Stanislav Kosík, politický vězeň a zapomenutý básník
Stanislav Kosik, Political Prisoner and Forgotten Poet

Summary/Abstract: Not only notes from prisons and labour camps, but also poems can become an authentic testimony of life behind bars and barbed wire. Perhaps not as a precise description of living experience of life there, which was so cruel and remorseless to the political prisoners that many of them sought refuge in their memories of their closest and most beloved ones… Just like Stanislav Kosik, whose verses emerged at the time when Czechoslovakia became, as Vaclav Smejkal put it, a land crowned with barbed wire. It was not by chance that the small notebook in which the young political prisoner wrote his poems is “adorned” with barbed wire on many of the pages. For him, this was not only the symbol of imprisonment, the enclosed space guarded with guns, but an obstacle on the way to freedom, observed every day and perceived physically.

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