COURAGE

connecting collections

Kaczmarek was an initiator of the Poznan Anarchist Library. For several years he collected items, organised the archive and acted as a librarian. An electrician by profession, he made a living working in Poznan’s housing associations, while voluntarily co-running the library in Rozbrat. While co-creating the library, Kaczmarek started library studies, which enables him to create a professional archive documentanig the anarchist movement – gathered in folders and organised in catalogues by subject and time.   

Simultaneously, Kaczmarek was involved in publishing in the Anarchistyczna Oficyna Wydawnicza Nabat (a publishing house). After two years (1997-1999) Nabat ceased to function and its texts were taken over by another publishing house: Oficyna Wydawnicza Bractwa Trojka. Some books and brochures Kaczmarek published also as a Pubslihing House of Poznan Anarchist Library. Within this initiative he edited the „Bulletin of Poznan Anarchist Library”, to which he also contributed as a main author. After the “Bulletin” had been changed into the “Anarchistic Review” in 2007, Kaczmarek entered its editing board; he also wrote numerous articles on the anarchist movement. He continued the publishing activity within Bractwo Trojka where he elaborated several issues. With time, Kaczmarek withdrew from being an active member of the anarchist movement – both for ideological and personal reasons; since a few years he has not engaged in the library’s and publishing house’s activities.

Mikhail [Moisei] Naumovich Kalik (b. 29 January 1927, Arkhangel’sk, Russia – d. 31 March 2017, Jerusalem, Israel) was a Soviet director and screenwriter of Jewish background, based in Moscow and Chișinău, where he worked at the Moldova Film-Studio. In 1949, Kalik enrolled in Grigorii Aleksandrov’s directing workshop at the Soviet State Film School VGIK. Two years later, he and four fellow students were arrested and accused of of “Jewish bourgeois nationalism” and of “planning anti-Soviet terrorist acts.” Kalik was sentenced to ten years of hard labour according to article 58-17 of the Penal Code of the RSFSR (production and dissemination of counter-revolutionary literature). He was sent to a GULAG concentration camp in the Far North. Rehabilitated in 1954 and readmitted as a third-year student to the VGIK, Kalik was able to continue his studies with Sergei Iutkevich, graduating in 1958. Kalik’s debut was Ataman Kodr (The Forest Outlaw Chieftain, 1958), co-directed with Boris Rytsarev after Ol’ga Ulitskaia had abandoned the project), produced by Moldova-Film Studio. A fast-paced, action-filled historical adventure, it romanticises Moldavian Robin-Hood-like outlaws. At the Moscow Gor’kii Studio for Children’s and Youth Films, Kalik then co-directed Iunost’ nashikh ottsov (The Youth of Our Fathers, 1959, with Rytsarev), a Civil War drama adapted from Aleksandr Fadeev’s pro-Bolshevik novel Razgrom (The Rout, 1927). With the independently directed Kolybel’naia (Lullaby, 1960) Kalik found his own theme and style, focusing on children whose innate goodness and openness to the world defines the film’s ethical perspective. Consisting of several novellas, Lullaby tells the story of a girl who is orphaned in World War II yet ultimately finds her father. Kalik’s best-known film is Chelovek idet za solntsem / Omul merge după soare (Man Follows the Sun, 1961), from a screenplay by Valeriu Gajiu, about a six-year-old boy who in one single day experiences numerous facets of life, from friendliness and help to heartlessness and rejection. “Sandu discovers a world full of natural light, towards which people gravitate as naturally as sunflowers turn their heads to follow the sun” (Josephine Woll). However, one brief erotic episode caused the indignation of Nikita Khrushchev and led to administrative measures against Kalik. At Mosfilm Studio, he directed Do svidaniia, mal’chiki! (Good-bye, Boys!, 1964), a poetic story of three friends in a port town during the 1930s; the film benefits particularly from Levan Paatashvili’s magnificent black-and-white imagery. Liubit’ (To Love, 1968), made at Moldova-Film, consists of four shorts adapted from stories by different writers, exploring the nature of affection and mixing fictional and documentary scenes. The film was censored, released in a limited number of copies, withdrawn from distribution in the summer of 1969, and restored by the director in 1990. Tsena (The Price, 1969, TV, first broadcast in 1989), adapted from an Arthur Miller play about two alienated brothers, was Kalik’s last Soviet film. He emigrated in 1971, after which his name was eliminated from all Soviet publications. In Israel, Kalik made one feature film, Shlosha V’achat (Three and One, 1974), and worked as a teacher. In 1991, Kalik came back to Russia for a short period and directed I vozvrashchaetsia veter… (And the Wind Returns…), a meditation about his turbulent life and artistic accomplishments, including fictionalised episodes and scenes from his earlier films. He died in Jerusalem in March 2017. 

