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Ivan Martin Jirous, also known under the pseudonym of “Magor“ (“madman”, “fool” – though in a positive sense), was a Czech poet, art historian, and leader and theoretician of the Czech underground. He signed Charter 77 and was the manager of the art music band “The Plastic People of the Universe”. In the seventies and eighties he was in prison five times (a total of eight years and six months) as a result of his cultural activities and attitude towards the system.

In 1963, Jirous began studying art history at the Faculty of Arts in Prague, and graduated in 1968 with a defence of his master thesis about the poet and artist Jiří Kolář. At the end of the sixties, he officially published art-theory texts, while from the beginning of the seventies he worked either as a labourer or was unemployed. At the end of the sixties, he collaborated with the Czech rock-music band “The Primitives Group”, which played psychedelic music. From 1969 he was the art leader of the underground music band “The Plastic People of the Universe” (PPU). One of Jirous’s most important essays was an introduction to the Czech underground “Notes on the Third Czech Musical Revival”. Jirous defined its fundamental values and artistic basis in a programme statement of the underground, where he emphasized authenticity in life and in creativity within the context of communist power. “Notes” was published in 1975 as a samizdat volume (entitled “Notes from the Czech Musical Underground”) and after that in the exile magazine “Testimony” (Svědectví, Paris 1976).

Jirous organized numerous concerts, public lectures and cultural events, for example, “Festivals of the second culture” (1974 in Postupice, 1976 in Bojanovice – connected with his wedding with Juliana Jirousová). The concert in Bojanovice, where The Plastic People of the Universe and others underground bands performed, was held in the hall of a village restaurant and became a pretext for repressive action taken by the police against sympathizers of the underground community – nineteen people were taken into custody and were charged with disturbing the peace. Most of them were members of the music groups PPU and DG 307. This case became a cause célèbre after the friends of the detainees termed the trial as political in a message to Amnesty International, and it was then brought to the attention of the Western media.

Many people from Czech cultural and intellectual life supported the accused (for example, Václav Havel, the philosophers Jan Patočka and Karel Kosík, and the writer and Nobel Prize winner Jaroslav Seifert). These people were later connected with the origins of Charter 77. On the other hand, the official propaganda campaign described the defendants as drug addicts and social parasites. It led to two trials with seven people convicted. In the second trial (the ‘Prague’ trial), Jirous was sentenced to 18 months in prison, and the musicians Pavel Zajíček, Svatopluk Karásek for one year and Vratislav Brabenec for eight months. One immediate consequence of the trial of Jirous and the others members of the underground was the establishment of the opposition initiative “Charter 77”; in connection with the international commitment of Czechoslovakia to respect human rights, which was declared at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975 in Helsinki. Jirous signed Charter 77 after his release from prison in 1978 (his ex-wife, the poet and art historian Věra Jirousová, and his wife, the painter Juliana Jirousová, also signed the charter).

Most of Jirous’s sentences were classified as disturbing the peace (§ 202). In fact, it is possible to speak about the politically motivated trials connected with his political convictions and his cultural activities. He was imprisoned for: singing an anti-communist song (“Send the Russian killers to hell where they belong”) and arguing with a retired Security Service Major (StB; 1973–74); for activities linked with the band “The Plastic People of the Universe (1976–77); for offending a communist functionary (1978; he made a speech at a Jiří Lacina exhibition about the insurmountable differences between official and unofficial culture); due to his role in producing, publishing and distributing the samizdat magazine “Vokno” (1981–85); for the activities around the petition “Tak dost”, which was connected to the last victim of the communist regime, the political prisoner Pavel Wonka. After his release from prison in 1985, Jirous was on parole and had to report daily to the Public Security Office at a specified time.

His prison experience is reflected in the collection of poems “Magor’s Swan Songs”. The collection was created during his terms of imprisonment from 1981 to 1985 and was originally published as a samizdat volume. The collection won the Tom Stoppard Prize in 1985. Jirous’s poems from this collection have appeared in many translated anthologies (English, German, French, Polish, Russian). In 2006, Jirous was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Prize for this collection and his overall literary achievement. He published ten collections of poems as samizdat volumes. Jirous’s poetry work came out in 1989 in a collected volume “Magor’s summa” (Magorova summa). His work “The True Story of the Plastic People” was serialized in 1983, 1984 and 1987 in the Viennese magazine “Paternoster”, together with “Notes on the Third Czech Musical Revival”; and after that, for example, in the book “Magorův zápisník” (1997).

In the seventies and eighties he contributed to articles, critiques and polemics to many samizdat magazines, for example “Vokno” (Jirous helped found the magazine in 1979), also “Revolver Revue”, “Infoch – Information about Charter 77”, “Dialogy” and others. Jirous organized several samizdat anthologies of poems (for example “The Invalid Siblings for Egon Bondy on his 45th Birthday”, 1975). After 1989, he continued to write articles on art and other subjects, as well as poetry collections up until his death in 2011. He is now seen as a legendary figure who was crucial to the Czechoslovak underground.

