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Rozina Jadrná (née Pokorná) was a Czech journalist and host of the music broadcast on Radio Free Europe. She emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1948. After a short stay in Paris, she began her career in broadcasting at RFE in 1951 in Munich. She worked there as a radio host and from 1965 also as a DJ in the show “Odpoledne s hudbou” (Afternoon with music). The show, which played contemporary pop, jazz and rock music, focusing on young listeners, was very popular. Rozina Jadrná distinctively co-created its atmosphere, led correspondence and had other forms of contact with its listeners and also hosted a show called “Vzkazy domovu” (Messages Sent Home). After the occupation in August 1968, she personally engaged in helping emigrants, for example accommodating Karel Kryl. In 1980 she co-founded, together with her husband Karel Jadrný, exile edition “Arkýř”. Her activities, e.g. this contact with Czechoslovakia, were followed by the State Security (StB) for a long time – including StB’s well-known agent Minařík. After Rozina Jadrná’s death in April 1988 in Munich, there was a memorial service in the Church of the Most Sacred Heart of Our Lord in Prague; RFE was able to inform listeners about the event thanks to a telephone call by an anonymous listener.

The oppositional activities of Roland Jahn began with the expatriation of the songwriter Wolf Biermann from the GDR in 1976. With relatively spectacular feats to his name, he was a member of the Peace and Human Rights movement. The Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena ex-matriculated Jahn in 1978 from studies in the Faculty of Economic Sciences. In the beginning of the 1980’s he had several stints in prison. Finally, in 1983 he was expatriated against his will. As a journalist with the Free Berlin radio sender, he played a pronounced role in giving a voice to the oppositional elements of the GDR within West Germany. Through his contacts he was able to smuggle printing and copying machines through the Iron Curtain into the GDR. Following reunification he continued work as a journalist. In 2011, the Federal Government appointed him Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic.

Marek Janiak (born 1955) is an architect both by profession and education, however mainly known for being a member and the leading ideologist of the Łódź Kaliska group, the author of Liberating exercises (Ćwiczenia wyzwalające) camera performances and the participant of the Pitch-In Culture.

Janiak was born in Łódź. He studied architecture at the Łódź University of Technology and afterwards stayed at the University to continue his academic career. In 1979 together with Jerzy Koba, Andrzej Kwietniewski, Adam Rzepecki, Andrzej Świetlik and Andrzej Wielogórski he started the Łódź Kaliska artistic group, whose member he continues to be until this day. Janiak authored the most significant programme documents of Łódź Kaliska, and most importantly the 1980 Manifesto of embarrassing art, the 1983 Manifesto of embarrassing art II, the 1984 Second and last manifesto of embarrassing art, and the II (and last) manifesto of embarrassing art (not dated), as well as the 1983 Work without focus (Praca bez skupienia). He co-authored i.a. the 1982 Manifesto (for the art of the eighties), and finally the 1984 For the necessary art.

In the first of these texts Janiak states that the embarrassing art “perhaps embarrasses with its frankness and by breaking a taboo, which is the non-disclosure (privacy) of your struggle with the «necessity» of thoughtful functioning in the society that has been imposed on you, your struggle with the compulsion to adapt constantly to this functioning” and “it relates to the following terms: failed, trivial, stupid, vapid, repetitive, pedestrian, illogical, unreasonable, inconsistent, noncommunicative, unrevealing, unoriginal, indifferent, cynical, unconstructive, unobvious, inconsequent, not good, embarrassing, carefree, null, plagiarism, dull, weak, primitive, thoughtless, confused terms, disorderly, few”. In accordance with this concept the artist placed a banner above the site of the 1981 Osieki artistic plein-air, which read: “Temple of embarrassing and other art”.

The series of objects in For the rational art — embarrassing art (Sztuce racjonalnej – sztuka żenująca) from the beginning of the 1980s, and most importantly the 1987 Liberating exercises constituted a realisation of the ideas put forward in the manifestos and other theoretical statements. Janiak would carry out senseless activities, e.g. he would try to balance a stick on the tip of his nose or move around a massive desk, or break a glass with his head and shove Zbigniew Libera out of the frame. These actions presented the exhaustion of the avant-garde ethos and the embarrassing impossibility of new creation, as well as the sense of loneliness, and the need to compete in the world of art.