Milena Kalinovská is an art theoretician and former director of the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery in Prague (2015-2018). She emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1970, then she studied in the United Kingdom and in Canada. Until 2015, she worked in the United States as a director of collections and curator.

Zoltán Kallós (Răscruci, Cluj county, 26 March 1926 - 14 February 2018) was a Hungarian ethnographer from Romania, a folk music collector, who was also a honorary member of the Hungarian Cultural Society in Transylvania, a member of the Hungarian Ethnographic Society, and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts. Kallós completed his four years of elementary school in his native village of Răscruci and went on to study at the Reformed Gymnasium of Cluj. He continued his secondary-school studies in Sfântu Gheorghe/Sepsiszentgyörgy and Cluj, and earned a diploma as a primary-school teacher in 1946. He hailed from a well-to-do family. In 1933 his parents bought the hunting lodge in Răscruci previously owned by the Bánffy counts. In 1950, however, this was confiscated by the communist authorities, along with the five-hectare family property, under the pretext that Kallós’s father, listed as a kulak, had sown more than the amount stipulated in the sowing plan. He was punished with six months of prison and seizure of all assets. The case had an impact on Kallós’s career as well. Between 1946 and 1950 he worked as a primary-school teacher in Viștea, Cluj county before being admitted to the Gheorghe Dima Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca. His social background led to his disqualification for the first time as a second-year student. On that occasion he was able to re-enroll thanks to the intervention of Ilona Nyilas, deputy from Vișteain the Grand National Assembly. However, in the fourth academic year, in 1954 he was disqualified again due to his social background and was never able to complete his academic studies.

He carried out his military service in Moldavia, and the experience gained there motivated him to extend his folklore collecting activity from the ethnically mixed (Hungarians, Romanians, and Roma) area of the Transylvanian Plain to the Moldavian Csángós as well. Between 1954 and 1956 he worked as a primary-school teacher in Lespezi, Bacău county. Then, as the school in Lespezi was closed down as a consequence of the changes in the party’s policy on minorities subsequent to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, he moved to Târgu Mureș, where, for a brief period, he worked as a “teacher of folk literature” at the Heritage House. In 1957 he chose the Csángó Land of Ghimeș as his field of research and until 1959 he worked as a teacher in the village of Lunca de Sus, which belonged then to the Hungarian Autonomous Region.

His collecting efforts attracted the attention of the authorities. The closer surveillance he was subjected to is also explained by the fact that he primarily worked and published together with specialists from Hungary, exposing his collecting of Hungarian ethnographic materials to the charge of nationalism. However, the secret police chose to handle Kallós’ case as a common-law offence. In 1959 and again in 1967 the People’s Tribunal of Miercurea Ciuc sentenced him to one year three months and two years respectively of correctional imprisonment (ACNSAS P051484, 2–46). Between the two trials, from 1960 to 1966 he continued his collection work as an employee at the timber company in Lunca de Sus. After he had served his second sentence, in 1968 he moved to Cluj-Napoca and in 1970 he published, in the proper professional environment his Balladák Könyve (Book of ballads), a volume that caused a sensation and earned him professional recognition. In 1973, with the cooperation of Attila T. Szabó and János Jagamas, another volume entitled Balladák könyve: Élő erdélyi és moldvai magyar népballadák (Book of ballads: Living Hungarian folk ballads from Transylvania and Moldavia) was published in Budapest and soon became a great editorial success.

