in the dark

com Ivan Klíma e pouco mais.

novo para mim: Samizdat.

"Yes. How on earth did you keep writing? What made you write when you knew that as far as you knew you might never be published?

For me the writing was the most important, not the publishing. I was always surprised when I was published, and I was used even from the '60s that many books were refused because of the content and I was one of the people who really started the samizdat, so we very, very soon we, we started to public in this poor way, it means only on typewritten, on typewriter produce books but...

Fifteen copies I think on carbons wasn't it, fifteen pages?

Yes fifteen, fifteen it was the maximum and it was done three times, four times, maybe sometimes ten times, so it, it, it got about one hundred copies, but it had thousands of readers because it circulated and then it was sent outside and Skvorecky in '68 published and Tomsky in London they publish it in form the books and it was smuggled back to the country and it was again it circulated so we had maybe more readers in that time when we were entirely banned than we have today when we are entirely free, and our books appeared in the, my books still in about five thousand copies, which is above the norm, or normality. Anyway we have maybe five, six thousand, maybe ten thousands but in, in that time my books were broadcasted by BBC, the Czech broadcast by Radio Free Europe, the Dutch ........ nearly the whole year each."
(daqui)
Ivan Klima

"Samizdat was the illegal publication of magazines or books that were not sanctioned by the Communist government. My guess is that the meaning comes from the word sam (self) and dát (to give, make), so probably it literally means to produce or issue by oneself. Samizdat was the greatest tool of the Czech underground for freely expressing opinions back when freedom of the press did not exist. It was in samizdat publications that one could find out who in the underground had been arrested or imprisoned, what was really happening in the country, or you could get information about such things as the Chernobyl accident (which initially could not be found in any of the public newspapers since they were strictly controlled by the Communist government, and the Communist government had decided it would be best if Chernobyl did not happen). Also, all of the banned books of dissident writers could be obtained in samizdat form. Samizdat was a societal truth that opposed the lies that were called truth by the mainstream Communist media. These self publications were passed from one person to the next, so that one samizdat magazine or book might eventually be read by several hundred people." (daqui)