Aside from Łódź Kaliska, Janiak co-created another group from Łódź — the City Hall. He also actively participated in the Pitch-In Culture in the years 1981-1987, and was the creator of numerous pages of the Tango magazine. At the end of the 1980s Janiak conceptualised the postmodernist turn in the activities of Łódź Kaliska. In the later years he remained an active member of the group. He was also was a member and, for many years, the president of the Ulica Piotrkowska Foundation. In 2011 he took office as the architect of the City of Łódź. As a professor at the Łódź University of Technology he lectures on photography and interior design at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Development, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź.

Throughout the major part of the 1980s Janiak was one of the key figures of Łódź artistic underground. He not only dissented against official cultural institutions, but also against patriotic, committed or any other socially-useful type of art. He also had no ties to political opposition.

Sources:
Jarosław Lubiak (ed.), "Szczerość i blaga. Etyka prac Łodzi Kaliskiej w latach 1979-89", Łódź 2009.
Marek Janiak (ed.), "Kultura Zrzuty", Warszawa 1989.
Łódź Kaliska (ed. & elab.), "Bóg zazdrości nam pomyłek", Łódź 1999.

Henryk Jankowski was a Catholic priest, the best known chaplain of the “Solidarity” trade union, to which he was associated from 1980.

He had been ordained to priesthood in 1964 and after serving in two different churches in Gdańsk, in 1970 he became the rector of the saint Bridget in Gdańsk (this parish served also to the Gdańsk Shipyard). Jankowski started to directly support „Solidarity” when he celebrated a mass on 17 August 1980 in Gdańsk Shipyard during the strike. From that day on he showed up there daily in order to celebrate masses and encourage striking shipyard workers. He entered the very close circle of Lech Wałęsa associates. Father Jankowski participated in the First Regional Congress of “Solidarity” in Gdynia in the summer of 1981. According to some testimonies, he mediated between different emerging fractions in the trade movement and tried to mitigate the tension between two main opponents: Lech Wałęsa and Andrzej Gwiazda.

Because of his involvement in the opposition he became the target of Polish secret services. During 1980s he helped the “Solidarity” in Tricity in getting aid (mainly medicines) from American Polonia (Polish diaspora in the United States); he organised summer camps for trade union activists’ children and managed to support financially those oppressed by secret services. Saint Bridget Church and its parish were known as a safe place for Pomeranian opposition in the 1980s. In 1983 Jankowski together with Father Jerzy Popiełuszko (chaplain of Warszawa Steel Mill) co-organised the pilgrimage of “people of work” to Jasna Góra in Częstochowa. Jankowski and Popiełuszko’s activities were one of the best known examples of involvement of the Catholic Church in Polish political opposition. This engagement is still commemorated and used by the “Solidarity” trade union. In the Archives of National Commission of the "Solidarity" Trade Union, artifacts associated to Popiełuszko and Jankowski are still of great importance, according to Archives’ activist Łukasz Grochowski.

According to some, actions of clergyman Jankowski after 1989 cross out his former oppositional heroism. Sketchy businesses, anti-Semitic sermons, cooperation with All-Polish Youth (nationalist, right-wing party), accusations of sexual harassment, introducing politics into church (in Lord’s Graves – traditional representations of Jesus Grave displayed in Poland during Easter holidays) led to the situation, when only the most decisive part of “Solidarity” still celebrates his figure. This firm stand was not changed after the information from the Institute of National Remembrance about priest Jankowski being a contact person for Polish secret service.  

Leaving behind the evaluation of priest Jankowski’s character, his biography nevertheless interestingly presents how did opposition activists navigate in changed social conditions after 1989 and how the memory of involvement of Catholic Church in Polish democratic opposition is being preserved, commemorated, and contested. Conflicting interpretations of father Jankowski’s actions represent one of memory wars on 80s and 90s in Poland. 

