COURAGE

connecting collections

Paul Wilson is a Canadian translator, writer and musician. He studied English at the University of Toronto and University of London. In 1967 he moved to Czechoslovakia. He taught English at language schools in Prague and Brno, later he worked as a translator. In Czechoslovakia, he met unofficial visual artists, writers and musicians and he even performed as a singer with the Czechoslovak underground rock band the Plastic People of the Universe. He translated works by unofficial Czechoslovak authors, for example, texts by Jindřich Chalupecký, Ivan Martin Jirous or Milan Knížák. These texts were also smuggled to the West. In 1977, after his association with underground musicians and the creation of Charter 77, he was expelled from Czechoslovakia. His wife, Czech photographer Helena Wilson (born Pospíšilová), could join him later, after many administrative delays. After his deportation to Canada, Wilson founded a record label “Boží mlýn” (God’s Mill) and released recordings of Czechoslovak underground bands. Moreover, he translated Czechoslovak samizdat or exile works by Václav Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Ivan Klíma, Bohumil Hrabal and others. He worked also as a journalist, editor and literary critic and he contributed to many American and British magazines. He is still translating Czech literature to this day.

Iryna Yezerska is a historian, archivists and curator of the museum’s holdings. Yezerska received her masters and PhD from the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Her research interests include the Ukrainian liberation movement in the second half of the 20^th century, historical demography, source studies, church history, socio-cultural ties, and biography studies. She has authored a number of popular and scholarly articles on these subjects. 

Zaborskaitė (1922-2010) was a literary critic and historian. After she was dismissed from the Department of Lithuanian Literature at Vilnius University in 1961, she worked at the Institute of History. She became an active member of the Sąjūdis movement. She was also a member of the group of scholars who prepared educational reform for the Republic of Lithuania. She is the author of a biography of the famous Lithuanian poet Maironis (1862-1932).

The life, work and activities of Professor Vanda Zaborskaitė are relevant to the theme of cultural opposition for at least three reasons. First of all, in the 1950s and early 1960s, she was a member of the Department of Lithuanian Literature at Vilnius University. At that time, the department came under strong ideological criticism from the government. Zaborskaitė belonged to the so-called group of 'witches' that were forced to leave their positions as lecturers. Secondly, Zaborskaitė's research interests included the life and poetry of the Lithuanian poet Jonas Mačiulis-Maironis. While Maironis was not banned as an author in Soviet Lithuania, the estimation of his personality was complicated. Thirdly, Zaborskaitė was religious since her early childhood. She kept in touch with a number of Catholic priests, keeping up a correspondence with them. 

Adriana Zaharijević studied political science at the University in Belgrade. She is a junior researcher at the Faculty of Political Sciences. At present she is also a co-director of the Women’s Studies Center. She has been employed at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory since 2013, and since 2016 she has been working as an assistant professor at the University of Novi Sad.

In addition, she was previously program director of the Third Program of Radio Belgrade from 2004 to 2011. Since 2003 Zaharijević has been a member of the Association of Literary Translators of Serbia. Her fields of interest are political philosophy, contemporary feminist theory and history of the nineteenth century. She has published two monographs and over sixty works, which she has presented in Serbia and around the world. Her current theoretical interests are in the field of critical engagement. Key publications of Zaharijević include Somebody Said Feminism? (ed., 2007, 2008); Becoming A Woman (2010); “Radical Feminism” in Introduction to Gender Theories (Novi Sad, 2011).