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1 inTr o duCTio n Burrel, Spaç, Qafë-Bari, Ruzyně, Pankrác, Mírov, Leopoldov, Valdice, Jáchymov, Bytíz u Přibrami, Białołęka, Aiud, Gherla, Jilava, Piteşti, Recsk, Lovech, Belene, Idrizovo, Goli otok. These are names that mean little or nothing to many. But to East Europeans from Central Europe to the farthest reaches of the Balkans, they form an indelible part of their collective memory as the darkest page in the forty-five-year history of communism in the region. They are the names of detention centers, prison camps, and forced labor camps that corrupted the landscape of Eastern Europe from the end of World War II to the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although less familiar than the Soviet gulag made famous through the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and undeniably Soviet in inspiration, they were no less brutal and dehumanizing.1 They became a living hell for a huge number of human beings from every walk of life, especially intellectuals, artists, and students whose only crime in many instances was a repugnance for the repressive Communist system that demanded conformity and brooked no opposition. Resistance to the imposition of Communist rule throughout Eastern Europe manifested itself almost from the very beginning and grew into mass, and sometimes violent, eruptions of protest, among them the Poznań riots in Poland in October 1956, the Hungarian Revolution later that same year, the Prague Spring that led to the Soviet and Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the rise of Solidarity in Poland in the early 1980s—the reverberations from which were ultimately felt throughout all of Eastern Europe—and the bloody upheaval that ended the reign of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania in December 1989. Driven by fear and paranoia, the Communist regimes saw conspiracies under every rock and around every corner. In order to squelch opposition—real or imaginary—for the sole purpose of retaining power, the Communists put in place an extensive system of detention centers and forced labor camps along 2 | introduction Soviet lines. Despite inevitable differences between them from one country to another, they shared an utter disdain for human and civil rights. The number of people hauled into this Eastern European gulag in the nearly half century of Communist hegemony numbered in the millions. Because of their visibility in society, their ability to shape opinion, and their encouragement of democratic reforms, prominent literary figures were among the chief targets of Communist repression. Many were taken into custody, accused of hostile acts against the state, including treason—often in show trials reminiscent of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany—and sentenced to prison for short or very long periods of time. Their lives and careers were disrupted or even worse. Conditions in some prisons were so mindlessly brutal it is a wonder that as many survived as did. Yet despite the physical and mental hardships, the degradation they were subjected to on a daily basis, and the smell of death in the air, they not only survived but continued to write—on paper, if they had any, even toilet paper, or in their minds—as they sought to create testimonies of what they had experienced, legacies in a sense for fellow countrymen and peoples beyond Eastern Europe who they believed remained ignorant of the true conditions of life under communism . They wrote in different genres and styles and viewed incarceration from different perspectives. Some of their writings—those, for example, by the Albanian Jusuf Vrioni, the Czechs Jiří Mucha, Karel Pecka, Lenka Reinerová, and Eva Kanturková, the Bulgarian Venko Markovski, the Hungarians György Faludy and Adam Bodor, the Romanian Paul Goma, and the Yugoslavs Vitomil Zupan and Borislav Pekić—were detailed prose accounts of the day-to-day wretchedness of the prison routine; some assumed the character of thought-provoking essays on society, politics, and religion, especially those by the Pole Adam Michnik, the Slovak Milan Šimečka, the Czech Václav Havel, and the Yugoslav Milovan Djilas. Although often intellectually substantive, they did not aspire to the extraordinary accomplishment of the Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) of the Italian Marxist political theorist and philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891– 1937). Others were lyrical in nature, contrasting the beauties of the natural world with the manmade drabness of prison cells—those by the Czech poet Jiří Heyda, for example—or philosophical in nature, inquiries into good and evil, as in the mystical verse by the Czech Catholic poets Jan...

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