cenzura

Abstract

The life story of writer Karel Pecka (1928–1997) offers a unique glimpse into the history of unofficial literary and book culture in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989 as well as into the life of a writer in a totalitarian regime. Pecka’s samizdat “Odyssey” started by printing the illegal leaflet magazine Za pravdu in 1949. Back then, he could hardly anticipate how much publishing in unofficial, “parallel” book circulation will define his work in the decades to follow. As a prisoner in the Jáchymov and Příbram labour camps in the 1950s, he continued secretly writing collections of poems, followed by short stories. He was a member of prison samizdat, the most beautiful items of which were reportedly written on cigarette paper. From the early 1960s on, some of his handwritten works were first distributed among selected readers in mimeographed copies due to delays in publication. His brief official writer career was cut short by the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies to Czechoslovakia in August 1968. This opened the second twenty‑year period of Pecka’s life marked by the impossibility to publish and attempts at overcoming the barrier. His novel, Štěpení, delivered to Škvorecký in Toronto in handwritten form and subsequently issued by their ’68 Publishers publishing house, made Pecka a bona fide samizdat pioneer. The normalisation of 1970s and 1980s spent in the alternative culture environment brought several more publications in exile and samizdat editions (including Motáky nezvěstnému) and a series of texts in the Obsah periodical. Pecka’s samizdat life ended with the postsamizdat publication of his prison poems, Rekonstrukce, self‑released in 1995, two years before his death.