Suchergebnisse

This article examines Magorovy labutí písně ('Magor's swan songs'), a collection of poems by political prisoner Ivan M. Jirous, and an important example of Czech prison poetry from the second half of the 20th century. It was during his imprisonment in Litoměřice, Ostrov, and Valdice (1981–1985) that Jirous wrote the poems, which were smuggled out as motáky (clandestine notes written on rolls of paper) by his friend and fellow prisoner Jiří Gruntorád. The article first characterises the situation of Jirous and the Czech underground during the 1970s and 1980s. It then proceeds to analyse how Magorovy labutí písně represents a form of literary creation whose aesthetic specificity arises from the situation of extreme hardship — the 'state of emergency' — in which it was written. This specificity can be found in the authentic and even documentary aspect in which the poems reflect the time and place of the prison, as well as the broader, timeless, and more spatially expansive awareness of life that the poems express. What is essential here is not the contingent aspects of the writing, the fleeting influence of inspiration, but more broadly the conscious use of specific means and methods of poetic composition. It is thus a form of literary expression that confronts the characteristic aspects of prison time and spatial confinement by consciously exceeding the limits of the walls, reaching out into the diverse and varying temporal planes and shifting reality of the surrounding world — an experience that is only intensified by its juxtaposition to the daily life of the prisoner from which these dimensions have been brutally stripped. This context-based interpretive analysis demonstrates, in conclusion, that the prison poetry in question here aims to define the effects of confinement and the prison environment by means of a complex gesture, one that is unified by a range of interrelated poetic devices: aural (sound and metre), figural, metaphorical, compositional, stylistic, etc. Prison poetry thus facilitates the survival ...

The paper deals with the contents of two monographic volumes, published as the current issues of two journals with a comparative and international focus — Slovo a smysl (Charles University) and Romània Orientale (Sapienza University of Rome), in which the first results of the international interdisciplinary research project The Humanities and the historical and cultural context of Central and Eastern Europe in the XXth century are printed. The project focuses on unpublished texts by scholars and translators, as well as writers in the broader sense, concerning topics and problems specific to the cultures of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. This was a century shaped by war, revolution, and the ascent of anti-democratic regimes, all of which had a decisive influence on the scholarly environment in which historians, philologists, and translators carried out their work. With an aim to better understand this often overlooked historical context, the research focuess on scholars who may not have been at liberty to choose their object of study, translators who were not always able to choose which books to translate — that is, on an extra-literary context, political and social, that exerted a pronounced influence on scholarly work broadly speaking, whether through explicit restrictions (ideological censorship, for instance) or through other forms of psychological conditioning.