COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

After her return from Czechoslovakia on 10 February 1946, Mērija Grīnberga had to submit several accounts of her journey to the authorities. After she was forced to leave her position as acting head of the Ethnography Department of the Historical Museum, she had to submit an explanation to the Ministry of State Control of the Latvian SSR as to why she did not hand over the collections of the department to her successor, according to the rules. Although Mērija Grīnberga was born in St Petersburg and her spoken Russian was good, her written Russian was a little clumsy, but the draft is written very expressively, and describes in detail the attitude of the museum administration towards the museum collections and her personally. The drafts of the accounts written by Mērija are also interesting because they show how she gradually adopted the ideological language of the Soviet regime. 

In 1968, Zaborskaitė finished and published her book about the life and work of the Lithuanian poet Maironis. She presented it for her doctorate. During her speech, she acknowledged that the idea to write a book had come to her in the 1950s, and the book was written in 1958-1961 (see Stonytė V., Ir aš ją pažinojau...Atsiminimai apie Vandą Zaborskaitę [I Used to Know Her. Memories of Vanda Zaborskaitė], 2016, Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, p. 503). Nevertheless, due to the political situation and the regime's attitudes towards the Department of Lithuanian Language and Literature at Vilnius University, Zaborskaitė not only could not publish her book on Maironis, but was also dismissed from her position as lecturer (in 1961).

The poem “Poslední růže” (“The Last Rose”) from the collection Dům Strach (House of Fear) was written by Jan Zahradníček during his time in Pankrác Prison in the early 1950s. The manuscript of this poem was hidden by Václav Sisel , a guard and technical chief in the Pankrác Prison print shop. This manuscript finally became part of the Jan Zahradníček Collection at the Museum of Czech Literature in 1968. The poem depicts a real event: Václav Sisel, in accordance with Jan Zahradníčekʼs request, gave a rose from the prison garden to Antonín Ludvík Stříž, the canon of the Royal Collegiate Chapter of St. Peter and Paul at Vyšehrad. The rose, which grew and bloomed before prisonersʼ eyes, was then put on the main altar of the Vyšehrad cathedral.

“The Book of Mařenice” (Mařenická kniha) was published as a samizdat in 1977. It includes texts by Pavel Zajíček, Czech poet, musician, artist and leading figure of the Czech underground. These texts (diary notes, personal comments, reflexions, poetry, lyrics) were written in the first half of the 1970s, during Zajíček’s stay in the village of Mařenice in Northern Bohemia. Only one copy of “The Book of Mařenice” was published. This unique exemplar with its original visual concept is currently part of the Libri Prohibiti collection.