Suchergebnisse

The editor of Index on Censorship describes what happened when she went to a banned symposium in Prague.

Title story from exiled Czech writer's first published book

An Interdisciplinary Conference on International Understanding and Peaceful Co-operation, called by the social science division of UNESCO, was held in Prague, September 24–30, 1958. The approximately thirty social scientists present came from seventeen countries, including Egypt and Japan (which had not had representatives at previous meetings of the series). The Czechoslovakian National UNESCO Commission were hosts to the meeting, which was held in the Charles University.

In response to his banishment to barbaric Tomis, on the Black Sea, in 8 C.E., Ovid composed theTristia,entreaties to Emperor Augustus to permit his return to civilized Rome. Feeling equally alienated from fin-de-siècle Vienna, the Czech expatriate poet, Josef Svatopluk Machar, produced the slim collectionTristium Vindobona.One poem, "První dojmy" (First impressions), finds Machar's narrator and alter ego tormented by visions of an otherworldly and unattainable Prague. "Na Kahlenbergu" (On Kahlenberg) takes the narrator to the eponymous hill outside Vienna, where he invokes his distressed land to the north. The legacy of Habsburg dominion over the Czechs appears to him as a "wide and bloody path" spanning historical battlegrounds from Diirnkrut, near Vienna, to the White Mountain, west of Prague. Czech critics in 1893 hailedTristiumas both a literary and a political event, its stature enhanced by its publication under the "shadow of bayonets," that is, during an official state of emergency in Prague. The young critic Emanuel z Čenkova raised only an amicable objection in his review inLiterární listy:Machar's narrator could easily come home—eluding reverie and history—since "express trains cross like lightning" between Vienna and Prague.