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

Bolton, Jonathan

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0674416937 ISBN 13 : 9780674416932

Editeur : Harvard University Press, 2014

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

"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."

Revue de presse :

Worlds of Dissent" would be valuable simply because it meaningfully gathers in one place so many familiar and less familiar voices, themes, accounts, and analyses of episodes and aspects of social and cultural life in 1970s Czechoslovakia Readers unfamiliar with the personalities or events discussed are given plenty of help, while Bolton writes with painstaking clarity throughout. As contemporary Bohemia s public life drifts ever further away from that apparently dreamed and lived by the 1970s dissidents, at least its past may be in safe hands. --Rajendra A. Chitnis"Central Europe" (05/01/2013)"

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Date d'édition: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0674416937
• ISBN 13: 9780674416932
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 360