Abstract
On the eighth anniversary of the occupation of Czechoslovakia we have decided to mark that tragic event by the publication of a special issue. Three of the contributors — A. H. Hermann, Ivan Kraus, and A. J. Liehm — live in exile, one is a Rumanian novelist now in the USA, and another an American journalist who spent three years in Prague before being expelled in 1970. The others all live in Czechoslovakia, and it is an indication of the conditions prevailing there that they cannot use their own names but have had to adopt pseudonyms.
Apart from articles on literature, theatre and films, and a piece on the banned singer, Marta Kubisova, we also print a translation of Vaclav HaveFs new one-act play, Audience (‘Conversation’), which has been banned in Czechoslovakia. This is its first publication in English.
Its author, Czechoslovakia's leading dramatist, whose plays are well known in the West, has been forced since the occupation to work as a labourer in a brewery in his home town of Trutnov. Now 40 years old, he has been ‘on the index’ for most of his life, for as the son of ‘bourgeois’ parents, he was prevented from studying by the post-1948 Communist regime and took a job as a scene shifter in a small Prague theatre. He started writing stories and plays, but for a long time could not get any of his work published or performed. It was only during the relatively relaxed period of the sixties that his satirical plays were at last staged, becoming immensely popular with Czech audiences and soon gaining their author a name abroad. Since 1969, Havel has again been one of the many outstanding writers who go unpublished and are constantly harassed and persecuted by the authorities.
Over the past two or three years we have received much interesting material from Czechoslovakia, whose output of unofficial and censored literature of all kinds has been immense. Limitations of space, and the need to maintain a sensible balance, in the geographical as well as political sense, have often forced us, however regretfully, to discard articles which we should have liked to publish. We have had to be very selective even where this special issue is concerned — the Czech material we have received would easily have filled all of it, and to spare. The following case histories each deserve more extensive coverage, but perhaps will serve as an illustration of life in occupied Czechoslovakia eight years after the invasion, at least as it is for those who refuse to accept what has happened as ‘normal’, for those who refuse to undergo the indignity of ‘recanting’ their beliefs and to pretend that all is well.