František Janouch (b. 1931) is a Czech and Swedish nuclear physicist, publicist, dissident, founder of the Charter 77 Foundation and still a chairman of its board of directors. He studied physics in St. Petersburg and Moscow. After returning to Czechoslovakia, he was Head of the Department of Theoretical Nuclear Physics at the Czechoslovak Institute of Nuclear Research and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University. In 1970, he was expelled from his posts as a result of political purge and was banned from lecturing at universities. After numerous international protests, he was allowed to emigrate in 1974 and his Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked a year later. He moved his scientific research to Sweden but he also gave a number of guest performances in other Western countries and gained degrees of Dr. a Prof. h. c. at several world universities.

In 1978 Janouch co-founded the Charter 77 Foundation in Stockholm, which he continues to be the head of to this day. He chose the award ceremony of the Monismanien Prize for Freedom of Speech, which was awarded to the Charter 77 movement, to announce the foundation and called upon the public to support persecuted signers of Charter 77. Through the Foundation, Janouch significantly contributed to the founding of the Original Videojournal when he smuggled the first video camera to Czechoslovakia in 1985 and later, more technical equipment for video production and material help. The idea of a “video project” emerged from the correspondence between Janouch, historian Vilém Prečan and Václav Havel at the turn of 1983/1984, but only televisions and video recorders were considered. A year later Havel suggested the possibilities of a video camera which was later handed over to amateur filmmakers from the documentary group Čeněk [Chen-yek]. Before that, the filmmakers had used only analog film and the footage had to go through a risky path in order to be developed abroad. Janouch, as a representative of the Charter 77 Foundation, supported the activities of the Original Videojournal throughout the filming and archived the parts of the samizdat video magazine that were sent.

Vladimír Janoušek was a Czech sculptor and painter. He graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague in 1950. He met his future wife, Věra Janouškova (neé Havlová), also a sculptor, while he was studying there. He belonged to the generation of sculptors who tried to set themselves against socialist realism through their work, drawing inspiration from the interwar avant-garde. In 1960 he became the founding member of the UB 12 art group. When creating his sculptures, Janoušek would weld together metal materials. Figures featured predominantly – his characters were often surrounded by constructions made from wire. During the mid-1960s, his sculptures began to take on more of a technical character and resembled machine mechanisms. Janoušek became an “undesirable” sculptor during Normalization – he was forbidden from exhibiting in public and his designs were rejected from public competitions. During this period, his work was principally inspired by movement. In addition to sculpture, Janoušek also devoted himself to painting and drawing.

Věra Janoušková was a Czech sculptor, graphic designer and painter. In 1948 she married the sculptor Vladimír Janoušek, who was her fellow student at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague. In 1960 she helped establish the UB 12 art group, and in the 1960s, alongside her husband, she was one of the most distinctive figures in the Czech art scene. However, as with her husband, she was one of the most persecuted artists during Normalization. She lost all public commissions, was forced to cut off her international contacts and until 1989 she was only able to rarely exhibit her works in unofficial places outside of Prague. After 1989, however, her work began to be exhibited once more, both at home and abroad. Her personal technique was the “stitching” of statues (mainly figures) with welding wire. She also created monochrome, mainly purely white statues from asbestos. From the 1970s an important part of her work also became paper collages.

Augustinas Janulaitis was a famous Lithuanian political and cultural activist. He cooperated with the illegal Lithuanian media, and was an active member of the Social Democratic Party. He translated the Communist Manifesto (the first edition, 1904) into Lithuanian. Janulaitis was persecuted by the Imperial Russian government for his political activity, and was obliged to emigrate. For a few years, he studied at Bern University in Switzerland. He returned to the Russian Empire, and graduated in law from Moscow University. During the interwar period, as a well-known lawyer and professor, he shifted to the political right, and published a critical study about Soviet Russia ('Lithuania and Contemporary Russia', 1925.) Janulaitis was known to students, the academic community and the public as a legal and cultural historian. He collected material about personalities who played an important role in Lithuanian history and culture: about the lawyer and historian Ignas Danilevičius (1787-1843), the writer and folklorist Mykalojus Akelaitis (1829-1887), the poet Kiprijonas Nezabitauskis (1779-1837), the cultural historian Simonas Daukantas (1793-1864), and others. Janulaitis wrote and published biographies of Danilevičius and Akelaitis. His studies in Lithuanian culture had a huge influence on students, including Meilė Matjošaitytė-Lukšienė (1913-2009), who became a well-known cultural historian, and at the end of the 1980s she helped to initiate the Sąjūdis movement along with other Lithuanian intellectuals. Janulaitis was the uncle of Meilė Lukšienė. 

