January 11, 2011 posted in..... j.a. howard
January 11, 2011
I’m going to Prague this summer in order to check out the Libri Prohibiti, which is an archival research library that collects Samizdat and exile literature.
For those of you who don’t know, Samizdat was a dissident form of literature that arose across the Soviet bloc, in which people secretly reproduced state censored publications ( by typrewriter, carbon copy, or small self-bound books). One of my favorite books, The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, was circulated in just such a fashion, as were the early poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Vaclav Havel’s famous The Power of the Powerless. Being caught creating or possessing censored literature was severely punished in all Soviet bloc countries, so the stakes were extremely high.
I became interested in Samizdat on a trip to Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 1999 and it features prominently in my novel Hello Sparrow. One of the most interesting aspects of the movement was the way in which what circulated varied from country to country based on the differences in state power, state control of culture, and historical self-awareness of the people of each country–for instance, in Czechoslovakia, political tracts and essays that reinforced autonomous Czech culture were popular, while in the U.S.S.R. and Poland, fiction and poetry (both satirical and tragic) were widely circulated.
The Libri Prohibiti includes more than 29,200 monographs and periodicals, about 2,900 reference resources, and over 5,000 audiovisual materials. I hope that being able to read the papers and books, interview some Czech writers during the Prague Writer’s Festival, and visit with professors at Charles University will help create a more solid, historically accurate, foundation for this novel.
Since my interest extends past Samizdat–to all exiled texts and authors (Eduardo Galeano is a favorite, as is Edwidge Danticat), I am looking for connections and clues between the two. Likewise, I am fascinated (as a writer of literary fiction) with the state of the publishing industry in the US, the corporate bookstores hold over publishing houses, and the lack of a true underground forum for literature, and the parallels to state censorship in Soviet bloc countries. I have many questions I hope to explore!
BTW: Here is an interesting article on a self-published author who staged a guerrilla reading of her work at a Barnes and Noble in NYC last month. It makes me wonder if this is a burgeoning movement? Are we seeing the real rise of underground literature in the US? One can always dream…