Professional acknowledgment brought him once again into the centre of attention. In 1974 the Cluj-Napoca law court sentenced Kallós to two and a half years of deprivation of liberty on charges of committing a common-law offence. His arrest alarmed the Hungarian intellectual elite in Cluj-Napoca, the members of which – especially the poet Sándor Kányádi and the writer Andor Bajor – interpreted the trial aimed at discrediting the ethnographer as an act directed against them and, implicitly, the entire Hungarian community in Romania. The trials of 14 September to 28 September 1974 were attended by several personalities – apart from Kányádi and Bajor, the writers Tibor Bálint, GyörgyBeke, IstvánSzilágyi, and others were present – as a sign of protest against Kallós’ prosecution. They also voiced their intention to protest against the court sentence both at the Cluj-Napoca branch of the Writers’ Society and at other public forums. At the open sessions of the group trial involving ten persons – with Corneliu Brudașcu, a Cluj-Napoca-based painter also among the defendants – Kallós withdrew all of his previous declarations given under physical and moral coercion. His case was presented in detail in the Western press of the time and on Radio Free Europe (ACNSAS I203447/5, 390–395v, 397–398).

In retrospect, at a distance of forty years, Kallós could no longer remember whether he had served his prison sentences or not. All he could recall were his arrests and the fact that he had experienced life in penitentiaries all across Romania. In this regard he mentions the prisons of Poarta Albă, Codlea, and Aiud. He was released from the last of these thanks to a presidential pardon granted on the intervention of the Hungarian government. His account of these occurrences has not been supported so far by archival data. If true, his pardon granted on the intervention of neighbouring Hungary would constitute an unparalleled case in the history of Romanian–Hungarian bilateral relations during the communist regime. Communist regimes both in Hungary and in Romania looked at ethnographers with suspicion and labelled them as narodniks and nationalists. They were not allowed to select their own topics: the subject-matter was assigned to them. The government exercised pressure on them in an attempt to ensure that the discussed subjects served no other purpose than the consolidation and legitimation of the system. Under the dictatorship, Kallós, as a freelancer, did not benefit from financial support for his research. Nevertheless, his collection activity was closely monitored. This claim is supported by the informative surveillance file on Kallós, comprising two volumes and covering his activity up to the late 1960s (ACNSAS, I375159/1-2). There were occasions when he was subjected to criminal proceedings after purchasing an object, in an unsuccessful effort to prove him guilty of fraud and trafficking. His data providers, folk singers, were continuously harassed. As of the late 1950s, provocations, house searches, street tailings, and observations through agents were a daily phenomenon, and by the time of the change of regime in 1989 Kallós was the victim of continuous pressure from the authorities and the secret police.

In Kallós’ view, the main purpose of the Romanian Communist regime regarding minorities was to suppress, as much as possible, their national character and to eradicate the Hungarian sense of identity. Prior to 1989,Kallós consistently did enough work for several people. He carried out an activity aimed at preserving material and spiritual values which it would be impossible to accomplish nowadays as his data suppliers have passed away in the meantime. “I look around me; everyone in my surroundings has died. I’m left alone in the desert like a solitary tree.” – So Kallós confessed in an interview dated 21 September 2017 in Răscruci. Kallós’s name can be linked to the most extensive folk music collection ever carried out among the Hungarian-speaking communities. Records of selected pieces from the collection were primarily published after the change of regime and Kallós himself edited and published a series of audio materials based on his old recordings. As a singer he published two records himself (1997: Búsulni sohasem tudtam… (Sorrow was never my companion…), 1998: Idegen földre ne siess… (Don’t hurry to a foreign land…). He was the special consultant behind ethnographic documentaries and, as a singer, performed at folk music festivals. In addition to this, as one of the founders of Transylvanian and Hungarian dance-house movements he continued to organise folk-music and folk-dance camps. His influence as an educator is of great significance, considering that for many years he successfully motivated hundreds of young people to become familiar with and love Hungarian folk art. His professional advice and guidance paved the way for many generations, and were of much help in shaping the careers of musicians, dancers, and ethnographers.

