Word: czech
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...there not a feeling of the end of an era in Prague already in the spring of 1968, when Czech directors were suddenly, after 20 years, confronted with their newly gained freedom? As Jan Nemec says...
Maybe 1968 signaled the end of the "new wave." However, a dozen directors of international standing were already turning to something different, finding new ways of expressing their talent. The Russian invasion not only put an end to the "new wave" but, for the time being anyway, to Czech cinema as such...
...only now that the West is becoming acquainted with the extraordinary revival of Czech literature that took place during the 1960s as these remarkable works keep coming from Western publishers, along with books, written after the Russian invasion, that are banned from publication in Czechoslovakia. Contrary to the situation in cinema, we have here much more of a sense of the continuity of this literary trend. Movie production is a "public activity" which requires substantial material means; once the political conditions had changed, the production of "undesirable" directors was stopped. Writers are much more difficult to silence. They...
...remained the embodiment of German culture, resisting the barbarism of Goebbels and Co. Solzhenitsyn, though not published in Russia in the last ten years before he was expelled, still had a sense of speaking for the people, representing the national values against the neo-Stalinist pragmatism of Brezhnev. Similarly Czech writers, particularly Kundera. Vaculik and Kohout sensed the necessity to remain in their country. In touch with their people, even in this period of darkness. This is also reinforced by the shared feeling that they have a debt to pay. In 1948 Kohout and Kundera warmly welcomed the communist takeover...
...other sort is best represented by Alexej Pludek's antisemitic "novel" Vabank, the first to deal in literature with the events of 1968. As in any socialist-realist work the characters must be archetypes. The "positive hero" is a working class Czech guy, who just returned from Syria where he was providing "brotherly help" on an engineering project. The "bad guy" is a son of the exploiting class, "pretentious, selfish and foreign to our country." The fact that he operates as "eminence grise" of various literary and political circles is not "an indication of exceptional gifts, but rather a symptom...