COURAGE

Mbledhje koleksionesh

Karel Teige was a Czech aesthetician, theoretician, art critic, graphic designer and translator. He was one of the leading figures in the interwar avant-garde. He studied aesthetics and art history at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts in Prague from 1919 to 1923. In the 1920s and 1930s, he worked as an art coordinator and editor for numerous Czechoslovak journals and newspapers. His writing focused on art theory, architecture, photography, film and theatre. He formulated the principles of the avant-garde aesthetic. In 1920 he co-founded the Devětsil art association, he was a member of the Left Front (1929–1936) and the Prague Surrealist Group (1934–1938). From 1929 to 1930, he was a guest senior lecturer at Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. He was also involved in art –  for example, in the design of collages. At the end of the 1930s, he criticized the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. After 1948 he was persecuted and could not officially publish. He was involved in the publication of the surrealist samizdat volume “The Signs of the Zodiac” (1951).

Modris Tenisons is a Latvian and Lithuanian artist who established the USSR’s first mime troupe. He directed several professional mime theatre and radio productions, such as Ecce homo (1967), Dream Dreams (1968), Do Butterflies (1969), 20th-Century Capriccio (1970), and Collage (1971).

After graduating from the School of Applied Arts in Riga (Latvia), Modris Tenisons studied and performed mime. In 1967, he moved to Soviet Lithuania. At first, he worked in Vilnius, and later in 1968 he moved to the Kaunas National Drama Theatre. Ecce Homo was the first performance he devised and showed in Kaunas. Later, in 1968, Jonas Jurašas, the director of the Kaunas National Drama Theatre, invited Tenisons’ troupe to join the production Mamutų medžioklė (The Mammoth Hunt). According to Jurašas, it was an interesting experiment, in which every 'real' personage-actor had his 'shadow' in Tenisons’ troupe. As Tenisons recalls, the production was well received by audiences.

Modris Tenisons and his troupe worked at the theatre for two years, and in 1970 moved to Kaunas Musical Theatre, where it worked until the middle of 1972. Tenisons witnessed the self-immolation of Kalanta, because he was rehearsing in Kaunas Musical Theatre at that moment. Later, mass youth protests broke out, but he decided not to join them, knowing the possible negative consequences of taking such a step. Although he kept away from the protests, it did not save him and his troupe from being closed down. After the self-immolation of Romas Kalanta in protest against the Soviet regime, Modris Tenisons and his troupe were dismissed from Kaunas Musical Theatre.

László Terray (1924–2015) was a Hungarian Lutheran clergyman. He was born in 1924 at Miskolc. He was consecrated by Lajos Ordass Lutheran bishop in 1946. With the scholarship of the Lutheran World Federation, he traveled to Norway, where he decided to stay because of his illness and the emerging communist dictatorship in Hungary. In 1954 he started to work at the Missionary Science Institute in Oslo. He was the president of the Norwegian Evangelical Missionary Council for ten years. In 1956 he helped 1500 Hungarian people to move to Norway. He was an important leader of the Professional Partnership of the Hungarian Evangelical Pastors Living in Abroad. He was managing editor of the Norwegian Ecclesiastic Mission’s radio programmes for almost 25 years. He organized the International Ordass Foundation and the Ordass Archive, and he wrote the first biography about Lajos Ordass in 1983.

Jan Tesař is a left-thinking historian who has been involved in the cultural opposition in Czechoslovakia and after his forced exile also in other countries. He was born in Skuteč on the 2^nd of June, 1933, and studied history at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. In 1956–1958 and 1961–1969, he worked in the Military Historical Institute. In the meantime, he worked as an unemployed person for his own research, and in 1960 he briefly joined the Pardubice Museum. In 1966 he became a member of the Communist Party, but three years later he stepped out of it. In 1969, he was also arrested for the first time and imprisoned for more than a year, followed by additional arrests and imprisonments in 1972 and in 1979. Jan Tesař was the initiator and one of the founders of the VONS and the "spiritual father" of the regular meetings of Czech and Polish dissidents in Krkonoše. Since 1977 he has been co-publishing the period Dialogy. In 1980, Jan Tesař went into forced exile in Germany and then in France, where he dealt with publishing activities (such as Dialogy, Afgánský zápisník and texts for exile publishing houses) and he sought to coordinate political exile with other socialist countries too. After 1989, he participated in academic and political discussions. Currently, he lives in Slovakia.

Jan Tesař published a number of scholar books, in which he disputes with dominant historiographical interpretations and current myths of Czech/Czechoslovak history. His critical approach has a likeness which is present in the activities of dissents and exiles. His important works include Mnichovský komplex, Zamlčená diagnóza, Traktát o „záchraně národa“, Česká cikánská rapsodie.