him in their artistic experiments.
There are over 900 photographs from the years 1972-1974 where the newborn is composed into spatial-visual settings with everyday objects, most often in the private apartment of the artists. 
On one occasion he is placed in a baking pan circled with a cutlery ornament. Another time he is sitting in a metal bucket in a sink or is looking with keen interest out of the toilet bowl. The artists arrange around their son circles and patterns made of onion, lumps of ice, or the books they are reading at moment (Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations). 
These arrangements often feature the symbol of the communist state, i.e. the red banner. But the images also reveal the material misery of the décor and furnishings, the poverty of the Polish People's Republic, magnified by the material paucity of the hackworking artists.
By writing about the “use of their child in art”, Kwiek and Kulik signalled that they were aware that employing their child as a prop or a component of a work of art was controversial. As one of the contemporary commentators noted, their actions were “equally methodical and instrumental.”
The set-ups of the photographs are by no means incidental. Inspired by academic lectures, the artists wanted to translate the “mathematical and logical operations” to visual actions, and discover methods of doing analogous actions in their own field.
Revealing the poverty of their daily life was also interpreted as related to “the ideological dilemmas o Kwiek and Kulik, whose leftist ideas were too radical for the conformist party apparatus.” The entire project was seen as an attempt to “translate the experience of being a parent, being bound by the bureaucracy, and being an artist at the mercy of «people's» government into the language of art.” (Adam Mazur).

Źródła: 
KwieKulik. Zofia Kulik & Przemysław Kwiek, eds. Łukasz Ronduda, Georg Schöllhammer, Warsaw/Wrocław/Vienna 2012.
Mazur Adam, Kwiekulik, „Działania z Dobromierzem” 1972-1974, Culture.pl, 2015, http://culture.pl/pl/dzielo/kwiekulik-dzialania-z-dobromierzem-1972-1974

Farewell Waltz, novel of 1972 written in Czech. Discusses the loves and hatreds among the eight characters in the Czechoslovakian spa town during the early seventies. The novel was first published in 1976 in French translation (La Valse aux adieux), the Czech original three years later in exile by 68 Publishers in Toronto. We do not know when and under what circumstances copy of this novel became part of Mr. Šufliarsky´s collection.

Lazar Stojanović’s prison record is of special importance to this collection since it contains relevant material from his imprisonenment between 1972 and 1975, such as the verdict, complaints, personal notes and psychological evaluation of the case. Stojanović had a digital version of his record (poor quality photographs of the documents), furnished via back-channels.

From the record it is visible that Stojanović was on trial twice – first at the end of 1972, during his compulsory military service when he was brought before the military court. Stojanović served as a conscript amidst political infighting between the highest Party leadership and President Tito on the one side, and Croatian communist leadership (1971) as well as Serbian communist leadership (1972) on the other. The clashing between the central and national leaderships led to a complete purging of both national leaderships in the wake of which, the legitimacy of the Yugoslav Communist Party was seriously threatened. In the first six months of 1972, about 3,500 individuals were imprisoned as 'political criminals', 60% of which were from Croatia (Marković 2011, 119). Tito’s Letter from October 1972, in which he called for a “more assertive Party” was the trigger for a more direct confrontation with what had until then been accepted liberties, particularly in the arts. Exactly at the end of October 1972, during Stojanović’s final month of military service, a captain denounced him to the military authorities for his lambasting of the Yugoslav People’s Army and Tito’s Letter. While awaiting trial, he was threatened and the police searched his house and found “anarchistic” materials which were confiscated (Solomun 2012, 15). Apart from his films, all student papers, samizdat issues, émigré press and the majority of the publications distributed among politically active youth were confiscated. At first, Stojanović was accused of espionage, however, in the end, he was charged only with “hostile propaganda.” His film “Plastic Jesus” was used as evidence against him during the trial but he was not judged for the movie during this first proceeding. The military court sentenced him to one year of prison.

In the meantime a civil trial commenced for “Plastic Jesus”. The majority of Stojanović’s file concerns the verdict from June 1973 in which “Plastic Jesus” and its “hostile” agency were analyzed in detail. The verdict states that in the work, the author “represented the socio-political situation in the country maliciously and falsely”, that he depreciated the socialist revolution, its fighters, and self-governing socialist system, and that he had insulted the figure of the President, Tito, “the most distinguished representative of the Revolution and of the construction of the socialist social relations.” The civil court sentenced Stojanović to one and a half years of prison. This sentence, combined with the previous sentence of the military court equated to two years in prison. As the verdict was issued, all copies of the film were confiscated due to their ‘criminal offense’ and the movie was barred from screening until December 1990.

