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Koecher was arrested with his wife Hana, 40, who is also a Czech turned American, four hours before the couple were to board a flight bound for Zurich. Although federal prosecutors say that Hana worked between 1974 and 1983 as a transatlantic courier for Czechoslovak intelligence, she was taken into custody last week only as a witness to her husband's alleged crimes. She was not charged, a Justice Department official suggested, because the FBI bungled her arrest. If convicted, Karl Koecher could be sentenced to life in prison...
...Nobel Czech...
...those who believe that Seifert "seems a rather modest and provincial talent to become so celebrated," I suggest they read him first (they may have to learn Czech) and then form their judgment. Seifert needs time and attention. He deserves the prize...
...caught up, inevitably, in the crisis of 1968, when Czechoslovakia seemed for a few giddy months to have won a measure of independence. As Soviet tanks finally invaded, the ailing Seifert angrily hobbled to the Czech Writers' Union and got himself elected chairman so that he could take part in whatever resistance was to be offered. He helped organize the major protest declaration known as Charter 77. "If an ordinary person is silent, it may be a tactical maneuver," Seifert declared. "If a writer is silent, he is lying...
Silence can be imposed, however. For a decade, the Czech authorities published no new work by Seifert. His poems circulated only in the private versions known as samizdat. As he neared 80, the regime relented, and selections of his work began to appear once again. They proved immensely popular. Trying to explain that popularity, George Gibian, professor of comparative and Russian literature at Cornell, described Seifert as "the grand old man of Czech poetry, a combination of Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings...