Božena Komárková is an important representative of the Brno Protestant dissent. She was born on the 28th of January, 1903, in Tišnov, but her studies brought her to Brno, where she stayed until the end of her life. After graduation, she studied Philosophy, History and Geography at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. Professionally she worked most of her life as a secondary school teacher in several places in Moravia. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia, she joined an anti-Nazi resistance group: Obrana Národa, but in 1940 she was arrested and imprisoned until the end of the war. In 1945 she returned to Brno, where she continued her pedagogical activities. In autumn 1948, she was forced to change school because of ideologic reasons, then had to leave the profession as a teacher and became a librarian at the State Pedagogical Library, where she was released at the end of 1951. Since 1952, due to serious health problems caused by war prisoners, she had been paid as an invalidity pensioner.
In addition to her pedagogical activities, Komárková obtained a doctorate degree at the beginning of 1948. The Habilitation theses was written during the next year, and defended in 1992, in Brno. Among Komárková´s works, the most important, belonging to the ‘Sekularizovaný svět a evangelium, Původ a významný lidských práv, Lidská práva’ (‘Origin and Significance of Human Rights’), where she reflected on the development of modern society and the inalienability of human rights from a Christian point of view. This trend was also evident in its efforts to revive the theological and ecclesiological foundations of the Českobratrské církve evangelické (Evangelical Church of the Brethren), within the New Reconstruction stream. The result of these activities is a book called Zásady Českobratrské církve evangelické (Principles of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren).
Božena Komárková represents the Protestant stream of cultural opposition. Already in the early 1950s, she organised secretive seminars for members of the abolished YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association). She joined these activities after the signing of Charter 77; her apartment became one of the most important centres of the Brno dissent, which was especially Christian-oriented. She also published her texts in samizdat or in exile publishing houses.
Božena Komárková was awarded several times in her life for her dissent and intellectual work. In 1982 she received an honorary Doctorate of Theology at the University of Basel, in 1991 the Order of T. G. Masaryk, a year later the gold medal of Masaryk University, in 1993 the medal of Charles University too. She died on the 27th of January, 1997, in Brno.
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Location:
- Brno, Czech Republic
Tomasz Konart was born in 1955 in Warsaw. In the seventies and eighties, he actively participated in the neo-avant-garde movement, creating works in the field of film, video, installation, and photography. Particularly associated with the artistic communities of Łódź and Warsaw, he was a co-founder of the Group T and co-founder of the Gallery Mospan and Gallery P.O. Box 17.
In the years 1975-1980 Konart studied at the Lodz Film School; he was one of the founders of the Group T operating at the Lodz Film School since 1980. Earlier, in the years 1977-1978, Konart co-hosted the Mospan Gallery in Warsaw, and then in 1979, the P.O. Box 17 Gallery - both with Tomasz Sikorski. It was at the Mospan Gallery that the first individual Konart presentation took place - The Walk in 1977. The next individual exhibitions of Konart's works were held, among others in the Foto-Medium-Art Gallery in Wrocław, Workshop Dziekanka in Warsaw, Mała Galeria in Warsaw, Labirynt 2 in Lublin and Piwna 20/26 in Warsaw - small, original galleries and studios created by neo-avant-garde milieus.
In the 1990s, Konart emigrated to Canada, where in 1999 he started studying at the New Media Department of Ryerson University in Toronto. In addition to experimental film, video, and photography, he also practices net art. His works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Art in Łódź, the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Bureau of Art Exhibitions in Lublin and the New Museum in New York. Konart lives and works in Toronto and Berlin, constantly maintaining contact with the artistic establishment in Poland.
Sources:
Tomasz Konart, http://tomaszkonart.net/#!bio.
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Location:
- Toronto, Canada
Paul Kondas (1900-1985) was an Estonian naive artist. He was a teacher by profession. In 1919, he took part in the Estonian War of Independence against Soviet Russia (1918-1920). From 1925 to 1941 he was a teacher and director at the Suure-Jaani elementary school. In 1941, he was forced to leave Suure-Jaani, because he refused to cooperate with the German occupying authorities. In 1945, by the time of the Soviet annexation, he was appointed director of the Viljandi high school for adults. In 1951, he was dismissed for political reasons. After that, he worked as a teacher at the Heimtali school. He retired in 1961 and devoted himself to painting, fishing, and his correspondence. He was too old and eccentric for the state to be interested in him.
