Jiri Nenicka on Samizdat and Resisting Totalitarian Censorship

The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Libri Prohibiti is a nonprofit, independent, archival research library located in Prague, Czech Republic that collects samizdat and exile literature. Founded by Jiri Gruntorad after the fall of the communist regime its holdings include some 40,000 monographs, periodicals, reference resources, and audiovisual materials. In addition to dissident articles, many popular books were banned, and subsequently distributed as samizdats including George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, both of which are held in the library. In 2013, the Libri Prohibiti Collection of Czech and Slovak Samizdat periodicals from the years 1948–1989 was listed by UNESCO in its Memory of the World (MOW) Register. It is the largest collection of its kind in the world. According to the MOW Registry, "the completeness and uniqueness of this large number of documents attest to the fight against the communist totalitarian regime and its importance for the study of the history of the twentieth century." I met with Jiri Nenicka, a librarian at Libri Prohibiti, in Prague to talk about the collection. The novel/diary we refer to about 2/3 of the way in which beautifully describes the samizdat publishing experience is A Czech Dreambook by Ludvik Vaculik translated by Gerald Turner (Karolinum Press, Charles University, 2018)