Word: masaryk
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...libraries have now started combing their shelves, removing thousands of works by some 300 Czechoslovak authors. The books are being crated and shipped to an unknown destination for pulping. References to them in library card catalogues are being destroyed. Works about or by Czechoslovakia's founder, Tomas Masaryk, and about his successor, Eduard Benes, have disappeared-as have all records relating to Alexander Dubcek's 1968 fall from power. Editions of Marx and Engels fare no better if they contain prefaces by blacklisted authors...
...worth reading twice. In this autobiography, she demonstrates once more her considerable talents for evoking place and time, as she sketches the literary and political scene in England and Europe since World War I. There are flashing glimpses of the famous-H.G. Wells, Walter de la Mare, Jan Masaryk-as well as of obscure middle-European writers fleeing Nazism whom she tried to help. There are the sights and sounds of cities in crisis-Munich, Prague, Vienna, Budapest-as well as the bare cliff tops and mute-hued moors of her native Yorkshire coast...
Within minutes of the "discovery" of Masaryk's body, the case and his apartment were sealed off by the Communist-run security police, led by Interior Minister Václav Nosek. Within months, at least 25 people who knew something, or were believed to know something, were locked up. Of these, 14 were executed, murdered, committed suicide or, as the phrase went, "died in prison...
...sifting every scrap of evidence and interviewing virtually everyone still alive who could have knowledge of the death, the author has reconstructed certain essentials. There was extreme disorder in both Masaryk's bedroom and bathroom-pillows on the bathroom floor and in the dry tub, glass bottles from the medicine chest ground under foot, a smear of excrement on the sill. Strangely, Masaryk had gone out the bathroom window even though it was much smaller than the one in the bedroom and very awkward to reach...
...though, Masaryk bore too much responsibility and was too aristocratic to play the lowly Schweik for long. Though it was not his fault, he failed tragically to live up to Schweik's cardinal rule: "Always try to outlive the enemy; dying will get you nowhere...