Kallós’ most important accomplishment following the change of regime was the establishment of the Zoltán Kallós Foundation. Having in view the preservation and continuity of traditions, he donated all his assets to the Foundation. In 1992 the family property and the manor were returned to him after having been used for forty years by the local agricultural cooperative. Initially he offered the manor to the Reformed Church District of Transylvania, but, as Bishop Kálmán Csiha planned to use it as an old people’s home, he changed his mind, arguing that young people were more endangered than the older generation. Among the first activities of the newly established Foundation was the organisation of various camps. It was within the framework of the Foundation, in 1998, that Kallós’s private collection was officially put on display for the first time. In 1999 the Foundation launched its diaspora education programme, an activity derived from diaspora camps. Kallós’s colleagues visited Hungarian families in about twenty settlements in the Transylvanian Plain only to discover that education in their mother tongue was not accessible in any of those villages. Consequently, they founded a Hungarian kindergarten and a primary school with the possibility of boarding. After a twenty-five year interruption of primary education, the programme was launched with four children, and by 2017, 140 children attended the institution. With the introduction of education for members of the Hungarian community who lived scattered throughout Transylvania, the Foundation’s activity, so far restricted to two summer months, became permanent.

In recognition of his work both before and after 1989, its founder was continuously honoured by the Hungarian government with prestigious prizes and awards. Among other distinctions, Kallós received the Kossuth Prize (1996), the Hungarian Heritage Award (2000), the Hungarian Corvin Chain (2001), the Kölcsey Memorial Plaque (2003), and the Hazám Award (2006). In 2014 he was presented with the Artist of the Nation Award, and in 2017 he also received the Kossuth Grand Prize (ZoltánKallós Foundation 2017). On 5 April 2017 the European Committee and Europa Nostra announced the list of winners of the 2017 EU Prize for Cultural Heritage/Europa Nostra Award, which counts as the most prestigious distinction in the European Union in terms of safeguarding cultural heritage. Zoltán Kallós was presented with the award in the category “Dedicated Service to Heritage.” As a result of the subsequent online voting Kallós received the Public Choice Award as well. At the time of his death in 2018, he was listed among the most decorated Hungarian personalities (Europa Nostra 2017).

Mart Kalm (b. 1961) is an Estonian art historian. He gained his PhD in 1998 from the Estonian Academy of Art, where he defended his dissertation ‘The Formation of the Architectural Culture in Estonia in 1918–1940’, and has been the rector of the institution since 2015. He has worked there in several positions over the years since 1992.

Kalm studied art history at the Tartu State University in 1979–1984, and was an active member of the Noor-Tartu (Young-Tartu) student movement. He is one of owners of the movement’s collection today. 

István Kamarás is a sociologist of religion, a writer, and a professor. He was born in 1941 in Munkács (today Mukacsevo, Ukraine). He was a member of an illegal Catholic movement in Szentimreváros. After having completed high school, he couldn’t attend university, because he had studied the Bible and he wasn’t a member of the working class or the child of a peasant family. After working as a physical labourer for two years, he was accepted by an institution of higher education. He graduated from the Hungarian-Library Department of Eötvös Loránd University. He was a member of the staff of the university periodical Tiszta Szívvel (“With a Pure Heart,” an allusion to a poem by Attila József), which caused a political scandal. In the periodical, people whose mentalities differed from what was expected by the regime criticized the socialist system. Some of these people later on became famous writers and intellectuals. He studied aesthetics at the Marxist-Leninist Evening University and sociology at Eötvös Loránd University. His first workplace was in the Archival Group in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and between 1968 and 1985 he worked at the Reading Research Class in the Centre of Library Sciences and Methodology of the National Széchényi Library, where he mainly pursued research on the sociology of reading. In 1985, he was given a position at the Cultural Research Centre, where he pursued research on the sociology of religion. Between 1990 and 1995, he worked at the National Educational Institute, and from 1996 to 1998 he was a professor at the Teachers’ Training Institute of the Janus Pannonius University of Sciences. He also taught at Pannon University (1999–2010), where he founded the Department of Anthropology and Ethics. He published several works of literature (the first was published in 1965), and he wrote many storybooks and novels.

