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.
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
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
