Literary Samizdat and Exile Bibliography Section

The Literary Samizdat and Exile Bibliography Section became part of our activities in 2016. This group deals primarily with dissident Czech magazines and to a lesser extent those of Slovak and Polish origin. These journals date from the 1950s to the early 1990s, with an emphasis on the normalisation period and the time just before the Velvet Revolution. In addition to processing periodicals, the team undertakes analysis of non-periodical collections, including texts published under the auspices of well-known samizdat editions as well as those published elsewhere.

In 2023, the extraction of new samizdat titles was suspended and the database is being edited.  In the same year, extraction of Czech exile periodicals began.

From 2023, team members tackle the project Czech Literary Exile 1948–1989, which is financed by the NAKI II programme of the Czech Ministry of Culture. The main task of the bibliographic team is to compile an article bibliography of exile magazines from the specified period. The varying geographical distribution of key exile personalities, institutions, and periodicals will then be vizualized with a thematic interactive map.

The chief sources of this material are the Libri prohibiti library and scriptum.cz website, which feature scans of samizdat journals. Other material stems from the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre archive (now administered by the National Museum) and private collections.

Aside from their bibliographical tasks, staff also contribute to research on alternative culture from the post-war eastern bloc, and on the dissident movement and underground literature of the 1970s and 1980s. In these cases, they often partner with foreign institutions and research networks, such as the Institute of Literary Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL) and the international network NEP4DISSENT, supported by funds from the Horizont 2020 research programme, in collaboration with whom it created the Polonica database for Czech samizdat. Another output of international collaboration is Samizdat Past & Present (2019), an English-language anthology of seminar work on samizdat-related issues by leading Czech literary scholars and critics.  Members of the section also actively participate in thematic conferences (Fourth Congress of World Czech Literary Studies, Underground and Second Culture in Central Europe, and Archives, Power, Politics) and publish studies and articles in specialized anthologies (50 Years of Index and Sixty-Eight Publishers).

Head: Mgr. Gabriela Romanová

Contact address: sambibl@ucl.cas.cz