Word: czech
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While this kind of fascist garbage received the National Book Award in Prague, a dozen works by Czech writers not allowed to be published in their country were acclaimed by critics in the West. Whereas the "official" publications seem a rather desperate effort' third-rate writers to please their Russian-sponsored supervisors, those that are banned are linked with and perpetuate the Czech literary tradition...
...called the literature of the absurd: with Kafka it is expressed through the feeling of alienation, with Hasek through a satiric sense of humor. Joseph Skvorecky continues the latter tradition with his novel The Tank Brigade, where the contemporary Schweik is confronted with the stupidity and absurdity of the Czech army at the height of the Stalinist era, instead of the Austrian Army of Franz Joseph...
Another prolific, now-silenced Czech writer is Milan Kundera. While he became famous in the West with his political novel The Joke, his work became a classic in Prague where anybody would know the famous quotation from it when Ludvik, replying to his enthusiastically communist girlfriend who wrote to him about the "health atmosphere" prevailing at the summer Party school, quips on a postcard...
Although everybody was ready to weep crocodile tears when half a million troops from the Warsaw Pact armies marched in, in August 1968, to crush Czech hopes for a socialism reconciled with democracy, the pity was short-lived. For the Western establishment, detente and attractive trade prospects have superceded the initial expressions of humanitarian sympathy mixed with "red-scare" rhetoric. To people on the left, especially pro-communist intellectuals in Europe, the more blatantly violent repression under right wing dictatorships, has made them forget the much "duller" horrors of the Czech "normalization," and close ranks with the socialist camp...
When Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius), the leading seventeenth century philosopher and founder of modern pedagogy left Czech lands in 1620 to avoid persecution, fored Germanization and Catholicization, he was invited to become the first president of Harvard; he turned the offer down. What on earth had that obscure place on the other side of the ocean to offer the most prominent Czech intellectual of his time...