COURAGE

connecting collections

Ghimpu, Gheorghe (b. 26 July 1937, Colonița village, now Chișinău; d. 13 November 2000, Chișinău) was an outstanding member of the National Patriotic Front and the main ideologue of the movement. He produced or co-wrote most of the group’s programmatic documents. He studied at the Tiraspol Pedagogical Institute, graduating in 1960 from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. Subsequently, he worked as a schoolteacher in Strășeni district and as a university instructor in Tiraspol and Chișinău. He also worked as a minor official within the Communist Youth League (Komsomol). At least from the mid-1960s, he began to openly display his oppositional and nationalist views, which earned him several reprimands and ultimately cost him his job in the Komsomol. In 1970 he was admitted to the doctoral programme of the Institute for Biological Phisycs of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. However, he was expelled for ideological reasons in November 1971. Under the impact of the Prague Spring and the subsequent events in Eastern Europe, he founded the National Patriotic Front together with Alexandru Usatiuc. He later insisted on the spurious claim that this organisation had existed in the MSSR since the late 1940s and that it was merely “revived” in the late 1960s. He was arrested in January 1972 and sentenced to six years in a high-security labour correction colony. After his return to Chisinau, he was barred from engaging in any public activity and from teaching. He resumed his involvement in politics after 1989, being one of the founders of the Moldovan Popular Front. He was a member of Moldova’s first democratically elected Parliament between 1990 and 1994. In a highly charged symbolic gesture, he was allowed to install the Romanian flag (tricolour) on the Parliament building on 27 April 1990, thus consecrating the first act of symbolic rupture with the Soviet past. He remained actively involved in politics until his death in November 2000 as a result of injuries suffered in a car accident. He was the only member of the group who became a practising politician after 1989.

 

Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and leading figure of the Beat Generation. He was born into the left-oriented family of an American high school teacher and a Russian Jewish immigrant. He studied at Columbia University, however he was expelled from the University for repeated theft and drug use. Ginsberg came into public attention in 1956 with the publication of “Howl and other poems”, a collection of poems which was declared by the San Francisco Police Department obscene because of the graphic sexual language. As a consequence, its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested. The highly publicized ensuing trial attracted national attention and Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” achieved international fame. Ginsberg, known for his non-conformist life, sympathized with the hippie movement, championed gay rights and the anti-war movement. He was interested in Zen-Buddhism and travelled to many countries. In 1974 he co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute.

Bogomil Gjuzel is a Macedonian poet, writer, playwright, and translator. He was a dramaturge at the Dramski Theatre in Skopje for two terms, 1966–71 and 1985–98. He was one of the ten founders of the Independent Writers of Macedonia association and its first chairman in 1994. In 1999, he became the acting director of the Struga Poetry Evenings, a position he held until his retirement in 2004. Since 1995, Gjuzel has been editor-in-chief of the bi-monthly literary review Naše Pismo, which he founded in Skopje.

Gjuzel’s father, Dimitar Gyuzelov, was a Bulgarian revolutionary and member of the pro-Bulgarian Macedonian Youth Secret Revolutionary Organization (MYSRO), which was active throughout most of Macedonia over 1922–41, conducting guerrilla attacks on Serbian administrative and army officials. Bogomil’s father was imprisoned and after release was banished from Macedonia. The Gjuzel family lived in Čačak, Serbia, where Bogomil Gjuzel was born in 1939. During the Second World War, parts of Macedonia were occupied by the Bulgarian army, which allowed the Gjuzel family to return to Macedonia in 1941, where Bogomil’s father became the director of Radio Skopje. After the withdrawal of the Bulgarian troops from Macedonia in 1944, Bogomil’s father was killed by Macedonian Communists for being a “traitor to the nation”.

Zbigniew Gluza (b. 1955). Polish editor, founder and president of the KARTA Centre Foundation. During his studies he was involved in the alternative theatre movement. In 1979 he graduated from the Technical University of Warsaw. Member of the "Solidarity" in 1980. In January 1982, with a group of friends, he has opened an underground newspaper called "Karta", which became a quarterly later on.

Because of his involvement into the opposition activities, he was arrested in March 1985 and imprisoned. In September 1985 he was released. In 1987 Zbigniew Gluza initiated the Eastern Archive.

After 1989 he was a president of two legal entities – the Eastern Archive Foundation and the Karta Foundation, merged into the KARTA Centre Foundation in 1996. Since 1990 has also been the editor-in-chief of the "Karta" quarterly. He invented biographical dictionaries of former dissidents and opposition activists. He was also one of the key persons during the opening of the History Meeting House in Warsaw in 2006. Zbigniew Gluza is also the creator of many exhibitions.

Leszek Gnoiński (born 1966) is a music journalist, screenwriter, and a director. He is also an author and co-author of numerous books and documentaries on Polish rock music. Gnoiński is the co-author of the narrative of the permanent exhibition at the Polish Rock Granary. He lives in Cracow.

Gnoiński was born in Warsaw. In the 1990s he worked in Super Express daily, where he wrote the column on rock music. He was also a collaborator of Tylko Rock (Rock Only) and Machina magazines. In 2000s he became the vice editor-in-chief of Muza magazine and the editor-in-chief of the cgm.pl webportal. He also worked for Discovery Historia TVN channel, and wrote for Dziennik and Dziennik Polski, as well as for t-mobile-music.pl. He edited over a hundred albums of 1980s and 1990s Polish rock bands, including 30 albums for the series titled Polish Music Stars of the 1980s (Gwiazdy polskiej muzyki lat 80.) added to the Dziennik daily. He hosted radio shows in Warsaw Radio 94 and Cracow Ex FM. He serves as a member of the ZPAV (Polish Society of the Phonographic Industry) Phonographic Academy, and used to be a juror of the rock festival in Jarocin and the festival of Polish videoclips Yach Film.

Gnoiński’s most important books include Raport o Acid Drinkers (1996), Encyklopedia polskiego rocka (1996) – jointly with Jan Skaradziński, and the best-selling Kult Kazika (2000), Myslovitz. Życie to surfing (2009). Together with Wojciech Słota he created the film Chasing the Acids – w pogoni za Acid Drinkers (2006), the Historia polskiego rocka TV series (2008), Beats of Freedom – Zew wolności (2009) and Nieważne jak wysoko jesteśmy (2011), as well as series of documentaries on Jarocin produced especially for the Polish Rock Granary (2013). In 2016, together with Marek Gajczak, he shot a documentary titled Jarocin, po co wolność, and on his own film Fugazi. Centrum wszechświata dedicated to the famous transformation-era Warsaw club.

Gnoiński’s attitude was shaped by the nonconformist message of the early 1980s rock music. He is attached to the idea of rock being a vehicle for dissent against the state and social system. Nevertheless, the peak of his professional activities took place in the 1990s and 2000s, when rock suffered from commercialisation, becoming one of many options available in the music market.