Tadeusz Kantor was a theatre director, a happenings creator, a painter, a scenographer, and an art theoretician. His theatrical works gained wide international recognition and contributed to the shaping of European theatre in the 1970s and the 1980s.

Kantor studied at Cracow Academy of Fine Arts.
In 1956 he founded the Circot 2 theatrical troop. The name was a reference to the pre-war avant-garde visual artists’ theatre Cricot. Cricot 2 theatre centres were established in Cracow and Florence.
Kantor performed plays by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. He drew inspiration from the prose of Bruno Schulz and from his own life experience.
His theatre practice is famous for the use of manikins. Kantor referred to his vision of theatre as i.a. the “Theatre of Death”.
 
“He often participated directly in his productions, acting as a «master of ceremonies», attentively observing the action and intervening when necessary. The shows, often thought to be the vision of a single artist, were replete with references to a complex and multi-cultural Polish history and iconography. They brought Kantor widespread recognition and transformed him into the godfather of a style of theatre that combines the visual perception of form with the need to convey a deep, personal, emotional message. Many of his productions have been inscribed in the annals of theatrical history.” (Culture.pl)
His most prominent and recognised productions include: The Dead Class (1975), Where Are Last Year's Snows? (1979), Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Let the Artists Die (1985), I Shall Never Return (1988), Today is my Birthday (1991). His most famous happening was the 1977 Panoramic Sea Happening.

Źródła:
Kitowska-Łysiak Małgorzata, Tadeusz Kantor, Culture.pl, http://culture.pl/pl/tworca/tadeusz-kantor

Kłossowicz Jan, Tadeusz Kantor. Teatr, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa 1991.

Eva Kantůrková is a Czech writer, signatory and spokeswoman of Charter 77. She studied philosophy and history at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. From 1967 she worked as a professional writer and published in official periodicals. However, the situation changed after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, as Kantůrková criticized the emerging “Normalization”. Later she also signed Charter 77 and was its spokeswoman in 1985. In May 1981 she was arrested and released without a trial in March the following year. During “Normalization” her books could not be published officially. Therefore, she published in samizdat volumes. She also organized two samizdat works recalling the journalist Václav Černý and the work of the historian Josef Pekař. She contributed to exile periodicals (Listy, Svědectví, Obrys, Rozmluvy) as well.

After the Velvet Revolution, she became active in civic and political life. She was one of the founders of the Občanské forum (Civic Forum) and a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1990–1992. Kantůrková was involved in cultural politics, and was head of the Writers’ Association from 1994–1996 and 2005–2007. From 1998–2000 she worked at the Ministry of Culture. She was a member of the council for radio and television broadcasting from 2003–2009. She wrote also several books after 1989.

Eva Kantůrková’s literary work is characterized by political and social criticism, which became more abrasive in the 1970s. Her strong motifs include allegories of the past and present, the individual and the collective. She has also been acclaimed for the three-dimensional psychological portrayals of her main characters. Kantůrková has been awarded several prizes: The Tom Stoppard Prize (1984) , The Jan Palach Prize (1989), The Egon Hostovský Prize (1999), and The Ladislav Fuks Award (2008).

