Ludvík Vaculík

The guinea pigs

Sekyra

Český snář

Václav Klaus

Institut Václava Klause

a kol.

Ota Filip

Jiří Hájek

Čestmír Císař

Publikace obsahuje texty ze semináře Centra pro ekonomiku a politiku z 21. srpna 2008 a další důležité doplňkové texty. Jsou zde také přetištěny důležité přílohy.

Srpen 1968: čtyřicet let poté

The Axe

Cesta na Praděd

It’s 1979 in Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing restoration of repressive communism known as normalization, and Ludvík Vaculík has writer’s block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his last novel, and even longer since he wrote the 1968 manifesto, "Two Thousand Words,” which the Soviet Union used as one of the pretexts for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of a friend, Vaculík begins to keep a diary: "a book about things, people and events.” Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculík has written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction – an inverted roman à clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses, the secret police and leading figures of the Czech underground play major roles.

A Czech Dreambook

The Guinea Pigs is a chilling fable about dehumanization and alienation representing Vaculik's vision of the menace of Soviet domination in the wake of the 1969 invasion. Written in 1970, it is a sweeping condemnation of totalitarianism, embedded in a rich, imaginative, highly experimental narrative. In the words of the New York Review of Books it is "one of the major works of literature produced in postwar Europe."

The Guinea Pigs

Ludvík Vaculík

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