The Czech writer who declared 'not one human question has been solved in twenty years' and authored the 'Two Thousand Words' manifesto
When Vaculík declared at the 1967 Writers' Congress that 'not one human question has been solved in the last twenty years,' the party delegation walked out and the audience erupted in long applause.
A Czech writer and Communist Party member who was expelled after his speech at the 1967 Fourth Congress of Czechoslovak Writers openly indicted the Novotný regime, declaring that 'not one human question has been solved in the last twenty years.' In June 1968 his manifesto 'Two Thousand Words' called on citizens to press for deeper reform through their own initiative, becoming a defining text of the Prague Spring and a pretext for Soviet intervention. Banned from publishing after the invasion, he founded the samizdat series Edice Petlice (Padlock Editions), which circulated works by banned writers including Václav Havel and Ivan Klíma for seventeen years. A Charter 77 signatory, he continued his criticism of the regime and, after 1989, wrote a weekly column for Lidové noviny until his death in 2015.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1945–1967Member, Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
- 1959–1965Editor, youth programming, Czechoslovak Radio
- 1965–1969Editor, Literární noviny (later Literární listy)
- 1967Expelled from the KSČ after his speech at the Fourth Congress of Czechoslovak Writers
- 1968Authored and published the 'Two Thousand Words' manifesto
- 1969–1989Banned from official publication; underground samizdat activity
- 1973–1990Founder and operator of Edice Petlice (Padlock Editions) samizdat press
- 1977Signatory, Charter 77
Related historical events
Samizdat publishing and criticism of Charter 77
After Gustáv Husák came to power in 1969 and censorship tightened, Vaculík, no longer a party member, worked among dissident writers. In 1973 he began the samizdat series Edice Petlice (Padlock Editions), which he ran through 1979. The Prague Writers’ Festival states that he ran it from 1973 to 1989 and that it printed and distributed more than 400 banned titles. The figures indicate the scale of a publishing effort sustained over years. Vaculík attended a planning meeting for Charter 77 in December 1976. On 6 January 1977, he, Václav Havel, and actor Pavel Landovský tried to mail a copy of the charter to the government; secret police stopped their car and took all three in for interrogation.
In late 1978, Vaculík published “Remarks on Courage,” criticizing the risk of Charter 77 becoming isolated. He warned that most original signatories came from the intelligentsia in Prague and Brno, potentially making the charter difficult for ordinary citizens to relate to. His intervention helped sustain discussion of Charter 77’s position and role and registered disagreement within the dissident milieu, rather than presenting it as a unified, uncontested group.