Eternal Times
July 10, 2009
In three parts, this publication offers three ways of remembering the totalitarian everyday life.
The first part presents the confessional reflections of personalities from different generations and destinies: the views of Vaclav Havel on the early normalisation in contemporary letters to Alfréd Radok, further autobiographical essays by Jiřina Šiklová, Karel Hvížďala, Jan Ruml and Martin C. Putna. The second part, whose author is the historian Kamil Činátl, forms a kind of anthropology of totalitarianism. Czechoslovakian totalitarian years create a collage of juxtaposed political, social and cultural events, as they absurdly met between 1945 and 1989. The terminology of totalitarianism constitutes a glossary of terms typical of everyday life under communism. There is also a listing of important domestic institutions that are engaged in totalitarianism. The book is accompanied by a wide selection of contemporary photographs and images of everyday life.
The book was published by cooperation of Respekt Publishers and the Circus of Totalitarianism.
We are selling the book for CZK 350 + Postage (which is not charged for, if the book is collected in person).
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A Word about Words – samizdat essay
„The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness, as Belinsky once described Ostrovsky’s Storm. They can also be lethal arrows. Worst or all, at times they can be one or the other. They can even be both at once!“
Václav Havel:
A Word about Words – samizdat essay
July 25, 1989
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