During the Soviet period, Janulaitis was loyal to the regime. He participated in creating the Academy of Sciences in Soviet Lithuania in 1941, and was elected a member. In 1945, he became the dean of the Faculty of History at Vilnius University. However, in 1946, he was accused of 'bourgeois nationalism' during an ideological campaign that was started by Party authorities against 'Western influences' and 'cosmopolitism'. The Party leadership 'reminded' him of his negative attitude towards Soviet Russia. He survived, but retired from the university and the academy. He died in 1950. Students and the younger generation of the Lithuanian intelligentsia saw him as a representative of the cultural elite of independent Lithuania. His studies in 19th-century Lithuanian culture and his collection of documents about activists in the national revival had a huge impact on Lithuanian historians, especially during the period of the national revival in 1988-1990.

Croatian and American historian Jere (Jerome) Jareb was born in Prvić Šepurina (Croatia) on May 3, 1922, and died in Charlottesville (Virginia, USA) on November 22, 2017. After completing the classics gymnasium in Šibenik, he left the town because Fascist Italy occupied it in September 1941. He moved to Zagreb where he studied at the Faculty of Law. Due to his poor health, he was not recruited into the army of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). He became a member of the editorial board of the magazine Ustaška mladež (Ustasha Youth), where he wrote historical articles until the end of World War II. In the fall of 1944, he was severely stricken by a bout of tuberculosis in the bone of his right leg, and in July 1947 his leg was amputated. At the beginning of May 1945, instead of the planned hospitalisation, he ended up at the refugee camp in the suburbs of Klagenfurt. He stayed in the camp for three months, after which he was sent to the hospital where he remained until May 1949. In December 1951, he moved to Salzburg to seek an immigration visa to the United States.

In January 1952, he flew to New York, where his father, a pre-war economic emigrant, lived. Jere lived in New York until 1966. He was one of the founders of the Croatian Academy in America, established in 1953, and served as its executive secretary for the first four years, and then later became its president. Along with Karlo Mirth, he was the editor of the Academy's Journal of Croatian Studies, which was founded in 1960. From 1953 to 1995, he was a trustee of the journal Hrvatska revija (Croatian Review). From 1953, he studied history at Columbia University, where he earned his MA in 1958. He concluded his graduate studies, with an emphasis on East-Central European and Western Europe contemporary history, in 1964 by defending a doctoral dissertation entitled "The Adriatic Question from June 1919 to February 1924." During his stay in New York, he constantly acquired books from the homeland that he needed to study Croatian history. Olga Živković, then employed at the Lexicographic Institute, sent him books regularly. When Olga travelled to the United States in 1959, Jere Jareb married her (Matković 2008: 722). From 1963 to 1966, he lectured at Rutgers University (New Jersey), and in 1966 he moved to St. Francis University in Loretto (Pennsylvania), where he lectured on European and world history until his retirement in 1992. From 1968 until his retirement, he was chairman of the University’s History Department.

