Czech Samizdat Archives – the Past and the Present

In the former Czechoslovakia, samizdat was not limited just to the dissident community: the big “publishing houses” like Vaculík’s Petlice soon became a model for many local followers. Under communism, they naturally made effort to keep their activities secret; after 1989 vast majority of them did not find a reason to claim credit for their work and their production remained buried in their personal archives. Therefore, the lexicographic and bibliographic research in Czech samizdat faced a lengthy problem: while a representative part of the (mostly Prague) dissident publications had been smuggled out of the CSSR and collected in specialized archives in Scheinfeld (Germany) in the 1980s, it took quite a time to identify the local samizdat publishers and get access to their production.