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Location:
- Viljandi , Estonia
István Konkoly (1930) is a Hungarian Roman Catholic priest and former bishop of Szombathely. He studied at a high school in Szombathely, and then he studied theology at the Pázmány Péter Theological Academy in Budapest. He became a priest in 1954 in Szombathely. Konkoly was a chaplain in Gyöngyösfalu, Rábagyarmat, and Jánosháza between 1955 and 1962. He completed his doctor of theology in 1960. In 1962–1963, he served as vice-pastor in Szőce. Between 1963 and 1972, he was secretary to the bishop of Szombathely. He became an agent of the political police in 1959 under the codename “Mátrai,” but most of his reports were of no use to the Ministry of the Interior. He became so passive in the 1970s that he was expelled from the network in 1977. In 1963, he was made secretary of the National Liturgic Committee and in 1987 he became the president of the organization. Between 1972 and 1987, he was the pastor in Gencsapáti. In 1986, the state security established a connection with him again, because in the following year he became the bishop of Szombathely. He led the Diocese of Szombathely until 2006.
György Konrád grew up in a Jewish family in Berettyóújfalu, a village in eastern Hungary which at the time had a significant Jewish minority. His father was a hardware merchant. His mother was a descendant of a bourgeois family from neighbouring Oradea (in Hungarian, Nagyvárad), Romania. Before 1920 and between 1940 and 1944 the city had been part of Hungary. Berettyóújfalu Jews were deported and the majority of them were killed in 1944, but miraculously both of Konrád’s parents survived. He himself managed to survive in a Budapest house under Swiss protection. After the war, he became a student at the Reformed College in Debrecen. In 1947, he moved to Budapest to study in a renowned high school, the Imre Madách Gimnázium. In Budapest he was joined by his parents in 1950, when the state nationalized his father's business in Berettyújfalu.
Initially, Konrád enjoyed the democratic atmosphere of the high school, but after the Communist takeover this was lost, and indeed the school became quite the opposite of democratic. Students like Konrád, who did not toe the political line, were kicked out of the student association. Because of Konrád’s bourgeois background, he was not allowed to study Hungarian and French at Eötvös Loránd University. Rather, he was redirected to the Russian Institute. Many of the professors in the Instiute were old Russian emigrés, who had left their home country in 1917 and lived in one of the states that had become part of Yugoslavia. In 1948, after the Tito-Stalin split, however, they were unwelcome in Yugoslavia, but they were not allowed to return to the Soviet Union either, even though they were able to get Soviet citizenship. They ended up in other socialist countries like Hungary, where they often taught Russian. Inspired by them, Konrád developed a deep interest in Russian literature, and he wanted to write an entire monograph on Gogol. Konrád was particularly interested in how Gogol related to the state culture of the empire of Nicholas I and how he dealt with censorship. As Konrád explained in a 1988 interview, this choice was motivated by the analogies he discovered between the two systems. In April 1953, the Russian Institute was renamed after Lenin. It became a space for hard-liner Marxist-Leninists, who until then had taught at the Department of Philosophy. Konrád was dismissed, and he was also expelled from all institutions of higher education.
By autumn 1953, however, the political context changed. Imre Nagy had emerged as a principal political actor, and Konrád was admitted to university to pursue studies in Hungarian literature and linguistics. Konrád remembers these years as an interesting period, when political activism was on the rise among the youth, and he started to establish himself as a young writer and critic. This came to an end in 1956. During the revolution, he became a member of the National Guard, took hold of a machine gun he never used, and distributed flyers with his friends, one of whom was György Krassó. When Krassó was arrested in November 1956, the majority of their circle fled, including Konrád’s wife and sister. Konrád decided to stay.