James A. Kapaló is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religions at University College Cork, Ireland and co-Director of the Marginalised and Endangered Worldviews Study Centre (MEWSC – https://mewsc.wordpress.com/). He is author of Text, Context and Performance: Gagauz Folk Religion in Discourse and Practice (Leiden: Brill, 2011) and Inochentism and Orthodox Christianity: Religious Dissent on the Russian and Romanian Borderlands (forthcoming Routledge: London, 2019) and several has published several articles on religious minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. He is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: ‘Hidden Galleries’ in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (project no. 677355).

Yulia Karadachka-Simeonova is the chief bibliographer and head of the bibliographic and information services department. With scientific interests in the field of history and art history, Y. Karadachka was involved in the creation of the collection "Only forbidden newspapers remain in history". Taking into account the variety of forms of opposition to the totalitarian regime, Karadachka stresses the difficulty, even impossibility to clearly distinguish political and cultural opposition. Newspapers and magazines of opposition parties, for example, such as the Bulgarian Agrarian People's Union “Nikola Petkov”, the Social Democratic Party and other parties banned by the communist regime played an important cultural role as well, criticizing the lack of basic civil liberties, the restrictions on freedom of expression.

There is not enough information for a biography on Iljko Karaman (1922-2010), as he was not a public figure. Nonetheless, he was a descendant of a distinguished Dalmatian Karaman family from Split, with a long tradition of intellectuals and lawyers. His father, Ljubo Karaman (1886-1971), was a prominent art historian and a conservator, while and his younger brother, Igor Karaman (1927-1995), a distinguished economic historian and archivist. Iljko obtained a law degree at the time of the Independent State of Croatia, and after WWII he worked as an investigator at the Public Prosecutor's Office in Zagreb. In the early 1970s, he became the Zagreb District Deputy Public Prosecutor (his personal note of 3 March 1992 contains his signature as the deputy public prosecutor).

The family friend Mrs Snježana Zima b. Znidarčić testifies that he was a member of the Catholic Crusaders Organisation (Križarska organizacija), which the communist regime began suppressing in 1945. He was also a close friend of the organisaion’s president, Dr Lav Znidarčić (1918-2001), a lawyer and political prisoner under communist rule whose private archive was organised by Karaman himself. Aside from his work, Karaman was active in the Zagreb Society for Underwater Sports, which was established in June 1954. He was the first secretary and later president of the society.

Iljko Karaman does not provide an explanation as to the reasons for collecting material in question. He apparently thought it was important to store the confiscated material is a safe place, but he does not explain the purpose of doing so. In the opinion of the mentioned Mrs Zima, he belonged to the intellectual and cultural school that had gathered around her father, Catholic lawyer Dr Lav Znidarčić, who opposed the regime and had decided to collect evidence against the communist system for future use. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the fall of the communist regime during the events of 1990-1991, the time had come to disclose the collection publicly and make it available for research.

László Kardos (1948–1999) a legal advisor, sociologist, an activist of SZETA, as well as director of Hungarian Soros Foundation.

He was born in Budapest in 1948. He completed his diploma as Doctor of Law at Loránd Eötvös University Budapest in 1972. JHe took a job as a state company solicitor and then as a legal advisor for the Social policy Department of the Ministry of Labour. He remained at his post in the hope that his department would be made a new Ministry of Public Welfare and that this would give him meaningful tasks in social policy design, but he was ultimately disappointed. In 1979, he volunteered as a secret legal advisor for SZETA, and in this position he helped hundreds of needy families, mainly in rural areas, from his ministry office. However, his clandestine activities were soon discovered and he had to leave his job.

Beginning in the early 1980s, he worked as a freelance intellectual, taking poorly paid sociological fieldwork, which for the most part meant doing interviews and making questionnaires to support his family. Given his legal expertise, he would have preferred to have worked as a research sociologist. In the early 1970s, he got in touch with István Kemény and Kemény’s young research team, and he took an active part in their nationwide pioneering research projects among the poor and the Roma in Hungary, and later also participated in many smaller research projects (for instance, involving the culture of labour, lifestyles, cooperatives, small villages, commuting workers, and other programs).

