COURAGE

povezovanje zbirk

Jonas Lankutis, a researcher of Lithuanian literature and critic, graduated from Vilnius University in 1953, and in 1956 he started to work at the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature. In 1984, Lankutis was appointed director of the institute. (He was director until 1992.) He is the author of a book about the work of Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas. (First published in 1961, the third edition came out in 1986.) During the writing process, he often communicated with Mykolaitis-Putinas. In 1979, Lankutis presented his correspondence with Mykolaitis-Putinas to the Manuscript Section of the library of the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature.

Leonhard Lapin is an Estonian architect, artist and poet. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts as an architect in 1971. He was active in the avant-garde from the 1960s. Since the avant-garde was prohibited during the Soviet period, he could not find work as an architect, nor exhibit his artwork officially. He and like-minded artists organised semi-legal or illegal exhibitions. He was also active in the 1970s, editing manuscript magazines and creating texts and illustrations. Some of his work was shown outside the Soviet Union in Western countries in the 1970s, and it was highly praised. Since 1990, he has been a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts, and since 1995 he has been a professor.

Emese Kinga Latkóczy-Osváths’ grandparents were displaced members of a family belonging to the nobility originating from Slovakia and having several ties to the Smallholders Party. The other branch of the family participated in the 1956 revolution and suffered persecution afterward. Emese Latkóczy was born in Toronto in 1961. Like other members of the CHRR, she grew up within the large and lively Hungarian community, whose popular activities at the time included the Hungarian weekend school and Hungarian scouting groups. The family moved to New York in 1973, where her parents acquired a travel agency. She met László Hámos, one of the founders of CHRR, in the framework of the Hungarian scouting organization. She became a professional actress very early and was admitted to New York Film Academy at the faculty of acting. She graduated as a film director. She spent her compulsory high school volunteer period in 1977 –1978 at CHRR, thus supporting the organization from a very early period. She worked in the film industry, with which she became disillusioned at an early stage, while at the same time growing increasingly committed to working for the human rights of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe. Later, she became chief executive of the HHRF and then head of the Budapest office. She is currently director of the HHRF.

Gheorghe Leahu was born on 10 May 1932 in Chişinău (also known as Kishinev, today in the Republic of Moldova) into a family belonging to the economic and political elite of Bessarabia, then part of the Kingdom of Romania. As a result of the Soviet ultimatum sent to the Romanian government on 26 June 1940, which called for the surrender of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina under the threat of Soviet military invasion, the Romanian army and administration left the province. Before the Soviet troops entered Chişinău at the end of June 1940, Gheorghe Leahu and his parents moved to Bucharest. According to Leahu’s account, his grandparents, who remained in Chişinău, were arrested and executed by the Soviet troops as part of extensive repressive measures which targeted the elite of the province. In 1944, his father was wounded on the battlefield and transported to a hospital in Făgăraş, a small city in the south of Transylvania, near the mountains of the same name. Gheorghe Leahu, along with his mother and sister, moved from Bucharest to Făgăraş to take care of his wounded father. Subsequently, the Leahu family lived for several years in Făgăraş. After he graduated from high school in Făgăraş, Leahu attended the architecture courses of the Ion Mincu Architecture Institute in Bucharest between 1951 and 1957. There he had the opportunity to study under teachers who had had a Western education, and had been architects in interwar Romania, such as Duiliu Marcu, Octav Doicescu, and George Simotta. They instilled in him a respect for architectural heritage which would mark his entire activity.
After finishing his studies, he worked in the period from 1957 to 1991 as architect at the Bucharest Project Institute (Institutul Proiect Bucureşti), which was responsible for carrying out urban planning and architectural projects in the Romanian capital, and was in charge of designing the contemporary emblematic buildings of Bucharest in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Unirea department store. In 1984, as an employee of the Bucharest Project Institute, he was charged with coordinating the architectural planning for the new building of the Bucharest Court of Law, which was to be situated, according to Ceauşescu’s instructions, on the site of the Văcăreşti Monastery, an important historic monument dating from the eighteenth century. Leahu and the team of architects he coordinated came up with twelve different architectural solutions which would have allowed the court of law to be built while at the same time preserving most of the site of the Văcăreşti Monastery. After two years of protracted debates, the authorities decided in 1986 to completely destroy the monument in order to make room for the new construction, rejecting all of the alternative proposals offered by Leahu’s team to save the monument. The very fact that Leahu received the task of coordinating the design of the new court of law in the Romanian capital suggests that he was accepted as a competent professional by the communist authorities, and that his initiatives to promote architectural heritage were tolerated, although not approved of.
In the context of the limitations and stress of the professional environment, caused by the interference of those in political power, one of Leahu’s means of escape was to paint watercolours. He started painting watercolours when he was in high school. In the 1980s, given the frustration caused by the degradation of working conditions for architects, who turned themselves into mere witnesses to the demolition of numerous historical monuments without attempting to protest, Leahu started his own silent act of cultural opposition by painting watercolours as a way of escaping the gloomy atmosphere of everyday life. He painted mostly old streets and buildings in Bucharest and other Romanian cities. His watercolours represent a source of information for large areas of the Romanian capital, which were destroyed in the 1980s in the restructuring of Bucharest, a process legitimised by the official discourse concerning the “urban systematisation” of the capital, which presented the demolitions as a necessary step in modernising the city. The watercolours represent an alternative memory to the official discourse of the time, which attempted to limit the protection and promotion of the city’s architectural heritage, and especially of the city’s old churches. A series of watercolours representing urban landscapes in the old centre of Bucharest were gathered by Leahu in an album entitled Bucureşti – arhitectură şi culoare (Bucharest – architecture and colour) and sent for publication in 1986 to the Sport Turism Publishing House. Initially, the album was approved by the censors and was published in 1988, probably due to a lapse of censorship activity, but, because it contained reproductions of watercolours representing old churches, it was withdrawn from sale and all but a few copies were destroyed.
Leahu kept a secret diary between 1985 and 1989, which he hid in his garage. The years discussed in the diary were characterised by a drastic rationing of basic products, as well as by a more repressive political regime, an intensification of censorship and propaganda, especially in the form of Ceauşescu’s personality cult. In his diary, Leahu harshly criticised Ceauşescu’s regime and its policies, which turned everyday life into a desperate struggle for food or other consumer goods, and professional activity into a long line of humiliations.
After 1989, Leahu exhibited his watercolours in Romania and abroad (New York – 1992, Vienna – 1994, Chicago – 1995, Paris – 2001, Venice – 2002). He also published a series of albums containing selections of reproductions of his watercolours, such as: Bucureştiul dispărut (Lost Bucharest, 1995), Distrugerea Mănăstirii Văcăreşti (The Destruction of the Văcăreşti Monastery, 1997), Bucureşti – portretul unui oraş (Bucharest – Portrait of a City, 1999). In 2005, he published his secret diary from the 1980s, under the title: Arhitect în „Epoca de Aur” (Architect in the “Golden Age”). The Romanian Post Office issued a series of stamps reproducing Leahu’s watercolours, which illustrates the manner in which his work marked the visual culture of post-communist Romania. As a sign of appreciation for his entire activity, Leahu was included in various professional organisations, such as the National Commission for Historic Monuments and the leading structures of the Union of Architects of Romania. In 2004, he was decorated by the President of Romania with the Order of Cultural Merit, rank of Commander, for his contribution to promoting Romanian culture.

