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Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska was born in Vinnytsia, Ukraine in 1931. She was the niece of Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. Her father Khoma married Kateryna Bedryzova, a Crimean of Armenian descent, who was trained and educated classically in St. Petersburg. In 1929, Bedryzova was accused of Ukrainian nationalism and only her Armenian heritage kept her from being included in a criminal case against the members of an organization called the “Union for the Liberation of Ukraine.” That said, Bedryzova embraced the family’s efforts to preserve and protect Kotsiubynsky’s literary legacy. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Kotsiubynska recalled how her parents struggled to save their family as well the Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky museum. Her father Khoma refused to evacuate the family until they were issued an entire train car to take with them the museum’s holdings from Chernihiv. Miraculously, their request was met in the final hour, but as they waited for their train car to be attached to trains heading into the Soviet interior, Nazi bombs began falling all around them. Mykhailyna recalled in her memoirs how in that moment her parents protected that which was most valuable to them. They placed Mykhailyna on top of the trunk holding Kotsiubynsky’s original manuscripts and used their bodies to shield both from the fallout.

Despite Kotsiubynska’s ties to Ukrainian literary royalty, she was unable to avoid the post-Khrushchev crackdown on the cultural intelligentsia entirely, although unlike some of her counterparts, she was not sentenced to hard labor and exiled. Kotsiubynska lost her job at the T.H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature in 1966, the same year she was asked to turn in her party card following her participation in a protest staged at a Kyiv screening of Sergei Paradhznov’s film “Shadow of Forgotten Ancestors.” This film was an internationally acclaimed adaptation of the eponymous novel written by her uncle Mykhailo, but became a lightening rod for political protest, after a wave of arrests of Soviet writers and artists indicated renewed ideological retrenchment. While working at the Institute of Literature, Kotsiubynska had befriended and became a mentor to a young Vasyl Stus and is responsible for making much of his oeuvre accessible posthumously to the broader public. Her insights into his creative process were invaluable, and after decades of silence Kotsiubynska also wrote prodigiously after independence, chronicling the struggle of this circle of Kyivan intellectual and writers in the face of an oppressive and unyielding Soviet system.

Petr Kotyk is a Czech literary historian and curator in the Literary Archives of the Museum of Czech Literature. Since 1990 he had been making video recordings depicting Czech poets and writers as part of the time-lapse project, “Authentic”. The project focused on public events (readings, discussions, literary conferences, etc.) as well as private (recording the memories of authors and contemporaries). Kotyk is responsible for many publications and exhibitions in related to contemporary Czech literature. In January 2017 he was awarded the Czech PEN Club Prize for his work and achievements.

Poet, philosopher, architect, urbanist. After graduating with a degree in architecture, he became a disciple of philosopher Béla Hamvas. A few years later, they participated in a series of conversations with Béla Tábor and Lajos Szabó, which made a strong impact on him, and he choose Szabó as his new master. He got a serious infection in 1948, and his arm was paralyzed.

Following the failed Hungarian revolution in 1956, he emigrated with his family (and also with Szabó and his wife) to Brussels, where he studied architecture and urbanism. According to his wife, he preferred conversations to letters, and more than once, triggered by a book, he would locate the author, travel to his home, and ring the bell. This seems to have been the case with Guy Debord in 1960.

Kotányi became involved with the Situationist International (SI) in 1960, the same year he became director of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism in Brussels. He participated in the group’s conferences held in September 1960 in London, August 1961 in Göteborg, and November 1962 in Antwerp. He was appointed to the Central Council of the SI; he participated in the first four sessions held in November 1960 in Brussels, January 1961 in Paris, April 1961 in Munich, and February 1962 in Paris. Kotányi served as the main editor of issues 5, 6, and 8 of Internationale Situationniste, as well as the inaugural issue of Situationistik Revolution, published in October 1962.

He contributed a number of seminal essays to the journal, including Gangland and Philosophy, 1961, Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism, 1961, co-authored with Raoul Vaneigem, and Theses on the Commune, on which he collaborated in 1962 with Debord and Vangeiem. In the summer of 1963, he submitted a proposal (as a private letter) with the outline of a radical reorientation for the movement. The text and he himself were accused of mysticism by Debord, and as a consequence, he was expelled from the group.

