1901–1986
○ Natural causes
A poet who confronted censorship and power at each moment of reform
In September 1968, condemning the invasion, he contrasted the first tank to enter Prague with the last one to leave.
Jaroslav Seifert was a Czechoslovak poet and journalist who linked Prague’s working-class culture with the avant-garde. He left the Communist Party in 1929 in protest against its bureaucratic and Stalinist turn, while retaining a left-wing social outlook. After 1948 he led a committee examining the persecution of writers, and in 1968 he helped make the Writers’ Union a platform for abolishing censorship and widening cultural freedom, later condemning the invasion. He received the 1984 Nobel Prize in Literature, even as normalization restricted his publications and public voice.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1921Published his first poetry collection, City in Tears, and joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
- 1922–1929Helped found Devětsil and edited Communist newspapers and avant-garde journals
- 1929Expelled from the Communist Party after signing the Manifesto of the Seven
- 1930–1948Worked as a journalist and cultural editor in the social-democratic and trade-union press
- 1949–1956Left journalism to write full-time and faced restrictions on publication
- 1956Criticized cultural policy toward disfavored writers at the Writers’ Congress
- 1968–1970Chaired the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union and then the Czech Writers’ Union
- 1984Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
Related historical events
Normalization and Charter 77
When the normalization regime took shape in the 1970s, Seifert belonged to the writers who fell out of favor with the new leadership because of his civic stands and public authority, and he was forced into retreat. Only isolated reprints of his work could appear, and his new writing was published only with reservations from the late 1970s, when the regime, given his popularity, was looking for ways to deal with a beloved poet. Seifert repeatedly broke agreements to refrain from public statements and petition-signing in exchange for publishing his books: in December 1976 he became one of the first signatories of Charter 77.
His work circulated regularly in samizdat during this period. Collections such as Býti básníkem (To Be a Poet), Morový sloup (The Plague Column) and Všecky krásy světa (All the Beauties of the World) appeared in samizdat, and people copied and passed them on. Distributing samizdat was punishable by the authorities. Jiří Gruntorád was sentenced to four years for subversion for circulating musical recordings and literary texts, among them collections by Seifert and Bohuslav Reynek, and after his release he lived another three years under so-called protective supervision, which barred him from leaving Prague 2 at night. Seifert himself was not imprisoned; the case is a separate documented instance in which his banned writing led to criminal punishment of a third party.
Despite the pressure of normalization, Seifert received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1984. Because of poor health he did not attend the ceremony and his daughter accepted the prize in his name, while media controlled by the regime reduced this major event to a dry mention. Jiřina Šiklová, who sent abroad the materials for the Nobel deliberations and the manuscript of his memoir Všecky krásy světa, was even prosecuted for it. The regime could not deny the most prestigious literary award, and instead of silencing him it later tried to appropriate the poet for its own propaganda. The Charter 77 signature of 1976, the samizdat circulation and the Nobel award together show both how the Czechoslovak authorities tried to control literature and where that control ultimately failed to hold.