COURAGE

connecting collections

The Ion Monoran Collection documents the intellectual profile of one of the leaders of the underground cultural movements in the Banat, who, thanks to his ability to catalyse the action of the crowd gathered in the streets of Timişoara on 16 December 1989, became one of the figures who incontestably made a mark on the Romanian Revolution.

The Irina Margareta Nistor Private Collection includes a series of written documents, together with a few dozen VHS video cassettes preserving a small part of the Western films that were introduced clandestinely into Romania between 1985 and 1989, to be translated and dubbed and then distributed on video cassettes (semi)clandestinely. This collection epitomises a popular culture phenomenon without any equivalent in Eastern Europe, which emerged in Romania as a reaction to the reduction of the official programme broadcast on television channels to just two hours per day and to news broadcasts about the activity of Nicolae Ceauşescu and the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party.

The collection reveals the life and work of the famous Lithuanian theatre director Jonas Jurašas. He was expelled from the position of director of the Kaunas State Drama Theatre in 1972. Jurašas did not agree to work under the proposed conditions of ‘Soviet theatre director’. He expressed his own view of what kind of working conditions and rights artists, and specifically theatre directors, should have. His terms were rejected by Soviet cultural administrators. Jurašas became unemployed, and had to endure poor living conditions. He and his family were among the first people in Soviet Lithuania to request permission to emigrate to the West, and received it from the Soviet government.

This collection contains letters which the Libri Prohibiti Library obtained from the estate of the poet and manager of the Czechoslovak underground band Plastic People of the Universe, Ivan Martin Jirous. These letters were written by his wife, the painter Juliana Jirousová, during his many stays in prison. However, we can also find several unknown letters which were written before their wedding. This collection contains over 120 letters.