Pavel Kouba is a Czech philosopher and pupil of Jan Patočka. Kouba studied German and Russian at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. He attended underground philosophical seminars conducted by Jan Patočka from 1973 to 1977. Together with Ivan Chvatík, another of Patočkaʼs students, he cooperated on the samizdat publishing of Patočkaʼs works, and he co-organised underground seminars, even after Patočkaʼs death in 1977. From 1980 to 1989 he worked as a librarian at the Institute of Architecture, Prague City Council. In 1990 he became a research fellow of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (later Czech Academy of Sciences), and together with Ivan Chvatík, he founded the Jan Patočka Archives. Having been awarded the research fellowship by the Humboldt Foundation he spent two years (1992–1994) at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster in Germany. Then, he briefly served as a head of the Twentieth Century Philosophy Department at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and in 1995 he joined the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Charles University, where he became an associate professor in 1996. Between 2000 and 2004 he served as director of the Centre of Phenomenological Research, jointly run by the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Charles University. In 2003, Kouba was appointed a professor.

 Pavel Kouba deals mainly with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and with Patočkaʼs attempt at their synthesized interpretation. In his studies he focuses on current issues of phenomenological philosophy and hermeneutics (pertaining to H. Arendt, E. Fink, H.-G. Gadamer), since the late 1980s with special emphasis on the interpretation of Nietzsche. His main interest is currently the hermeneutic concept of fundamental ontological problems, in particular the relation between space and time.

Viktor Koval (born in March 1941, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Khabarovsk Region, RSFSR) was an engineer who came to the Moldavian SSR (the city of Bălți) in 1974, after previously working in various cities of the Russian Far East and the southern region of European Russia (such as Novorossiisk). Koval was of Russian ethnic background and came to the MSSR along with many other engineers and technicians of Russian extraction who staffed the expanding industrial enterprises of Soviet Moldavia during the 1960s and 1970s. At the time of his arrest in March 1982, Koval had been working for the past five years as a head engineer at an electrical equipment plant, in the section dealing with construction works. According to the material of the official investigation, Koval began to openly express ”anti-Soviet” opinions in late 1977, mainly at his workplace. He was very critical of the Soviet political structure, in general, and the electoral system, in particular, claiming that Soviet citizens lacked any real civil liberties and political rights, while deputies were pre-selected by the party instead of being elected by the people. The KGB correctly identified the Western radio stations which Koval used to listen to (Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, BBC, etc.) as the major sources of his criticism and discontent. This coincided with the regime’s own fears of foreign propaganda, but also proved the real impact of the “enemy stations,” despite Soviet jamming efforts.

The most serious incident linked to Koval’s rejection of “Soviet democracy” occurred on 4 March 1979, when he adamantly refused to take part in the token elections for the Supreme Soviet and argued his position in front of the members of the electoral commission. The case files point to a growing radicalisation of Koval’s views during the next two years. Thus, in early 1980 he criticised the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, claiming that it was in fact a case of brutal interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state rather than an example of “internationalist assistance,” as the official propaganda insisted. Even more serious from the authorities’ perspective was Koval’s open support for Polish Solidarity. In August 1980, he praised the Gdansk workers’ revolt as a model of true democracy and “people’s power,” contrasting it with the sham democratic credentials of the Soviet regime and the purely formal existence of Soviet trade unions. In late 1981, he condemned the brutal police repression of the Solidarity movement and the declaration of the state of siege, viewing these events as a suppression of the people’s will. These opinions led the KGB officials to conclude that they were dealing with a particularly dangerous case of anti-regime attitudes. This was also confirmed by the search of Koval’s apartment, which led to the discovery of a number of papers and notes with an “anti-Soviet” content. He did not spread or propagate his views in written form (aside from the small incident with the leaflets found near his factory in early 1982), but was quite frank in his conversations with his co-workers.

Following the trend of using punitive psychiatry in order to suppress open opposition, Koval was subject to a psychiatric evaluation, which found that he suffered from “latent schizophrenia,” despite the fact that the evidence was not convincing. Rather than receiving a prison sentence, on 27 August 1982 he was sent to a special psychiatric facility of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs located in Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine). During the Perestroika period, on the occasion of the Nineteenth Party Conference held in Moscow in June 1988, Koval filed a petition for his release and rehabilitation, claiming that he was punished for his political opinions. However, this petition was rejected by the General Prosecutor of the MSSR in October 1988 on the grounds that Koval’s action was still “socially dangerous.” He was released in May 1990, when Article 203, part 1, of the Penal Code of the MSSR, on which Koval’s conviction was based, was abolished. He was definitively rehabilitated only in November 1991, following a special decision of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Moldova, which recognised that Koval’s case was political in nature (without explicitly condemning the use of punitive psychiatry). Koval’s fate after his release remains unknown.