COURAGE

connecting collections

Egon Bondy, real name Zbyněk Fišer, was a Czecho-Slovak poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher and “guru” of the Czechoslovak underground. He had been active within Czechoslovak surrealism from the end of the 1940s. He founded the samizdat edition “Půlnoc” (Midnight) with Ivo Vodseďálek at the beginning of the 1950s. Based on a collection of poems “Jewish Names” (Židovská jména) (1949), he chose the pen name Egon Bondy in response to the antisemitic atmosphere of the time. During the 1960s, after graduating in philosophy and psychology from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University (1961), he worked as a night watchman at the National Museum and later at the bibliography department of the State Library of the Czechoslovak Republic. He was inclined towards Trotskyism and Marxism at the time and he also focused on Eastern philosophy, such as Buddhism and Taoism. He was entitled to a full invalidity pension from 1967. During the 1970s and 1980s, he was a theorist and protagonist of the Czech underground, he wrote for samizdat and exile magazines, while his works were set to music by the underground band The Plastic People of the Universe. He signed Charter 77 in 1977 and was awarded the exile Egon Hostovský Prize for his novel “The Invalid Siblings” (Invalidní sourozenci) in 1981. On the other hand, Bondy had been collaborating with the StB (State security) since 1952. This collaboration lasted, with some intervals, until the change of regime in 1989. Until 1989, his works were mainly published as samizdat volumes or in exile. Bondy was involved in ultra-left-wing groups after 1989. He applied for Slovak citizenship after the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993 and lived in Bratislava. Egon Bondy appears as a literary character in several novels, including works by Bohumil Hrabal. There have also been several documentary films made about him. He wrote more than forty collections of poems, twenty novels and numerous philosophical and journalistic texts. Despite the fact that Bondy collaborated with the StB before 1989, he is one of the most significant figures from Czechoslovak independent and underground culture during the communist era.

21 May 1928, Hajdúszoboszló, Hungary – 21 March, Budapest (Hungary)

Ethnographer and folk dance teacher Jolán Borbély and her twin sister were born in Hajdúszoboszló to a peasant family. Her stepparents and grandparents were also peasants. In 1938, she began studying in Debrecen at the Calvinist Dóczi Grammer School, from which she graduated in 1946. At the High School, she became fond of the world of folk songs and folklife. Between 1947 and 1956, she studied Hungarian, Museology, and Ethnography at the Eötvös Lorand University. At the university, she learned about István Molnár’s collection on folk dance. She started to dance with the Csokonai Dance Group, where she met Ernő Pesovár and György Martin, whom she married in 1961.

Michael Bourdeaux, an Anglican priest, was the founder of the forerunner of the Keston Center, the Center for the Study of Religion and Communism. In 1959-1960, Bourdeaux was one of the first British exchange students to the Soviet Union and it was then when he learned of the repression of the Russian Orthodox Church during Nikita Krushchev’s term. He purchased a copy of the first issue of Science and Religion (Nauka i Religiia) initiating the decades-long accumulation of primary sources on religion and state in the Soviet Union and other communist societies. With his commitment to being a “voice of the voiceless” and to scholarly research, Bourdeaux worked with two scholars, Leonard Schaprio and Peter Reddaway, to establish the Keston Institute in 1969.

In 1984, one year after Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Bourdeaux won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion “for helping keep religion alive in East Europe.” In addition to providing leadership to the Keston Institute, Bourdeaux travelled to the Soviet Union, published prolifically, and taught lectures and seminars. Even after the relocation of the Keston archive and library to Baylor University, Bourdeaux remains on the Keston Advisory Board. In 2013, Bourdeaux delivered a keynote address at the first Keston Symposium titled “Religion and Political Culture in Communist Countries: Past, Present, and Future.” Although Bourdeaux was not directly involved in anti-communist or opposition movements in the Soviet Union, his career and life work aided the underground movements of religious dissent through various support, dissemination of information to the West, and various other means.

Kazys Boruta is a famous Lithuanian novelist, poet and translator. During the interwar period, he belonged to the leftist organisation the Socialist Revolutionaries Union. In 1925, he was arrested for a short period, and in 1926 he left Lithuania. He lived in Austria and Germany, and cooperated with the Social Democratic press. He returned to the Republic of Lithuania in 1931, and was arrested again for illegal political activity, and sentenced to four years in jail, but amnestied after two years. 

In 1940, Boruta enthusiastically welcomed the Soviet regime in Lithuania. However, his relations with the regime started to change, and became more and more complicated and tense. His famous novel Baltaragio malūnas (The Mill of Baltaragis), published in 1945, was strongly criticised for 'mysticism' and ignorance of the Soviet reality. (All the print-run was destroyed by the government.) In the end, in 1946, Boruta was arrested and sentenced to five years, but in 1949 he was released. He was ignored by the regime, and had many problems publishing his work. However, his situation started to change during the period of de-Stalinisation. In 1965, he was honoured with the title of cultural activist, and after his death the publication of his collected writings (ten volumes) started. The first volume was published in 1970, and the last in 1975. 

To the Lithuanian intelligentsia and cultural activists, Boruta was an example of a rebellious artist, who protested against different political regimes for artistic autonomy and creativity.