Czech & Slovak

The collection includes approximately 150,000 articles on some 100,000 individuals who lived and worked within the borders of the region known today as the Czech Republic and Slovakia. These individuals influenced the development of politics, economics, religion, art and culture in the regions of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slovakia from the 8th century through all periods of Middle European history up to the present.

Catalog to the Slavonic Library of the National Library of the Czech Republic.

Paul Wilson has translated the works of several Czech others, including Josef Škvorecký, Vaclav Havel and Ivan Klíma.  This collection consists of manuscripts and proofs of Wilson’s translations Škvorecký, Havel, Klíma and other Czech authors. They include drafts with notes by Wilson and others, including notes from Škvorecký on Wilson’s translation of The Engineer of Human Souls.

Holograph letters or notes (written under pseudonym Frida, Emil Bohuslav Frida) (1853-1912). In Czech. Photocopy of excerpt from book

[manuscript]

Josef Škvorecký was born in Czechoslovakia in 1924 and immigrated to Canada in 1969. He has continued to write while living in Canada and also taught English and Film at the University of Toronto’s Erindale College. This collection contains books, manuscripts and typescript drafts of novels, as well as travelogues, literary essays, film scripts and personal correspondence.  The collection is acquired from the author on a continuous basis since 1973.

The Reeves Papers contains papers as well as audio and video recordings of interviews with Czech and Slovak leaders.  Topics discussed include the Prague Spring, Christianity in Eastern Europe, Czechoslovak political affairs and life in Czechoslovakia before 1968.  Also included are reminiscences of pre-1948 Czechoslovakia used in CBC’s “The Human Face.”

 “Petlice” is a collection of privately-issued typewritten samizdat works in Czech and Slovak.  It contains journals, books, and pamphlets by authors not permitted to publish officially in Czechoslovakia before 1989.  The subjects cover belles-lettres, philosophy, religion, economics, politics and history.

 This is an extensive collection of the Jazz Section of the Czechoslovak Union of Musicians, consisting of publications dealing with art, music, poetry, photography, and culture in general.  The Section was officially dissolved by the government in 1984, but continued to function underground.  The Jazz Section’s original purpose was the promotion of jazz and rock music and was the main defender of ‘alternative’ music in Czechoslovakia.

Manuscript collection: This is a collection consisting of news clippings, typescripts, Radio Free Europe reports and analyses, special issues of newspapers printed during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and various ephemera, all of which were used by Professor H. Gordon Skilling as source material for his book Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1976).