His best known book, Pola stoljeća hrvatske politike (One-Half Century of Croatian Politics), was initially a critical review of Vladko Maček's memoirs, which were serialized in Hrvatska revija (1959). In 1960, he expanded the text and published it as a book in Buenos Aires in 1960. It was a political history of Croatia from 1895 to 1945, with an emphasis on the history of the Ustasha Movement and the NDH. In that book, he presented a different view of the history of 20^th-century Croatian politics than the one that  had prevailed in Croatia and other parts of Yugoslavia. After publishing this book, he became close to the Croatian political emigration. He contacted and interviewed numerous Croatian emigrants, from Vladko Maček, through Juraj Krnjević, Lovro Sušić, to Eugen ‘Dido’ Kvaternik. He also had contacts with historians and other intellectuals from the homeland such as Ljubo Boban, Bogdan Krizman, and Zvonimir Kulundžić. Historians in the country saw his books as valuable and professional works, although they were banned in Yugoslavia. He is also the author of the books Političke uspomene i rad dra Branimira Jelića (Political Memories and Work of Dr Branimir Jelić) published in Cleveland in 1982; Zlato i novac Nezavisne Države Hrvatske izneseni u inozemstvo 1944. i 1945.: dokumentarni prikaz (Gold and money of the Independent State of Croatia taken abroad in 1944 and 1945: Documents) (Zagreb, 1997), and Državno gospodarstveno povjerenstvo Nezavisne Države Hrvatske od kolovoza 1941. do travnja 1945.: dokumentarni prikaz (State Economic Commission of the Independent State of Croatia from August 1941 to April 1945: Documents) (Zagreb, 2001). At the late stage of his career, he was also a corresponding associate of the Croatian Institute of History.

During his academic career, he gathered his collection of books and other publications, which he donated to the Croatian Institute of History in 1997. He has been active in preserving the cultural and historical heritage of Croatian emigrants, so had donated the émigré periodicals to the National and University Library in Zagreb, and the documentation (grey literature) of Croatian emigrants to the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb.

Although he was an anti-communist, he did not join any political organisations nor did he engage in political activism. Jareb acted only on a cultural and academic basis, trying to preserve the legacy of Croatian emigrant communities and explore those spheres and themes in Croatian history such as the history of the NDH which could not be studied freely the communist regime, for only an ideological approach was allowed.

He studied theatrology at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. In the early 1980s, after a short stint with hippie communities, he developed interest in punk and New Wave music.

In 1991 he left Poland and moved to Stockholm and Hamburg. Upon his return, in mid-1990s, he noted that albums of punk bands that he used to listen to in his early youth were not available in stores and realised that he only had their amateur cassette recordings.

As Jarosz puts it: “It turned out that these alums have never been released. It was a time when people were getting rid of their cassettes, open-reel tapes, and papers. Certain awareness awoke in me; that some things needed to be saved from destruction”.

Thus the “Trasa W-Z Archive” archive was created, dedicated to Polish pop culture from the 1956-1989 period. It currently comprises ca. 700 hours of music, including numerous unique recordings, also from the legendary festival in Jarocin. Jarosz is the creator and the curator of the archive and the publisher of several music albums based on archive’s materials. It was only after having been developing the collection for several years that he gave it a name, formulated the rules of handling the materials, and defined its future use. “Trasa W-Z Archive” contains the entire collection of Walter Chełstowski, the initiator and the organiser of the Jarocin festival, which in the 1980s was the key annual event for Polish punk, as well as rock music in general.

Jarosz co-designed the concept of the permanent multimedia exhibition in the Polish Rock Granary in Jarocin, i.e. a museum dedicated to the history of Jarocin festival and Polish rock.

In 2002 in collaboration with Kacper Sawicki Jarosz wrote the script and directed Buntownicy i kontestatorzy (Rebels and dissenters). He is an author of publications and exhibitions dedicated to Polish music and art of the 1980s, i.a. the 2010 book titled Generacja (Generation).

Rimantas Jasas (1929-2002) was a Lithuanian historian. He was born in Šiauliai, where he lived until 1936 when his family moved to Utena. At the end of the Second World War, his father emigrated to the USA, and his mother was sent to Siberia in 1948. Rimantas Jasas concealed these facts when he became a member of the Komsomol. He even started to work as a laboratory assistant in the Department of Marxism-Leninism at Vilnius Pedagogical Institute, although he was soon accused of withholding information and sacked. In 1952, Jasas started studying history at Vilnius University. He graduated from the university in 1957, and started working at the Lithuanian Institute of History. In 1968, he moved to the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, where he worked till the end of his life.