Jiří Lederer was born on July 15, 1922 in Kvasiny near Rychnov nad Kněžnou. In Rychnov he later studied at grammar school. During the war, he was completely engaged to work in Wroclaw, to where he had fled and was hiding in his home region by the end of the war. After the war he studied philosophy and politics at the Political and Social College and at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague. From 1948 to 1949 he studied Polish Literature and Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

After the war he published in the Social Democratic Letters, was an activist in the radical left-wing of the socially democratic youth, and in 1948 participated in the merger of the CSSD (Czechoslovak Socialist Democratic Party) with the Communist Party, which he later left. In 1948 he became the editor of the World in Paintings. For his disagreement with the practice of the 1950s, expressed at the conference of the Czechoslovak Union of Journalists, he was expelled from the union and could not publish or perform any work on culture. From 1951 to1954 he had to work in Ostrava's mines of ČKD.

Later, he was given amnesty and became the editor of the World of Soviets, and in 1956, Evening Prague, from where he was fired in 1958 for a positive review of the “Coward's” novel of Josef Škvorecký, which caused a great disturbance at the time. For a year he was unemployed before he was taken to the Technical News as an editor in 1959. Between 1962 and 1967, he was head of the Research Department of the Czechoslovak Radio, then the editor of the Weekly Literary Sheets (or Sheets) and the Reporter. Lederer was one of the most prominent publicists of the Prague Spring of 1968. In the 1970s, Lederer was deeply involved with the Czechoslovak dissent and was one of the first signatories of Charter 77. During the “Normalization Period” he was imprisoned several times (1970, 1972-1973 and 1977-1980), the first time for writing as a pretext for his attitude about the events of 1968 in Poland, the second time for the publication of interviews in Reporter with the writers who were not allowed to publish and for sending their works abroad. In 1980, he emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany because of political pressure from the StB Asanace campaign. He continued his journalistic work in West Germany until he died at the age of 61 on 12 October 12 1983 in Birnbach, Bavaria.

He published several journalistic essays and books of essays (České Rozhovory, Cologne 1979; Když se řekne Voskovec – Když se řekne Werich, 1982, Mé Polsko, 1982) by samizdat and abroad while in exile; posthumously his book Jan Palach: A Report on the Life, Action and Death of the Czech Student (Prague 1990) was published.