Wooden shoe with a secret hiding-place from a forced labour camp in Bulgaria
Petko Ogoyski in his collection holding the wooden shoe with a secret hiding-place for medicine and a small pencil, perserved from the forced labour camp in Belene on the island Persin. Petko Ogoyski - one of the few living artists who survived socialist prisons and labor camps, was an important figure in the Bulgarian cultural opposition against the communist regime. As a member of the Bulgarian Agrarian People’s Union-Nikola Petkov (BZNS-Nikola Petkov) and poet/writer, Ogoyski was imprisoned twice (1950-1953 and 1962-1963) by the socialist state for writing “hostile” poems, texts and aphorisms and for “conspiracy”.
The Tower-Museum was established as a private initiative of the family Petko and Yagoda Ogoyski. The exhibition is partly a national and a local ethnographic one, including household appliances, costumes, and weapons from the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, this was a way to circumvent the censorship of the communist regime. Among the ethnographic materials, Petko Ogoyski kept and preserved evidence from the periods of his imprisonment in six prisons and two forced labour camps, as well as notes, books and poems written by him during and after the discharge from prison.
Glossary of Technology
“The Glossary of Technology” is the name for the special issue of “Vidici” that came out in the spring of 1981. It is one of the most significant dissenting publications that directly relied on the then subversive press trends in Czechoslovakia and Poland. “The Glossary of Technology” acquired a great deal of inspiration from the Solidarity Movement, which some of the journalists and editors were in contact with. In contrast to all previous editions, it was modelled on a manuscript from mediaval times with illustrations and using a calligraphic style. It was completely handmade and crafted with old-fashioned technology. Another specificity was that this issue was conceived as a dictionary with carefully selected samples. The manner in which the dictionary looked had a symbolic meaning. It was a protest against the modern technology-based social systems (Z.P. Piroćanac, Nomenclatura Serbica, 2012, 1). The edition had 171 terms on 30 pages. Some of the terms mentioned were: "WILL – unconditionality. The possessor of movement and the only force that can master it. Will realized as life is personality. Will is without conditions, but it is the condition for everything. “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Book of Genesis); DEMOCRACY – equilibrium. A form of medium of society. This is the technology that cannot be eliminated by an individual. The devilish game of democracy is concerned with knowledge and ignorance, crime and punishment, cruelty and kindness ... (Cummings); MASS – indolence. Being the mass does not mean being part of the crowd, but rather being indistinguishable in the same impersonal frequency of consciousness in general. History is required to vanish in the mass, because it has become complete numbness, pure immanence. A direct consequence of the new role of masses organised into a collective ... is barbarism (Berdyaev); MORALS – mirroring, limiting. Morals are laws realized in the medium of society. Only technologists need morality to avoid collision while moving, however the individual does not need it. Morality is acting egoism. Moral judgments belong to a stage of ignorance in which the distinction between what is real and imaginary is lacking …” (Nietzsche).
All this was too confusing for the political authorities who did not know exactly what was behind this coded edition. The edition was banned, and its subversive nature was discussed in front of the University Commitee of the Union of Communists, where an analysis was initially formulated in the party document "Analysis of the Ideological Orientation of the Journals "Vidici" and "Student".” In it we see that it is precisely the "aesopian language" and that it is impossible to understand the text without a "key" or "code", which worried the party most. Eventually, it was concluded that "The Glossary" was anti-humanist and antisocialist-oriented, which was enough of a reason to ban it. Soon afterwards, the party organs launched a media avalanche that lasted for several months, and the highest party officials spoke of the necessity to reckon with the group gathered around "Vidici" and "Student". However, it turned out that the criticism of "The Glossary" was merely a motive for launching a broader backlash against dissident groups after Tito’s death (1980). The subsequent outcome would be the publication of the "White Book" in 1984, by Croatia’s Communist party leaders, which called for an end to the so-called "cultural counter-revolution".
Film "Plastic Jesus"
"Plastic Jesus” (1971) stands as a masterpiece of the Lazar Stojanović collection and is one of the most famous cases of cultural opposition in socialist Yugoslavia. On the surface, the film has a simple plot depicting a strayed director (Tom Gotovac) in his attempt to make a movie while being financially supported by his lovers. However, the film represents a scathing attack on the society of the time, invoking almost all taboos of the era – from the political to the sexual. Stojanović used archival material, showing original footage of Nazis, Chetniks (radical Serbian nationalists), Ustashe (Croatian fascists) and socialist Yugoslavia. The film juxtaposed the totalitarian practices of Nazism and socialism, comparing them in the process. A sharp albeit indirect, satire of Josip Broz Tito rests at the heart of the film.
„Plastic Jesus” was Stojanović’s graduate final project at the Film Academy. It was banned before any public screening and led to Stojanović being brought to trial. The film remained banned until the end of 1990 in Yugoslavia. In 1991, “Plastic Jesus” received the FIPRESCI award at the Montreal film festival.