While Jasas did not undertake formal doctoral studies (he deliberately refused), he was considered a leading specialist in the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, knowing the archival sources very well. He prepared and translated the Bychovets Chronicle (published in 1971). Even today, this publication is a standard example of a perfect work on historical sources. Nevertheless, while working at the library, Jasas was overloaded with technical work that impeded his research work. The reason for this negative situation was the lack of political trust in him by the regime.

Milan Jelínek was born 22. 6. 1923 in Brno. After his graduation in 1942, he was forced to work in Austria, where he worked as a clerk. During this time he participated in an anti-Nazi resistance group Lípa. Because of this, he was arrested and imprisoned from the beginning of 1944 until the end of the war. In 1945, he began to study Czech, Russian and Serbo-Croatian at Brno´s University, but due to financial problems he finished his studies externally. In 1948 he became a teacher for a year at the grammar school in Holešov.

The next year he became an assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts in Brno for a while, where he returned again from 1958 to 1971. For the third time, this institution became Jelínek´s employer in the period 1990 to 1992. Jelínek also worked at the Czechoslovak Academy of Science from 1953 to 1958 and 1971 to 1983. In the academic year of 1961 to 1962, he had a fellowship at the University of Greifswald and four years later at Sorbonne. The second academic destination became a good "explanation" when French scientists visited his underground university at his flat in the 1980s. Milan Jelínek also worked in university administrative positions: from 1962 to 1964 as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, from 1990 to 1992 as the Rector of Masaryk University.

Jelinek was an enthusiastic Communist at the beginning of the 1950s and remained a strong left-wing ideologist until the end of his life. He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1970 because of his engagement in the Prague Spring. It was then that Jelinek was forced to leave the university in 1971 and work at the Academy of Sciences, where he could only pursue the popularization of Czech language and not scientific and pedagogical work. Jelinek published his articles unofficially under the names of other authors or in samizdat. The most significant activity of Jelinek within the framework of the cultural opposition lies in publishing samizdats and his organization of the underground university of the French branch of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation. The samizdat workshop of Jelínek's family (his wife Jana was actively involved) published about 120 book titles and 110 issues of magazines. The underground university in Jelínek's flat took place from 1986 to 1989, during which time there were 32 French thinkers.    

Milan Jelínek holds many awards, among them the Commandeur dans l 'Ordre des Palmes académique in 1993, the Medal of Masaryk University and the University of Silesia in Opava.

Ivan Martin Jirous, also known under the pseudonym of “Magor“ (“madman”, “fool” – though in a positive sense), was a Czech poet, art historian, and leader and theoretician of the Czech underground. He signed Charter 77 and was the manager of the art music band “The Plastic People of the Universe”. In the seventies and eighties he was in prison five times (a total of eight years and six months) as a result of his cultural activities and attitude towards the system.

In 1963, Jirous began studying art history at the Faculty of Arts in Prague, and graduated in 1968 with a defence of his master thesis about the poet and artist Jiří Kolář. At the end of the sixties, he officially published art-theory texts, while from the beginning of the seventies he worked either as a labourer or was unemployed. At the end of the sixties, he collaborated with the Czech rock-music band “The Primitives Group”, which played psychedelic music. From 1969 he was the art leader of the underground music band “The Plastic People of the Universe” (PPU). One of Jirous’s most important essays was an introduction to the Czech underground “Notes on the Third Czech Musical Revival”. Jirous defined its fundamental values and artistic basis in a programme statement of the underground, where he emphasized authenticity in life and in creativity within the context of communist power. “Notes” was published in 1975 as a samizdat volume (entitled “Notes from the Czech Musical Underground”) and after that in the exile magazine “Testimony” (Svědectví, Paris 1976).

