Th is text looks at the early Communist intellectual movement in Slovakia (in an area that, for part of the time under discussion, was affi liated with the the Hungarian Soviet Republic) organized around the journal Kassai Munkás (Th e Košice Worker). By placing this movement in the context of the development of Western Marxism and the incipient Marxist aesthetics of György Lukács, who was among those who published in the journal, the paper characterizes the movement’s contribution to discussions of the meaning of proletarian culture, which elaborated on the concept of social culture developed by Lukács in his radical period. An earlier version of this article, in the original Slovak and in parallel English translation, was published in Košice Modernism: Košice Art in the Nineteen-twenties = Košická moderna. Umenie Košíc v dvadsiatych rokoch 20. storočia, ed. Zsófi a Kiss-Széman, (Košice: Východoslovenská galéria, 2013), pp. 84–94.
At the beginning of the 18th century, numerous printing workshops were founded in the Czech countryside. On the example of the Znojmo printing workshop, the text follows the establishment of a new workshop in the region; it asks questions about the reasons for it and tries to define groups of the workshop’s customers and to determine the possible share of the printing production in the transformation of the society at that time. The article is divided into two complementary parts. The small Znojmo workshop is first presented through its owners whose fates were decisive for its functioning; on the basis of archival research, the existing picture of its operation is then corrected and complemented by means of contextualised biographical explanation. The second section provides, building on the analysis of extant printed books, the typology of their commissioners and presents the range of the workshop’s publications. Based on these analyses, the concluding part attempts to answer the questions raised above and outline the research directions that should complement the existing results. Besides the detailed description of the workshop’s production, the article presents the relations of the workshop to Moravian and partly also Lower Austrian printing workshops, the basic features of the distribution network, as well as the structure of the printed books published not to order but at the initiative and risk of the printer., Jiří Dufka., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
This study deals with the grey zone phenomenon in the context of literary life under late Communist rule during the 1970s and 1980s in Czechoslovakia. The aim of this text is to attempt to trace, using the method of historical reconstruction, how the concept of the grey zone was understood in Czech and Slovak society before 1989, especially in texts and discussions on dissent and exile that reflected the reality of normalization. These texts show that awarenesss of the grey zone played an essential role in the thinking of dissident and émigré authors, as it challenged bipolar schemes and blackand- white images of social reality in the Czechoslovakia of the time. However, this conception of the grey zone often contradicts today’s journalistic and specialist approaches, which tend to classify the grey zone as a silent or passive majority. This study shows that the definition of what we now call the grey zone was much broader.