| Number of records: | 21,000+ (as of 1 February 2023) |
| Number of titles: | 100+ magazines (as of 1 February 2023) List of processed journals (xlsx) |
| Scope: | Czech and world literature (fiction and secondary literature), with more limited coverage of theatre, film, philosophy and politics |
| Materials: | samizdat magazines and anthologies of literary and cultural periodicals |
| Time frame: | 1950s–1990s |
| Languages: | Czech, Slovak, Polish, English, French, German, Russian |
| How to cite the Czech Literary Samizdat Bibliography: | Czech Literary Bibliography. Czech Literary Samizdat Bibliography. Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences, a public research institution. Available at: https://sambibl.ucl.cas.cz/ |
| Access to database (Aleph): | http://aleph.ucl.cas.cz/samizdat |
| Dataset To Download: | https://clb.ucl.cas.cz/en/datasets-to-download/ |
| License: | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International |
The Czech Literary Samizdat Database contains records of articles that appeared in dissident magazines of Czechoslovak origin between 1948 and 1989. There is also some crossover into the early 1990s for magazines that continued to be produced even after the social changes brought about by the Velvet Revolution.
The samizdat magazine article database was developed between 2016 and 2020 as one of the core tasks of CLB researchers. As of 2021, our analysis and recording of samizdat anthologies and related books continues. Further development and editing of the database are anticipated in coming years as circumstances permit.
The database includes works of Czech and world fiction as well as secondary texts on Czech and foreign literature including theatrical and film adaptations of literary works. Other records chart cultural activities associated with the Czech and foreign underground and songwriting, particularly in the folk and rock music scenes. Finally, there are entries on philosophical essays, historical and political analyses, news reports and social commentaries – in all cases, these works relate in some way to literary personae or events.
The main sources of this material are the Libri prohibiti library and scriptum.cz website, which features scans of samizdat journals among its resources. Other documented copies come from the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre archive (now curated by the Czech National Museum) or private collections.
The choice of titles is inspired mainly by the collection Czech Literary Samizdat 1949–1989: Series, Magazines, Anthologies (Michal Přibáň et al. Prague: Academia, 2018). Along with literary magazines, the database includes periodicals of a cultural or more general nature and others devoted to other art forms.
Also featured are periodicals that were distributed within the narrow confines of one community or existed in the grey zone between samizdats and authorised literature. As part of our effort to improve user services and facilitate working with samizdat, we have created a separate database known as “SMZ” for users of these records. Entries for individual items are also available through the search page of the main CLB database. Samizdat records are identified by the [samizdat] tag after the name of the source (e.g. Vokno [samizdat]). Some entries also include links to the online version of the magazine or specific content. All recorded titles can also be found in our Database of Recorded Periodicals.
