COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

The collection of the material for the ‘private archive’ and on the political elite started in 1985, then continued with the cooperation of the Historical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Science (HAS) from 1988 (commissioned and financed by the publishers of the HVG weekly) and was complemented with a large number of documents just before the 1990 parliamentary elections. Its establishment was linked to the parliamentary almanacs in which the 1990 elections were documented. The various types of material (interviews, correspondence, questionnaires) gathered during the research process were published not in a separate volume but in a thematic ‘election supplement’ by the publishers of the HVG weekly. Later, József Marelyin Kiss and József Kovalcsik published the written documents of the parties and MPs (amounting to some 50–60 archive boxes) as research results of the Foundation for Contemporary Research. The publishing process restarted, and still runs, in the form of a book series, with the addition of material concerning MPs in the later volumes. Altogether, the collection references the personal data, jobs, and CVs of 7,838 people with correspondence and questionnaires and it became the basis of the Collection of Political Transition.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Ákos Birkás was experimenting with critical, grotesque, “bad painting,” targeting purposefully banal subjects. The theme of his work in the collection is four postcards available at the time in Hungary from English import.

On the pictures one sees plush animal toys in everyday situations (sawing, mountain climbing, gathering in a garden, picnicking). The painter juxtaposed the cards in two rows, thus creating a “picture in picture” situation, distancing the viewer from the “cuteness” of the animal toys and making it possible to compare visual analysis of the image promoted for children’s use.

In 1977, English nurse Frances Meacham began to collect Ivan Blatný’s manuscripts of poems. She also sent some poems to Josef Škvorecký, a Czech writer living in exile in Toronto, Canada. Škvorecký decided to publish Blatný’s poems and thus, the collection of poems Old Addresses (Stará bydliště) was issued by the Czechoslovak exile publishing house Sixty-Eight Publishers in 1979. The collection was compiled during years 1978 and 1979 by Czech poet Antonín Brousek, who emigrated to West Germany in 1969.  In accordance with Josef Škvorecký’s request, Brousek intentionally did not include multilingual and “modern” poems. On the contrary, he chose rather lyrical poems that resembled Ivan Blatný’s texts from the beginning of the 1940s. Josef Škvorecký justified this decision stating that their clients (readers of books issued by the publishing house Sixty-Eight Publishers) are usually “elder emigrants, who already had preconceived notions about poetry”. Although Old Addresses did not reflect Blatný’s modern style, the issue of this collection in 1979 was crucial. It resulted in better knowledge of Blatný and his work in exile, and Blatný was rediscovered by Czechoslovak readers, mainly those in exile and dissent circles. This book circulated in Czechoslovakia, where it was disseminated through illegal typescript copies. As Czech literary historian Jiří Rambousek stated later, it “created a small literary sensation.” Thus, it was not surprising that Old Addresses was also published by the Czechoslovak samizdat edition “Czech Expedition”. Moreover, it encouraged Blatný himself to continue in his literary work. Since 1989, this collection has officially been published in Czechoslovakia, and later in the Czech Republic, four times (1992, 1997, 2002 and 2014).

The Museum of Czech Literature possesses a copy of the typescript of the collection Stará bydliště (Old Addresses) with handwritten notes.