Jirous organized numerous concerts, public lectures and cultural events, for example, “Festivals of the second culture” (1974 in Postupice, 1976 in Bojanovice – connected with his wedding with Juliana Jirousová). The concert in Bojanovice, where The Plastic People of the Universe and others underground bands performed, was held in the hall of a village restaurant and became a pretext for repressive action taken by the police against sympathizers of the underground community – nineteen people were taken into custody and were charged with disturbing the peace. Most of them were members of the music groups PPU and DG 307. This case became a cause célèbre after the friends of the detainees termed the trial as political in a message to Amnesty International, and it was then brought to the attention of the Western media.

Many people from Czech cultural and intellectual life supported the accused (for example, Václav Havel, the philosophers Jan Patočka and Karel Kosík, and the writer and Nobel Prize winner Jaroslav Seifert). These people were later connected with the origins of Charter 77. On the other hand, the official propaganda campaign described the defendants as drug addicts and social parasites. It led to two trials with seven people convicted. In the second trial (the ‘Prague’ trial), Jirous was sentenced to 18 months in prison, and the musicians Pavel Zajíček, Svatopluk Karásek for one year and Vratislav Brabenec for eight months. One immediate consequence of the trial of Jirous and the others members of the underground was the establishment of the opposition initiative “Charter 77”; in connection with the international commitment of Czechoslovakia to respect human rights, which was declared at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975 in Helsinki. Jirous signed Charter 77 after his release from prison in 1978 (his ex-wife, the poet and art historian Věra Jirousová, and his wife, the painter Juliana Jirousová, also signed the charter).

Most of Jirous’s sentences were classified as disturbing the peace (§ 202). In fact, it is possible to speak about the politically motivated trials connected with his political convictions and his cultural activities. He was imprisoned for: singing an anti-communist song (“Send the Russian killers to hell where they belong”) and arguing with a retired Security Service Major (StB; 1973–74); for activities linked with the band “The Plastic People of the Universe (1976–77); for offending a communist functionary (1978; he made a speech at a Jiří Lacina exhibition about the insurmountable differences between official and unofficial culture); due to his role in producing, publishing and distributing the samizdat magazine “Vokno” (1981–85); for the activities around the petition “Tak dost”, which was connected to the last victim of the communist regime, the political prisoner Pavel Wonka. After his release from prison in 1985, Jirous was on parole and had to report daily to the Public Security Office at a specified time.

His prison experience is reflected in the collection of poems “Magor’s Swan Songs”. The collection was created during his terms of imprisonment from 1981 to 1985 and was originally published as a samizdat volume. The collection won the Tom Stoppard Prize in 1985. Jirous’s poems from this collection have appeared in many translated anthologies (English, German, French, Polish, Russian). In 2006, Jirous was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Prize for this collection and his overall literary achievement. He published ten collections of poems as samizdat volumes. Jirous’s poetry work came out in 1989 in a collected volume “Magor’s summa” (Magorova summa). His work “The True Story of the Plastic People” was serialized in 1983, 1984 and 1987 in the Viennese magazine “Paternoster”, together with “Notes on the Third Czech Musical Revival”; and after that, for example, in the book “Magorův zápisník” (1997).

In the seventies and eighties he contributed to articles, critiques and polemics to many samizdat magazines, for example “Vokno” (Jirous helped found the magazine in 1979), also “Revolver Revue”, “Infoch – Information about Charter 77”, “Dialogy” and others. Jirous organized several samizdat anthologies of poems (for example “The Invalid Siblings for Egon Bondy on his 45th Birthday”, 1975). After 1989, he continued to write articles on art and other subjects, as well as poetry collections up until his death in 2011. He is now seen as a legendary figure who was crucial to the Czechoslovak underground.

Františka Jirousová was born in March 1980 and is the oldest daughter of the painter Juliana Jirousová, née Stritzková, and the poet Ivan Martin Jirous. She spent part of her childhood alone with her mother and younger sister Marta because her father was active in the underground movement and was imprisoned for his activities. Several letters by Marta and Františka appeared in the publication Ahoj můj miláčku, addressed to their father in prison. 

Františka received a degree from the Police Academy (2001) and later graduated in philosophy at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. In 2017 she finished her doctoral studies in the same subject. Her dissertation work was called Evolution as a way to God in Teilhard de Chardin’s work.

