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cZEcHosloVaKia | 151 Milan Šimečka (1930–1990) The father of the well-known Slovak novelist Martin Šimečka (b. 1957), Milan Šimečka was a highly respected and influential Slovak writer and dissident. Although born in the Czech part of Czechoslovakia and educated at the University of Brno, Moravia, where he studied Czech and Russian literatures, his subsequent career developed in Slovakia. He moved to Bratislava, the Slovak capital, in 1954, where he taught at the University of Bratislava and then at the School of Performing Arts. He lost these positions, as well as his membership in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1968. Unable to work or publish in his own country, Šimečka became an active dissident and a prolific writer of political articles and essays all of which had to be published abroad. The most notable of these publications was Obnovení pořádku, published initially in Cologne, Germany, in 1979 in the émigré Czech “Index” series. It was brought out in English in London in 1984 under the title The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia, 1969–1976. The book is an outspoken analysis of the “normalization” imposed in Czechoslovakia after the suppression of the Prague Spring of 1968 and the de facto reimposition of Soviet-style political and cultural controls. Since smuggling manuscripts, especially those of a political nature, out of Czechoslovakia for the purpose of publication abroad was regarded as subversive by the authorities, Šimečka was taken into custody. His trial ended with a sentence of ten years, most of which was spent in Ruzyně prison. Šimečka was released on 27 May 1982, having spent only thirteen months behind bars. But the separation from his family, friends, and colleagues took its toll. Since he was limited in what he could write from prison (prison routine was a taboo), he consoled himself by writing letters of a personal and at times intimate nature, many about his wife and his longing for her and their sons and how he wondered if he had been a good father to them. The letters encompass a myriad of small everyday thoughts and recollections. They are also of more than casual interest for Šimečka’s ideas on literature that he shares with his son Milan (Martin), a budding author in whose promise the elder Milan took obvious pride. Šimečka wrote warmly, and compassionately, and his letters from prison (first published in Bratislava in 1999 under the Slovak title Listy z väzenia) have to be reckoned among the best specimens of this genre. Separate from Šimečka’s letters to family members are his philosophically speculative longer letters about the nature of reality. These, too, were composed while he was still in prison. Although he had writing implements and paper available to him, he 152 | cZEcHosloVaKia was unsure that the letters would ever see the light of day. As he writes in a preface to them in Bratislava, in August 1982: When I started to write these long, separate letters about the nature of reality, I scarcely entertained the possibility that I might eventually send them or hand them to someone personally. In prison I consistently held to Dante’s line and abandoned all hope lest I should suffer too much over their demise. And lo, a year later, I’m sitting at home at my desk and reading what I actually wrote then and wondering why I wrote it and what to do with it. There is an enormous difference between the two situations: the one in which I wrote it and the one in which I’m reading it, and that difference perturbs me. I ask myself why I started to engage in philosophical speculations in prison. I was probably tempted by the scope it offered: I had a pen, paper, a table, and a gray wall in front of me. I didn’t have bookshelves at my back to unsettle me—as they are now doing—coaxing me to correct the obvious lapses of memory and in general to somehow improve the carefree flow of ideas that I set down on copy paper in my cell. It also occurs to me that I should put the whole lot into a shoe box and leave it like that.12 Strongly committed to the cause of Czech-Slovak relations, and human rights in general, Šimečka worked as a senior adviser to President Václav Havel. He died...

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