Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture Under Communism - Couverture rigide

Bolton, Jonathan

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0674064380 ISBN 13 : 9780674064386

Editeur : Harvard University Press, 2012

Synopsis

"Worlds of Dissent" analyzes the myths of Central European resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and replaces them with a picture of the struggle against state repression as the dissidents themselves understood, debated, and lived it. In the late 1970s, when Czech intellectuals, writers, and artists drafted Charter 77 and called on their government to respect human rights, they hesitated to name themselves "dissidents." Their personal and political experiences - diverse, uncertain, nameless - have been obscured by victory narratives that portray them as larger-than-life heroes who defeated Communism in Czechoslovakia. Jonathan Bolton draws on diaries, letters, personal essays, and other first-person texts to analyze Czech dissent less as a political philosophy than as an everyday experience. Bolton considers not only Vaclav Havel but also a range of men and women writers who have received less attention in the West - including Ludvik Vaculik, whose 1980 diary "The Czech Dream Book" is a compelling portrait of dissident life.Bolton recovers the stories that dissidents told about themselves, and brings their dilemmas and decisions to life for contemporary readers. Dissidents often debated, and even doubted, their own influence as they confronted incommensurable choices and the messiness of real life. Portraying dissent as a human, imperfect phenomenon, Bolton frees the dissidents from the suffocating confines of moral absolutes. "Worlds of Dissent" offers a rare opportunity to understand the texture of dissent in a closed society.

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

The Arab Spring saw more than 300,000 protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square bring down Hosni Mubarak. But did these protesters represent the average Egyptians who stayed home? Writing about another equinox--the 1968 Prague Spring that introduced liberal reforms to communist Czechoslovakia and provoked a Soviet crackdown--Jonathan Bolton examines in Worlds of Dissent how revolutionaries speak for a nation...The author's nuanced view of Czech activism is helpful in understanding the Middle East's blithely named "Facebook revolutions" as they enter their second year. --Justin Moyer Washington Post 20120511

...a new and welcome type of narrative about dissent, one that respects but does not exaggerate its place in the history of Communism... ...Bolton is a careful reader of primary texts, and has an original take on even the most famous of them... ...Focusing on the period up to 1980, Jonathan Bolton is writing about dissent in its darkest hour, when it seemed most isolated and thus most pressed to justify itself.... ..'Worlds of Dissent' shows the direction further studies should follow to fill in the picture. --Kieran Williams, Times Literary Supplement, Friday 8th June 2012

Biographie de l'auteur :

Jonathan Bolton is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Date d'édition: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0674064380
• ISBN 13: 9780674064386
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 360