György Konrád: The City Builder
“I write what I write, state publishers publish from me what they want, and I, however, publish my work as I can.” In 1974, György Konrád summarized the functioning of censorship in an interview given to the West German periodical Die Zeit. The dissident author and activist Konrád was regularly persecuted by the state authorities from the early 1970s. His works were either not published or printed only following thorough censuring. His novel, The City-Builder could be published in Hungary in 1977 only with substantial cuts and modifications forced by the censor.Gábor Klaniczay, the young intellectual interested in counter-culture preserved one copy of Konrád’s novel. This book is unique, however: in his own copy, Klaniczay corrected by himself the parts that were cut or modified by the censor. At that time, the original texts of forbidden or censured works were shared in manuscript or homemade copies among oppositional networks. The book displayed here documents both the intention of suppressing culture and the individual act of resisting it.
Note of Danilo Kiš from the lawsuit for defamation in „The Anatomy Lesson”
The court documentation in the collection shows that Kiš defended himself by explaining that his book was created as a gesture of a "legitimate and necessary defense, as a value greater than the prosecutor's honor: [a gesture] of my literary existence and my literary approach, as well as generally, as a fundamental defense against fatal and destructive judgements of a layman". In court, Kiš took the view that he was a writer and had the right to defend himself, using literature, against unfounded attacks on his work.
In a written statement delivered to the court, Kiš wrote: "The particular polemic sharpness of my book was, in addition, dictated not only by rough challenge and polemic fervour, but also by the literary genre itself: traditionally, polemic uses irony, sarcasm, ridicule, because it is a form of literary struggle." Kiš claimed further that polemics is a category of literature which an author can legitimately use and cannot be subject to claims of defamation. He listed a series of polemic writers and literature to try to defend his right to artistic expression. He also advocated for the view that literary controversy is actually a kind of public debate and is subject only to public judgment and literary history, not to be interfered with by the court.
In the end, the court accepted Kiš’s view, and acquitted him of the three counts of defamation. The court ruled that Kiš's response to Golubović in The Anatomy Lesson represents a "personal and subjective view to the prosecutor's conduct, and that this does not amount to facts serving to prove the truth, and thus it cannot be accepted as a charge for defamation.” The court also called for observing the broader context in which the book was created, which was in Kiš’s favour. However in 1979, after the lawsuit, Kiš left Yugoslavia embarrassed and disappointed.
Vasyl Stus' poems smuggled out of Ukraine, 1979. Manuscript
All roads in the Ukrainian archives seem to lead to Vasyl Stus, one of the most prominent poets of the sixtiers generation. He was a central figure in samizdat circles, though his works were largely unknown to the larger public until the late 1980s. This item has a particularly unusual trajectory, as it was smuggled out of Soviet Ukraine by Raisa Moroz. Liuba Vozniak-Lemyk copied by hand five of Stus’ poems on two pieces of cloth and then Moroz sewed them into the wide skirt she would wear as she left the Soviet Union. Vozniak-Lemyk was a member of the Ukrainian underground, sentenced in 1948 to 25 years of hard labor in Siberia, but was amnestied in 1956. Moroz was a human rights activist married to one of the most prominent Ukrainian political prisoners of the Brezhnev era—Valentyn Moroz. On April 27, 1979, he was released unexpectedly from a Mordovian prison, as part of a spectacular exchange of five political prisoners for two Soviet spies that took place at JFK Airport in New York. None of the prisoners knew about the planned exchange nor been asked for their consent. They thought they were having their citizenship revoked and being deported. Raisa was also allowed to leave the Soviet Union as part of this exchange. These poems were published in the Munich-based émigré journal Suchasnist in Ukrainian in December 1979.
Lydia Sklevicky Feminist Collection
Lydia Sklevicky's Feminist Collection at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb consists of a newspaper and periodicals collection, documentation and a library that testify to Sklevicky’s professional work and interests, primarily related to feminism and the issues of women's rights in Yugoslavia and the world. Sklevicky was one of the protagonists of the late 1970s and 1980s who put women's issues in focus and criticized the unenviable position of women in Yugoslavia, particularly by pointing out the discrepancy between their contribution in World War II and their prominent role in the post-war period on the one hand, and their re-marginalization since the mid-1950s on the other.
In 1974 the Minister of Education of the Socialist Republic of Croatia Stipe Šuvar implemented educational reforms of secondary schools, which turned them into vocational schools with specialised and limited vocational training. Such schools were supposed to provide pupils with immediate employment, preferably in factories. In 1977 the name „gymnasium“ was forbidden, and among others, the Classical Gymnasium in Zagreb was re-named the Educational Centre for Languages. Thanks to the courage of its director Marijan Bručić, the classical curriculum was saved providing general (universal) humanistic knowledge with emphasis on classical languages. In addition, this school was among the very few schools, which kept four years of Latin and Greek and had philosophy alongside Marxism, according to the student record book. The cover of the classroom samizdat which was put together by pupils from grade 4K on the occasion of matriculation in 1989 makes a parody of this exceptional case by using a comic strip Asterix, which was very popular at the time. The Roman eagle carries a flag with the inscription „School and factory“ and beneath there is a plate, which instead of the Latin SPQR carries the abbreviation for Yugoslavia, that is, SFRY.
