The Literary Samizdat Bibliography team was formed at the CLB in 2016. It deals primarily with unofficial Czech magazines, though it does also marginally deal with those of Slovak and Polish origin. The timeframe for these excerpted magazines is from the 1950s to the early 1990s, with the main focus being on periodicals brought out during the normalization period and just before the Velvet Revolution.
The chief source of material under review is the Libri prohibiti library and the scriptum.cz website, presenting inter alia scans of samizdat periodicals, some copies from the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre archive, now administered by the National Museum, and some from private collections.
Apart from bibliographical activities, some team members are also involved in research projects closely associated with the subject of postwar eastern bloc alternative culture, the dissident movement and unofficial literature in the 1970s and 1980s. Within this framework they work together with colleagues from institutions and research platforms abroad, e.g. Instytut badań literackich at the Polish Academy of Sciences, the NEP4DISSENT international platform, supported by funds from the COST research programme, with whose collaboration the database of Polonica in Czech samizdat has been compiled. Another product of international collaboration has been the English-language publication Samizdat Past and Present – an anthology of seminal studies on the issues surrounding samizdat by the foremost Czech literary scholars and historians.
Team leader: Mgr. Gabriela Romanová
Contact address: sambibl@ucl.cas.cz