In 1984, thanks to some of his dissident contacts, he was offered a job as a secretary of the newly established Hungarian Soros Foundation. Later, from 1990 to 1994, he became the managing director of the Foundation. He was responsible for the administration of Hungary’s first and largest civil organisation, and he also actively initiated some new and successful programs. He did the preparatory work for most of the project plans and evaluations. During his last years of his life, he did an oral history interview with sociologist István Márkus for the 1956 Research Institute.

Olga Karlíková was an artist who graduated from the Prague College of Applied Arts after the war, where she studied with Antonín Strnadela and she studied textiels with Antonín Kybal, then worked as a textile designer in the state-owned Institute of Housing and Clothing Culture. She devoted herself to the abstract appearance of nature and was also interested in acoustics; she is best known for her works on the singing of birds and whales.

After 1977, when she signed Charter 77, she became an undesirable artist and her works disappeared from the public sphere. Karlikova was one of the first signatories to Charter 77. She found it through her niece, architect Helena Bukovanská. As she said in an interview with Marcela Pánková in 1995, "She was terribly relieved after the signing because she had been embarrassed by lying and resentment since childhood." (Fine Arts 3-4, 95) It was not until 1989 that she began to exhibit again and her work gained critical attention. She was exceptionally successful in exhibiting her work at the Monastery in Doksany in the 1980s, which was prepared by Ludvík Hlaváček.

Olga Karlíková is considered to be the first conceptual artist in Czechia.

Svatopluk Karásek is an evangelical pastor and signatory of Charter 77. He studied at the Comenius Evangelical Theological Faculty from 1964–1968. He then worked for three years as a pastor until 1971, when the state withdrew its permission to allow him to continue in his spiritual service. From 1972–1976 he worked as the caretaker at Houska Castle. In 1976 he was arrested and sentenced to eight months in prison in a trial along with the underground music group The Plastic People of the Universe. As a signatory of Charter 77, Karásek could not return to his original profession and worked mostly as a window cleaner. The turning point in his life came in 1980 when he was forced into exile. He settled in Switzerland, where he served again as a pastor from 1981. Since 1997 he has lived permanently in the Czech Republic, working as a clergyman. He was a member of parliament from 2002–2006 and the Government Commissioner for Human Rights from 2004–2006.

Karásek was also involved in musical and literary activities. His musical career began in the 1970s. His lyrics were published in samizdat volumes as well as in exile. Since 1989, his lyrics have been published officially. His literary works include the sermons Boží trouba (2000) and Tři kázání o Jonášovi (2007). Karásek’s musical and other works were influenced by his professional focus – his attempts to update the gospel and make the Biblical messages more relevant to today’s lifestyles. Karásek is connected to the underground through his provocative and sarcastic style, as well as naturalistic clarity.

István Kemény (1925–2008) was a Hungarian sociologist. In 1944 he participated in the resistance against the Germans. In 1947–1948 he was a co-worker at the Teleki Pál Scientific Institute. Between 1948 and 1957, he was taught at a high school. In 1955–1956 he searched the poor children and their families in the schools of Angyalföld (Budapest), he made lectures twice about his experiences in the Petőfi Circle. Under the Revolution of 1956, he was an active member of the Revolutionary Committee of the Intelligentsia. In 1957 he sentenced to four years of imprisonment for participating the 1956 Revolution. Kemény was released from prison in 1959. He worked at the Economical and Juridical Published, then at the National Széchényi Library, and in 1963 he joined to a research project conducted by the Central Statistical Office on the question of “social stratification.” From 1969 to 1971 he worked at the Sociological Institute of the Academy. In his researches, Kemény analyzed the poor, the Gypsy population and the management of state farms which were taboo subject under socialism. Kemény lost his job in 1971, but organized seminars in private places, and continued his researches incognito. In 1977 he emigrated to Paris. He taught at the Maison des Sciences de l’ Homme (1978–1981) and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (1983–1990). He edited the Hungarian Booklets and from 1980 to 1990 he was an outer co-worker of Radio Free Europe. He returned to Hungary in 1990.

