COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

Pavel Kohout was born in Prague on the 20^th July, 1928. After graduating in 1947, he studied comparative literature, aesthetics and theatre science at Charles University, but did not successfully finish his studies. From the end of the 1940s and most of the 1950s, he worked as a reporter, a commentator and a publicist in several editorial offices (Československý rozhlas, Československá televize, Československý voják). In 1949–1950, he worked in the Czechoslovak embassy in Moscow, and after his return he led the humorous magazine Dikobraz till 1952. From 1956 he became a professional writer, but in 1963-1966 he also worked as a playwright at Divadlo na Vinohradech. He has also been involved in official organisations - especially in the Czechoslovak Youth Union, later in the Union of Czechoslovak Writers - and until 1969 he was a member of the Communist Party. In 1977, he signed the Charter 77. Next year he travelled with his wife Jelena to Austria, but they were deprived of Czechoslovak citizenship and had to stay abroad. In forced exile he continued his creative activities and cooperated with exile publishing houses. After 1989 he was living alternately in Austria and Czechoslovakia /Czech Republic.

Pavel Kohout has been a writer since his youth, besides novels he also wrote poems and in the period of normalisation prose too. By the mid-1950s, he wrote highly engaging poems which were in line with current official poetics celebrating the Party's leaders, new Communist order, and the utopian prospects for the future (Verše a písně, Čas lásky a boje). Approximately since the mid-1950s, criticism of Czechoslovak society and politics become a permanent part of his texts and became a dominating theme in the years to follow (August, August, august, Bílá kniha, Nápady svaté Kláry, Hodina tance a lásky, etc.) A reflection on the period of Communism, the Prague Spring and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia brings the book Z deníku kontrarevolucionáře; the reflection of the origins of the Czech dissent and the establishment of the Charter 77 brings the book Kde je zakopán pes.  

The literary work was in line with the public involvement of Pavel Kohout, who gradually transformed from a prominent cultural figure of the communist regime into a vocal critic. In 1967, he criticised the 4th Congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers, which is considered to be one of the most important beginnings of the Prague Spring. Due to his activities in 1968, he was expelled from the Communist Party in the following year and persecuted in various ways. He participated in the establishment of the Charter 77 Declaration, being one of the first signatories.  In forced exile he contributed to the exile periodicals Svědectví a Listy. 

Taiga Kokneviča is the deputy director of the Museum of the Occupation in Latvia, and the main curator of the museum. She has taken part personally in building up the collection, in preparing exhibitions of paintings by Kurts Fridrihsons, and to popularise the collection on other occasions. As the main curator, she has also described the content and the use of the collection in connection with the 'Action of Light’ (donations by Paulis Kļaviņš and Ģederts Melngailis), and the review ‘Auseklis’ (donation by Vaira Strautniece).

Vesna Kolarić Kišur was born in Zagreb in 1925. She is the second wife of Rudi Supek and was the owner of his archive after his death in 1993. She continued to collect materials related to her late husband. After her death in Zagreb in 2004, the Rudi Supek archive was inherited by Supek’s descendants from his first marriage (his daughter Olga Supek). In the Rudi Supek Personal Papers at the Croatian State Archives, there are documents related to Vesna Kolarić Kišur, which includes her correspondence with Rudi Supek and others.

The work of Jiří Kolář covered two areas of interest. He was a poet, and his work was close to Skupina 42. He is the author of Prometheus’s Liver, as a result of which he was sentenced to several months in prison in 1952. Alongside his poetry, he also made collages (or as he calls them, proláže, roláže, muchláže). Thanks to them, he became internationally recognized. His work was presented at Documenta in Kassel (1968), at the biennale of Sao Paolo (1969) and in the 1970s and 1980s his work was frequently shown at the Guggenheim museum in New York.

Kolář lived in Czechoslovakia until 1979. After a year-long fellowship in Western Berlin, he moved to Paris. This change was not approved by the Czechoslovak authorities, and he stayed in Paris illegally. In 1984 Kolář received French citizenship. He returned to Prague in 1999.

Kolář was important not only as an artist, but also as someone who built communities. He was part of Skupina 42, Umělecká beseda and Křižovatka. After his release from prison in 1953, he started a tradition of the so-called Kolář’s table in Café Slavia (Prague) where independent intellectuals and artists gathered.

Běla Kolářová worked with photography (photograms) and collage. Her interest in experimentation and found objects was, for a long time, less appreciated than the work of her husband Jiří Kolář. This has changed in recent years. Her works were exhibited for the first time in 1962 in Mánes, and then she joined the group Křižovatka and exhibited with them. Běla Kolářová, together with her husband, left Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s for Berlin, and then for Paris. In 1981, she came to Prague for a short visit, but the police did not allow her to return to her husband until 1985. Since 1999 she lived in Prague. She was autodidact.

Božena Komárková is an important representative of the Brno Protestant dissent. She was born on the 28^th of January, 1903, in Tišnov, but her studies brought her to Brno, where she stayed until the end of her life. After graduation, she studied Philosophy, History and Geography at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. Professionally she worked most of her life as a secondary school teacher in several places in Moravia. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia, she joined an anti-Nazi resistance group: Obrana Národa, but in 1940 she was arrested and imprisoned until the end of the war. In 1945 she returned to Brno, where she continued her pedagogical activities. In autumn 1948, she was forced to change school because of ideologic reasons, then had to leave the profession as a teacher and became a librarian at the State Pedagogical Library, where she was released at the end of 1951. Since 1952, due to serious health problems caused by war prisoners, she had been paid as an invalidity pensioner.  

In addition to her pedagogical activities, Komárková obtained a doctorate degree at the beginning of 1948. The Habilitation theses was written during the next year, and defended in 1992, in Brno. Among Komárková´s works, the most important, belonging to the ‘Sekularizovaný svět a evangelium, Původ a významný lidských práv, Lidská práva’ (‘Origin and Significance of Human Rights’), where she reflected on the development of modern society and the inalienability of human rights from a Christian point of view. This trend was also evident in its efforts to revive the theological and ecclesiological foundations of the Českobratrské církve evangelické (Evangelical Church of the Brethren), within the New Reconstruction stream. The result of these activities is a book called Zásady Českobratrské církve evangelické (Principles of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren).

Božena Komárková represents the Protestant stream of cultural opposition. Already in the early 1950s, she organised secretive seminars for members of the abolished YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association). She joined these activities after the signing of Charter 77; her apartment became one of the most important centres of the Brno dissent, which was especially Christian-oriented.   She also published her texts in samizdat or in exile publishing houses.

Božena Komárková was awarded several times in her life for her dissent and intellectual work. In 1982 she received an honorary Doctorate of Theology at the University of Basel, in 1991 the Order of T. G. Masaryk, a year later the gold medal of Masaryk University, in 1993 the medal of Charles University too. She died on the 27^th of January, 1997, in Brno.

Paul Kondas (1900-1985) was an Estonian naive artist. He was a teacher by profession. In 1919, he took part in the Estonian War of Independence against Soviet Russia (1918-1920). From 1925 to 1941 he was a teacher and director at the Suure-Jaani elementary school. In 1941, he was forced to leave Suure-Jaani, because he refused to cooperate with the German occupying authorities. In 1945, by the time of the Soviet annexation, he was appointed director of the Viljandi high school for adults. In 1951, he was dismissed for political reasons. After that, he worked as a teacher at the Heimtali school. He retired in 1961 and devoted himself to painting, fishing, and his correspondence. He was too old and eccentric for the state to be interested in him.