Ludvík Vaculík
Ludvík Vaculík
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.
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