Szilárd Keresztes (1932) is a Hungarian Greek Catholic priest and retired diocesan bishop of Hajdúdorog. He led the Hungarian Greek Catholic Church for almost 20 years. From 1950 to 1955, he studied at the Greek Catholic Seminarium of Nyíregyháza. He became a priest in 1955. In 1957, he got a theological Ph.D. at the Theological Academy. From 1957 to 1960, he was an organizer priest in Kispest, and between 1960 and 1970 Keresztes was a deacon and cantor in Nyíregyháza. From 1961 to 1975, he was a theological teacher at the Theological Academy of Nyíregyháza. Between 1966 and 1969, he was a fellow at the Papal Hungarian Institute in Rome, where he got a license in the Faculty of Eastern Ecclesiastical Studies in the Papal Eastern Institute. In 1967, he became an agent of the State Security forces. He submitted reports under the codenames   “Nyíri” and “Keleti.” He became a cathedral canon in 1970. In 1971–1976, Keresztes was an administrator parson in Nyíregyháza. From 1975 to 1988, he was a suffragan bishop of Hajdúdorog, and in 1987–1988 he served as the rector of the Papal Hungarian Institute. From 1988 to 2007, he was the diocesan bishop of Hajdúdorog.

Imre Kertész (1929–2016), Hungarian Nobel Prize-winning writer and translator

Imre Kertész was born in Budapest in late 1929. As an assimilated Hungarian Jew, in June 1944 at the age of fourteen he was deported to Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945. On his return to Hungary, he worked for a Budapest newspaper, Világosság, but he was dismissed in 1951 when it adopted the Communist Party line. After doing two years of military service, he began supporting himself as an independent writer and translator of works by German-language authors, such as Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Freud, Roth, Wittgenstein, and Canetti, who all had a significant influence on his writing.

Kertész's first novel, Sorstalanság (Eng. Fateless, 1992; see WLT 67:4, p. 863), a work based on his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was published in 1975. “When I am thinking about a new novel, I always think of Auschwitz,” Kertész said. This does not mean, however, that Sorstalanság is autobiographical in any simple sense. Kertész himself said that he used the form of the autobiographical novel, but that his novel is not autobiography. Sorstalanság was initially rejected for publication. When published eventually in 1975, it was received with compact silence. Kertész has written about this experience in A kudarc (1988; Fiasco). This novel is normally regarded as the second volume in a trilogy which begins with Sorstalanság and concludes with Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért (1990; Eng. Kaddish for a Child Not Born, 1997; see WLT 74:1, p. 205), a title which refers to the Jewish prayer for the dead. In Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért, György Köves, the protagonist of Sorstalanság and A kudarc, reappears. His Kaddish is said for the child he refuses to have in a world that permitted the existence of Auschwitz. Other prose works by Kertész include A nyomkereső (1977; The Pathfinder) and Az angol lobogó (1991; The English Flag; see WLT 67:2, p. 412).

Gályanapló (Galley diary; see WLT 67:2, p. 412), a diary in fictional form which covers the years between 1961 and 1991, was published in 1992. Valaki más: A változás krónikája (1997; I - Another: Chronicle of a Metamorphosis), continues this inner monologue in the form of notes made during in 1991–95. After the political upheavals of 1989, Kertész was able to make more public appearances. His lectures and essays have been collected in A holocaust mint kultúra (1993; The Holocaust as Culture), A gondolatnyi csend, amíg kivegzőoztag újratölt (1998; Moments of Silence While the Execution Squad Reloads), and A száműzött nyelv (2001; The Exiled Language).

After 1989, Kertész’s works were published in translation in several languages, including German, Spanish, French, English, Czech, Russian, Swedish, and Hebrew. His books were received as a shocking revelation by both critics and the public. This series of international successes eventually paved the way to Stockholm in 2002, where he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature by the Royal Swedish Academy.