Location

Na Zátorách 6, 170 00 Praha 7 - Holešovice, Czech Republic
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Languages

Czech

Name of collection

Exile literature

Provenance and cultural activities

This collection of samizdat publications was created by historian Vilém Prečan in 1976 when he moved to Germany. He had gone into exile with a clear idea of how to help independent writing and friends in dissent. Immediately upon his arrival, he began to work on building a documentation centre as a place to preserve everything that was, at home, constantly threatened with seizure by the State Security. Thus he began systematically archiving documents about the resistance movement and samizdat documents of all kinds. These were books, periodicals, and individual texts that had been reproduced predominantly on typewriters, later on the mimeograph, the ormig, and even on a computer printer.

At the same time he began to build a collection of exile literature. Exile publishers and exile magazines provided support and assistance to domestic samizdat by publishing a lot of the books and texts published by samizdat. Domestic authors were paid by exile publishers to help them survive their difficult life situation. Books and magazines published in exile had been smuggled into Czechoslovakia and have become an important complement to domestic self-publishing activities. Exile books and periodicals came to Czechoslovakia by various smuggling channels, in which Prečan was involved with, even in his own domestic opposition. In April 1981, a caravan expelled from London where the exile literature was forbidden, as well as the labels with the addresses of Czech consumers of the exile magazine Testimonies, was detained at the border crossing in Dolni Dvoriste. Soon, the State Security launched a large police operation, in which around thirty people and two young French citizens who were riding a car were detained in Prague, Brno and Bratislava. Twelve of the detainees were prosecuted for subversion of the republic, later known as the "Jiřina Šiklová a spol" trial.

In the early eighties, German diplomat Wolfgang Scheur had the greatest credit for smuggling literature. He was succeeded in 1986 by Canadian diplomat Peter Bakewell. This is how the largest collection of Czech and Slovak exile literature was launched. After ten years of hard work, Vilém Prečan's plans for the establishment of an archive, documentation and information centre were carried out. In January 1986, the National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington NGO, provided a subsidy to the project of a documentation centre in exile. Václav Havel's appeal on June 29 1985, to support the centre, played a major role in awarding the grant. Václav Havel pointed out the unique importance of the work of Vilém Prečan, who operated the centre without an institutional background, under his own direction and with the help of only his closest friends, "almost as a private hobby". The Czechoslovak Documentation Centre for Independent Literature was founded in March 1986, and beginning in November 1986, it was based in Schwarzenberg in Bavaria in Scheinfeld, on the property of Karel Schwarzenberg, at his own expense. Prečan handed over all his collections to the newly-established centre. Many samizdat and exile creators supported the centre and completed its samizdat and exile collections, including Ludvík Vaculík and Václav Havel, who founded and ran two of the most important samizdat publications. In September 2000, the Documentation Centre and its collections were moved to the Czech Republic. In 2003, ČSDS made an agreement with the National Museum in Prague; the CSDS collections, including the exile collection, were donated to the National Museum.

Description of content

The collection of Czech exile literature contains over two thousand books, which were published by Czech exile publishers and 178 titles of exile periodicals. The collection contains almost complete productions of the Publishing Index, '68 Publishers, Interview (Rozmluvy), Bark (Arkýř), Opus Bonum, Confrontation (Konfrontace), Poetry Outside Home (Poezie mimo domov), and many other exile publishers as well as a number of books published outside the editions of the series. Exile periodicals, such as Testimonies (Svědectví), Letters (Listy), Transformations (Proměny), 150,000 words (150 000 slov), the West (Západ), Studies (Studie), Reality (Skutečnost), and many others, form an important part of the collection. The collection also includes a number of "hummingbirds" (kolibříci), reduced "smuggling" copies of exile books that were much easier to translate across Czechoslovakia in larger numbers. The disadvantages of reduced (9 x 7 cm) and worse-readable prints outweighed the sophisticated magnification in the back of books. These "hummingbirds" were devised and produced by Josef Jelínek from Erlangen, a member of the board of directors of the exile club ČSDS.

Content

publications (books, newspapers, articles, press clippings): 1000-

Operator(s)

National Museum of Czech Republic

Owner(s)

Geographical scope of recent operation

international

Topics

Founder(s)

Prečan, Vilém

Date of founding

1976

Place of founding

Hanover, Germany
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Creator(s) of content

Collector(s)

Important events in the history of the collection

Donation of Collections of Czechoslovak Documentation Centre to the National Museum of Czech Republic

Featured items

Tatarka, Dominik: Písačky. 1979. Manuscript.

Access type

visits by appointments

Author(s) of this page

Hanáková, Jitka

References

Papoušek, V. (2001). Trojí samota ve velké zemi. Česká literatura v americkém exilu v letech 1938-1968. Jinočany: H & H Vyšehradská.

Exilová a samizdatová literatura.. Brno : Státní vědecká knihovna v Brně, 1990. 63 s. (Výběr novinek Státní vědecké knihovny v Brně. Serie E-Kultura. Mimořádné č.)

Formanová, Lucie - Gruntorád, Jiří - Přibáň, Michal (1999). Exilová periodika. Katalog periodik českého a slovenského exilu a krajanských tisků vydávaných po roce 1945. Rychnov nad Kněžnou: Ježek.

Knopp, František - Dresler, Jaroslav (1996). Česká literatura v exilu 1948-1989. Bibliografie. Praha: Makropulos.

Prečan, Vilém , interview by Hanáková, Jitka, September 28, 2017. COURAGE Registry Oral History Collection

COURAGE

connecting collections

Exile Collection of Czechoslovak Documentation Centre