The record also contains the verdict of the Supreme Court in Serbia from November 1973 which stated that owing to the severity of the act, the sentence would be increased to three years of prison. The verdict stated that the lower court did not evaluate the level of criminal irresponsibility of the accused and that the sentence of (only) two years would not achieve the purpose of providing adequate punishment. The reasoning behind this act was to ensure that others would refrain from engaging in similar criminal offences.

Article 118 of the Criminal law of Yugoslavia, which judicated against “hostile propaganda” was used as the basis for trial in both cases against Stojanović. Article 118 stated: “Whoever uses propaganda, with the intention to pull down the authority of the working people, the power of the state to defend, or the economic basis of socialist upbuild, or the fraternity and unity of the peoples in the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia with a drawing, inscription, speech at a gathering or any other way uses propaganda against the state or social organization or against political, economic, military or any other important measures of the people’s rule, will be punished with rigorous confinement.”

The trial of Stojanović and the treatment of “Plastic Jesus” were meant to set examples for other artists, ending the so-called “Black Wave” in Yugoslav cinematography.

The novel Mirákl was published 1972 in Toronto and 1991 in Prague. It was the first Škvorecký book written in exile, like the immediate reaction to the events of 1949-1970, which the author, over several time levels, logically connects with the beginning of the communist era. We do not know when and under what circumstances the copy of this novel became a part of Mr. Šufliarsky´s collection.

The official accusatory act concerning the case of Pavel Doronin (case No. 6647) was issued by the KGB investigator, Lieutenant Filatov, on 6 March 1972, when it was approved by the head of the Investigative Section of the KGB, Lieutenant-Colonel Kulikov, and by the Head of the Moldavian KGB, Major General Chvertko. Three days later, on 9 March 1972, this document was also approved by the Prosecutor General of the Moldavian SSR, I. Ceban. This document summarized the main ”anti-Soviet” activities carried out by Pavel Doronin between 1967 and 1971, providing a synthetic narrative of his subversive actions. The motivations of the defendant were linked to the impact of the “anti-Soviet broadcasts of the foreign radio stations Voice of America and BBC,” as well as to the discontent of the accused due to his earlier criminal conviction by the Soviet authorities. Concretely, Doronin was accused of “undermining Soviet power” through “systematically producing and spreading leaflets, letters and other documents which contained calumnies and false assertions regarding the Soviet political and social order, while some of them included open appeals to overthrow the CPSU.” The accusatory act carefully reviewed the main stages of Doronin’s activities, starting from the leaflets he spread in Chișinău and sent to a number of Soviet institutions in November 1967. The document also described the letters Doronin sent to several Soviet newspapers with critical reactions toward various aspects of the Soviet regime, as well as the anti-Soviet messages which the accused wrote on a number of banknotes in vanishing ink. The summary of Doronin’s “anti-Soviet” actions also emphasized the subversive nature of the texts he composed on behalf of several fictitious Jewish organizations or groups of Soviet citizens of Jewish origin in which he “expressed his solidarity with Zionist organizations in connection with the anti-Soviet activities pursued by” the latter. The presence of the “Jewish question” in Doronin’s texts and, especially, his ostensibly pro-Jewish position deserve special attention. The problem of Jewish emigration from the USSR and the anti-Israel stance of Soviet foreign policy during the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the aftermath of the Six Day War and in the context of the debate on human rights which was gaining prominence in that period featured prominently in the Soviet press and were used by Doronin as a conscious strategy to attract the attention of the Soviet authorities. It is interesting that during the investigation he confessed that his frequent references to the “Jewish question” were meant to draw a reaction from the authorities and, rather than pointing to a pro-Jewish position, derived in fact from his anti-Semitism. This example is revealing of how Doronin used and manipulated Soviet official rhetoric in order to achieve his own goals. The accusatory act also mentioned the material evidence (protocols of searches, various expert assessments, witness accounts and the reconstruction of Doronin’s actions during the inquiry) that purportedly proved the guilt of the defendant. Doronin was accused according to article 67, part 1, of the Criminal Code of the Moldavian SSR (“anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda aimed at undermining Soviet power”). As in other similar cases, the sentence reproduced almost literally the text of the accusatory act. This document is revealing for the mechanism used by the Soviet justice system to define and classify various “anti-Soviet” actions and for the criteria applied in order to deem an individual as potentially dangerous for the regime.