COURAGE

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Theatre director Heiner Müller was also a passionate movie-fan, and had developed a preference for French cinema. Müller took the visual model for his "Lady MacBeth", which was staged by Corina Harfouch in 1982 at the Berlin “Volksbühne” theatre, directly from a figure from Jean-Luc Godard's "Alphaville" (1965), where Anna Karina played Natascha von Braun. This is confirmed in Müller’s handwritten notes regarding Godard, which are also part of the Heiner Müller’s personal library in "Transitraum" (see, Richard Roud: Jean-Luc Godard, Bloomington, London 1970, pp. 44-45).

Miklós Haraszti's Aesthetics of Censorship was one of the most famous samizdat publications in the 1980s, and this was for a reason: the pamphlet was the first attempt to understand censorship under state socialism in its full complexity, and it was also an open and radical critique of state censorship. This 1986 edition by AB Független samizdat press, the cover of which was designed by László Rajk, was not the first. It appeared originally in 1981, but copies from that print are rare and more difficult to access. Many knew Haraszti's work only from the poet György Petri's and the historian Gábor Klaniczay's critical essays, which were printed in the samizdat journal Beszélő in 1982. The book had a great international career. It was published in French as L'Artist d'Etat by Fayard in Paris in 1983, and it was translated into German and published by Rotbuch Publishing House in West Berlin as Der Staatkünstler in 1984. Three years later, an English edition was published with a preface by György Konrád in New York (Basic Books). The English edition, entitled The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism, was released in four consecutive editions in three years. It won praise from many prominent figures, including Josef Škvorecký in the TLS.

Haraszti started to develop his ideas about a "new civilisation" in the mid-1970s, when he realized that the Kádár regime had successfully consolidated its rule in the two decades following the 1956 revolution. His concepts were influenced by György Konrád and Iván Szelényi's famous book, Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (Hungarian emigré ed. 1978; Hungarian samizdat ed. 1985; English ed. 1979), which was circulated in typed copies from 1974. One of its central claim was that intellectuals accommodated to the system and its logic, including intellectuals who were in opposition. Haraszti finished his manuscript in August 1980, and by December it was on the underground book market. No doubt, besides its wit and depth, the emergence of the Solidarity movement and its oppression contributed to its international success.

After the change of regimes, the book was published legally in 1991, and, interestingly, a Hong Kong edition raised interest among Chinese students in the the first decade of the new millennium.

Václav Havel started to write visual poetry at the beginning of the 1960s, and in 1964 he created a collection of these poems titled Antikódy (Anticodes). The majority of his visual poems were created before 1969. In the 1970s and 1980s Havel wrote several new poems. His collection Antikódy was published in 1993 and again in 1999. Since then, new poems have been found. In 2013, Laterna Magika (National Theatre in Prague) performed a play based on Havel’s visual poetry. The same year this poetry was published and presented as an exhibition.

Heiti Talvik, citizen's name Heiti Talviken (1904–1947), was a famous Estonian poet who was mostly active in the interwar period. He was 40 years old when he was arrested in 1945 by the Soviet authorities. He was accused of being a ‘socially undesirable element', and sentenced to five years' deportation to the Tyumen oblast. He did not survive, and died of starvation and exhaustion in 1947.
Nevertheless, Talvik was not forgotten, and later became an iconic literary figure. His legacy was kept by his colleagues and friends. In 1966, many writers from the Estonian Writers Union requested his rehabilitation, after which it was possible to publish his poems posthumously. A collection of his poems was later published in 1968.
The case of Heiti Talvik is important not only as an example of the persecution of cultural figures, but it also shows that such people were often still appreciated by their colleagues, who did not hesitate to restore the dignity of a victim of the repressive regime.