Františka Jirousová worked as an archivist at the Libri Prohibiti library and as a proofreader, and is now employed as a book editor. As a philosopher she deals with Christian philosophy, specializing in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. When she was younger she painted, but later she swapped her brush for a pen and wrote two novels.

Františka Jirousová, together with Jana Bauerová, founded the literary group Catholic Decadence in 2004, and in 2018 they published their diary memories of Ivan Martin Jirous entitled Maga. As heir to Magor’s farm (Magor was the nickname of I. M. Jirous), Františka Jirousová runs and maintains this farm, which is open to students and artists for free. Jirousová lives alternately in Prague and Prostřední Vydří.

Juliana Jirousová was born in September 1943 in Stará Říše. Her father was the painter Otto Stritzko and her mother, Marie Florianová, was also a painter. Juliana’s grandfather, Josef Florian, was an important publisher and translator, who also lived in Stará Říše.

As a result of her so-called “cadre profile”, Juliana Jirousová was not allowed to study at university. Since she did not want to pursue a career in art as her family had done, and could not study, she sold furniture in Prague for a year. However, she soon started painting, influenced by Byzantine enamels. From 1964, she was employed as an art therapist at a psychiatric hospital in Havlíčkův Brod. She worked for a while in the most well-known psychiatric hospital in Czechoslovakia – Bohnice in Prague. However, she returned to Stará Říše due to the links between the medical staff and the secret police (StB). At home she continued to paint.

In 1972 she met Ivan Martin Jirous and began attending events connected with the underground and concerts by the band The Plastic People of the Universe, whose manager was Jirous. Juliana became integrated into the so-called second culture. Four years later, Jirous and Juliana got married and Jirous used his wedding as a pretext to hold the second Festival of the Second culture in Bojanovice. In response to the festival, Jirous was arrested and convicted in the “trial of the Plastic People“. After his release from prison in 1977, Jirous and Jirousová signed Charter 77. Besides writing poems, organizing “second culture” and managing the underground band The Plastic People, Jirous alias “Magor”, was also involved in creating samizdat volumes. His wife helped and supported him in these activities. During their marriage Jirous was imprisoned four times.

While they were separated, the married couple wrote letters to each other. Extracts from these letters were published in samizdat volumes (for example, in the magazine Koruna), and after the Velvet Revolution part of this correspondence was published in 2015 (Ahoj můj miláčku). Despite the prison censorship, these letters shed some interesting light on the life of prisoners. They help literary scholars in their studies of poems by Jirous, and they provide colour to the events of the seventies and eighties. The publishing house Torst owns some of these letters, and some of them were donated by Juliana and her daughter Františka to the Libri Prohibiti library. Juliana still lives in Stará Říše, where she focuses on painting with Christian motifs.

Ignas Jonynas was a Lithuanian historian. His works and studies (especially his seminal work ‘Vytautas’ Household’, written in 1932) laid the foundations for modern Lithuanian national historiography. During the interwar period, he was not only a professional historian and professor at Kaunas State University, but also a diplomat (from 1920 to 1922, he represented the Republic of Lithuania at the League of Nations. Later he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a couple of years).  Like several other Lithuanian intellectuals, writers and scholars, Jonynas appears to have sympathised with Soviet Russia. This is probably because he studied at Moscow University and liked Russian culture. He decided to stay in Lithuania after 1944. (His two sons left Lithuania.) 

He became a professor at Kaunas and Vilnius universities (from 1946, only at Vilnius University). His lectures were very popular with students, especially historians. His ideas on history were based on principles of historicism and positivism. Jonynas taught some famous Lithuanian historians: such as Vytautas Merkys and Mečislovas Jučas. He organised special 'historical’ trips for historians around important places in Lithuanian history. In 1948 and 1949, he was attacked severely by the University Party Committee, and later by leaders of the Lithuanian Communist Party, for ignoring Marxist methodology, and for ‘bourgeois nationalism’. Jonynas admitted to ‘ideological mistakes’, and continued his professional career at the university.