Františka Jirousová was born in March 1980 and is the oldest daughter of the painter Juliana Jirousová, née Stritzková, and the poet Ivan Martin Jirous. She spent part of her childhood alone with her mother and younger sister Marta because her father was active in the underground movement and was imprisoned for his activities. Several letters by Marta and Františka appeared in the publication Ahoj můj miláčku, addressed to their father in prison. 

Františka received a degree from the Police Academy (2001) and later graduated in philosophy at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. In 2017 she finished her doctoral studies in the same subject. Her dissertation work was called Evolution as a way to God in Teilhard de Chardin’s work.

Františka Jirousová worked as an archivist at the Libri Prohibiti library and as a proofreader, and is now employed as a book editor. As a philosopher she deals with Christian philosophy, specializing in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. When she was younger she painted, but later she swapped her brush for a pen and wrote two novels.

Františka Jirousová, together with Jana Bauerová, founded the literary group Catholic Decadence in 2004, and in 2018 they published their diary memories of Ivan Martin Jirous entitled Maga. As heir to Magor’s farm (Magor was the nickname of I. M. Jirous), Františka Jirousová runs and maintains this farm, which is open to students and artists for free. Jirousová lives alternately in Prague and Prostřední Vydří.

Juliana Jirousová was born in September 1943 in Stará Říše. Her father was the painter Otto Stritzko and her mother, Marie Florianová, was also a painter. Juliana’s grandfather, Josef Florian, was an important publisher and translator, who also lived in Stará Říše.

As a result of her so-called “cadre profile”, Juliana Jirousová was not allowed to study at university. Since she did not want to pursue a career in art as her family had done, and could not study, she sold furniture in Prague for a year. However, she soon started painting, influenced by Byzantine enamels. From 1964, she was employed as an art therapist at a psychiatric hospital in Havlíčkův Brod. She worked for a while in the most well-known psychiatric hospital in Czechoslovakia – Bohnice in Prague. However, she returned to Stará Říše due to the links between the medical staff and the secret police (StB). At home she continued to paint.

In 1972 she met Ivan Martin Jirous and began attending events connected with the underground and concerts by the band The Plastic People of the Universe, whose manager was Jirous. Juliana became integrated into the so-called second culture. Four years later, Jirous and Juliana got married and Jirous used his wedding as a pretext to hold the second Festival of the Second culture in Bojanovice. In response to the festival, Jirous was arrested and convicted in the “trial of the Plastic People“. After his release from prison in 1977, Jirous and Jirousová signed Charter 77. Besides writing poems, organizing “second culture” and managing the underground band The Plastic People, Jirous alias “Magor”, was also involved in creating samizdat volumes. His wife helped and supported him in these activities. During their marriage Jirous was imprisoned four times.

While they were separated, the married couple wrote letters to each other. Extracts from these letters were published in samizdat volumes (for example, in the magazine Koruna), and after the Velvet Revolution part of this correspondence was published in 2015 (Ahoj můj miláčku). Despite the prison censorship, these letters shed some interesting light on the life of prisoners. They help literary scholars in their studies of poems by Jirous, and they provide colour to the events of the seventies and eighties. The publishing house Torst owns some of these letters, and some of them were donated by Juliana and her daughter Františka to the Libri Prohibiti library. Juliana still lives in Stará Říše, where she focuses on painting with Christian motifs.

Ignas Jonynas was a Lithuanian historian. His works and studies (especially his seminal work ‘Vytautas’ Household’, written in 1932) laid the foundations for modern Lithuanian national historiography. During the interwar period, he was not only a professional historian and professor at Kaunas State University, but also a diplomat (from 1920 to 1922, he represented the Republic of Lithuania at the League of Nations. Later he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a couple of years).  Like several other Lithuanian intellectuals, writers and scholars, Jonynas appears to have sympathised with Soviet Russia. This is probably because he studied at Moscow University and liked Russian culture. He decided to stay in Lithuania after 1944. (His two sons left Lithuania.) 

He became a professor at Kaunas and Vilnius universities (from 1946, only at Vilnius University). His lectures were very popular with students, especially historians. His ideas on history were based on principles of historicism and positivism. Jonynas taught some famous Lithuanian historians: such as Vytautas Merkys and Mečislovas Jučas. He organised special 'historical’ trips for historians around important places in Lithuanian history. In 1948 and 1949, he was attacked severely by the University Party Committee, and later by leaders of the Lithuanian Communist Party, for ignoring Marxist methodology, and for ‘bourgeois nationalism’. Jonynas admitted to ‘ideological mistakes’, and continued his professional career at the university.