Truth and legends about the “68 Publishers”, the prestigious voice of the Czech dissent
Who knows if what is told is really true. Who knows if it is true that in a snowy winter in Toronto, an indomitable Czech housewife took the money given to her from her husband as a “Christmas gift” and decided to invest them by founding a publishing house.
This is at least according to the legend: Zdena Salivarová, the wife of the already famous exiled, dissident writer Josef Škvorecký, wanted to react once and for all against all the relentless poverty that seemed to follow the couple even in their golden Canadian exile. In the December of 1970, the determined, ingenious lady decided to translate “Tank Battalion” an old book of her husband into English, a book which by now is unobtainable and censored by the regime of Prague. Also according to the myth, after sending the first 300 copies to Czech exiles scattered throughout the Western world, Zdena founded a publishing house destined to enjoy twenty years of literary success.
“The only money that could be seen in my house was there thanks to the bookstore owned by my father, Salivarová later explains, in a way, my choice was an obvious one”.
This is how the austere, impeccable, but precious “Sixty-Eight Publishers” appeared, which subtly, but relentlessly invaded the niche market of Western Europe. Read, studied, consulted in universities, research centres and embassies of all democratic countries and also elsewhere.
The graphics, except for some subsequent improvements, would always remain dry, almost gaunt. The name however, come to think of it could not have been anything else. If the Škvoreckýs had had to leave their beloved Prague to live in Toronto, Canada, and if many of their friends and comrades had emigrated to Austria, United States, Australia, England and Germany, it was basically due to that fateful year. The year 1968.
The year of dreams and disappointment, the year of Dubček and Husák, flowers in the cannons and then the Russian tanks in Wenceslas Square. In short the year of the Prague Spring. Consequently, “Sixty-Eight Publishers” was the name of the small but refined publications.
“I don’t know how the publishing house started, I don’t know about the somewhat crazy manner in which we got the idea which bordered on the impossible” wrote Josef several times in his books of memories. “Of course, the role of Zdena was important. The publications came to light in our house, after a lunch and one of the translations that I was committed with during the period. My wife reconstructed the network of relationships that still bound us to Prague’s intellectuals, dissidents, the semi-clandestine cultural circles that focussed on Czech culture. So really, with no real planning, it led to what would become our job for almost 20 years”.
From 1971 to 1989, the year of the release of the last volume, there were indeed more than 200 titles published by this extremely precise Canadian publishing house, with about seventy authors linked or related to the dissidents. Once you have identified the volume, and the author, it was translated into English and then came up again in Czech. Needless to say that the books printed in their mother tongue were destined (also) to be smuggled illegally in the former Czechoslovakia, where they were all unquestionably banned. In addition, any possessor of the volume would risk years in prison just for having browsed through the heretical pages. The names of the authors? Besides the books of Josef (from the famous “The Cowards” to the by now legendary “The End of the Age of Nylon”) they discovered, translated, and republished Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Ludvík Vaculík, Ivan Klíma and many others. Not all of the books published had been written in Czechoslovakia; all of them featured a reflection on on what was the growing literary underground that was moving under the cultural permafrost imposed by the communist regime after the repression. “The paradox due to the success of our volumes was that many of the writers in the catalog were already famous in the United States, England, or perhaps even in Germany, but they could not know this”, said Škvorecký, “in their homes, in the small, heavily guarded Czechoslovakia they remained poor, barely employed intellectuals, often living in economic difficulty and often monitored by the police”.
Paradoxes of the Iron Curtain. In the world of politics too, it should be added.
Being unable to completely prevent the spread of the books of the “infamous” Sixty-Eight, the Czech authorities reacted by branding the Škvoreckýs as bought traitors (could they be anything else?) with money from M16 and the CIA. The volumes of the “68 Publishers” were “infected books”, according to the incensed articles of the Rudé Pravo and of the State Agency Československá tisková kancelář. Perhaps for this reason, after the collapse of the communist regime, the duo of publishers-intellectuals were received at the Castle as a couple of heroes. Perhaps for this reason, the President at the time, Václav Havel (author of “infected publications”) decided to award Josef with the Order of the White Lion, the highest honor of the Czech Republic.
by Ernesto Massimetti