As a result of his involvement in the revolution, Konrád could not find a permanent job until 1959, when he became a children's welfare supervisor in a lower class Budapest district, where poverty and alcoholism were widespread. Konrád’s experiences inspired a novel entitled A látogató (Magvető, 1969), translated into English as The Case Worker (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974). Konrád’s book was also influenced by Endre Fejes’ Rozsdatemető (Magvető, 1962; English translation: Generation of Rust, McGraw Hill, 1970), which depicted workers not as heroes of the workplace, but as troubled persons. Konrád started to work on The Case Worker in 1964 and finished in 1967. Both the Generation of Rust and Konrád’s novel were rejected by Szépirodalmi Publishing House, one of the two major publishing houses in Hungary at the time. In both cases, however, Szépirodalmi’s rival, Magvető, decided to publish the works (Standeisky, Kőszeg). The Case Worker met with negative reviews in the mainstream communist press, but it was appreciated by many literary critics, and most importantly by its readers. It became a hit at the 1969 Book Fair. Domestic success was followed by a rapidly increasing international reputation. By the mid-1970s, the novel had been translated into several Western languages.
From 1960 to 1965, while working as a social worker, Konrád was also employed by the Magyar Helikon Publishing House as a part-time editor. He prepared the works of Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky for publication. In 1964, he was involved in publishing the short stories of Isaac Babel, a work that Konrád particularly enjoyed, in part because some of the short stories had not been published in the Soviet Union at that point.
In 1965, Konrád left both of his jobs to join the Urban Science and Planning Institute, where he worked closely with urban sociologist Iván Szelényi. The two published a number of essays and books together. In July 1973, however, Konrád was dismissed for his involvement in a political issue. The regime had refused to publish or allow the publication of Miklós Haraszti’s sociographical work Darabbér (‘Piece-Wage’), and Konrád assisted in a failed attempt to smuggle the manuscript to Yugoslavia. Haraszti was sentenced to prison, and Konrád was given a prosecutorial warning and lost his job.
After this, Konrád worked for a couple of months in a mental asylum in Doba, a small village in Transdanubia. This experience inspired his next novel, which he wrote between 1974 and 1978, A cinkos (The Loser). The Hungarian government did not allow it to be published, but it found its way to readers in samizdat. Meanwhile, by May 1974, Konrád and Szelényi finished their next sociological work entitled Az értelmiség útja az osztályhatalomhoz (Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power), a study which had no chance whatsoever, given its content, of being published in socialist Hungary, but which nonetheless irritated the political police. The police subjected both authors to harassment, and Szelényi decided to leave the country, while Konrád choose internal emigration. Until 1988, when a second edition of The Case Worker was issued, only two works by Konrád were allowed to appear in Hungary: a censored version of his novel A városalapító (Magvető, 1977; in English: The City Builder by HBJ in 1977) and an essay in the journal Valóság in 1982 (Mondatok egy képzelt regényről, or ‘Sentences on an Imaginary Novel’).
During these years Konrád emerged as a leading voice of the democratic opposition. His works were published in samizdat, and Radio Free Europe gave him the chance to reach a wider audience. Konrád also became the most renowned Hungarian writer in the West. His books appeared in translations, and their publication and sale were major sources of income for him, as he could not get a legal job in Hungary. He also spent a considerable amount of time abroad. In 1977 and 1978, he spent time in West Berlin, the United States, and Paris, and in 1982/83 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He then spent a year at the New York Institute for the Humanities before returning to Hungary in 1984. In 1987/88, he taught world literature at Colorado College in the United States.
His mot significant work from this period, Antipolitika, or Antipolitics, quickly acquired world-fame. As the author of the biography on Konrád’s official homepage, Helga Balikó summarized the work: “portrayed the Yalta Agreement, foundation of the European bloc system, as the potential cause of a possible Third World War. The book’s subtitle was Central-European Meditations, and it was to become one of the voices demanding that region’s secession from the Soviet bloc as a requisite for peace in Europe.” In the mid-1980s, Konrád became part of a massive network of dissident intellectuals, East and West, and he played a major role in the debates and human rights movements in the period leading to the collapse of Communism.-
Location:
- Budapest, Hungary