Co vypovídá samizdat o české společnosti za socialismu?
What the Samizdat tell About the Czech Society during the Socialist Period

Summary/Abstract: The reviewer has a high opinion of the encyclopedic publication titled "Český literární samizdat 1949–1989: Edice, časopisy, sborníky" [Czech literary samizdat 1949–1989: Editions, periodicals, collections] (Prague: Academia and Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, v. v. i., 2018), a work of a team of authors of the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Michal Přibáň. She appreciates they have amassed a huge amount of information on the Czech samizdat production during the Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, their systematic approach to the processing of the rich source material, and a well-arranged list of more than 350 entries on Czech samizdat editions, periodicals, publishers and collections with at least some literary orientation. Although the publication does not aspire to providing an exhaustive account of these independent literary initiatives, it has succeeded in mapping a vast area of not very well known or almost forgotten (often regional) publishers and titles and in describing the (literary) samizdat as a comprehensive phenomenon including authors’ creations, production, copying, distribution and reception of nonconformist texts under the rule of a repressive regime which was trying to suppress these manifestations of independent thinking. The reviewer also considers the stimuli the publication offers to historians studying the Czech society, particularly during theso-called normalization period, and to current ongoing discussions on the nature of the Communist regime, and speculates about the potential of similarly structured research results in the context of the developing field of digital humanities.

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