Real socialism in schizophrenic disproportion, absurdity and banality: the old world lives on somewhere on the periphery but careerists seize their opportunity, history is mendaciously distorted and the Red Star and hammer and sickle hang above the town square.

The author and Miroslav Hanuš will read, Petr Adámek will speak and Michal Hrubý will play the bassoon.

Meeting with Václav Vacek, the parish priest in Letohrad.

Milada Blekastad left behind thousands of pages of correspondence with close friends and eminent names in Czech and Norwegian science and culture. Her letters and responses are a record not only of professional and personal relations but also of the age in which they were written.

The Václav Havel Library is holding this debate on the significance of correspondence in the period of Communist dictatorship in cooperation with the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Elg association. Speakers: Věra Schifferová (Czech Academy of Sciences), Vladimír Urbánek (Czech Academy of Sciences) and Jan and Ondřej Vaculík.

The evening will also see the launch of the travelling exhibition Invisible Bridge: Milada Blekastad 1917–2003.

In his most extensive and hitherto unpublished in book form piece of prose writing, Josef K. Šlejhar, best known as the author of the novella Kuře melancholic (Chicken Melancholic), comes to terms with his marriage as well as with the world as such. Over more than 700 pages his unusually evocative and sensuous language he piles up images of days together, commonplace deliberations, memories and sensations. With an almost stenographic precision, he records the sequence of events that preceded the collapse of his life. With anger and humility, lover’s fulminations and patriarchal pride, harshness and tenderness, he repeatedly endures evidence against his own fate. It lays accusations against him and holds him to account. With stubbornness he prepares a closing speech before a grand jury that has never sat and never will. Which changes nothing about the fact that the book is an exceptional, gripping read.

Evening hosted by Pavel Hájek and Jaromír Typlt, a connoisseur of Šlejhar’s work.

The actor Lukáš Jůza will read from the novel.

Vinoř reads Havel, with the Divadlo Prima den theatre having prepared a staged reading of these entertaining “trifles”. The members of the theatre have invited friends from their part of Prague, giving rise to an enjoyable and essentially neighbourly event. Havel can also be read like this – at home in the kitchen or in the neighbours’ garden.

Readers and actors: David Smoljak, Robert Rytina, Markéta Kilingerová, Barbora Marysková

Also featuring: Václava Zahradníčková, Jana Bačová-Kroftová

Evening moderated by the translator Lenka Kuhar Daňhelová.

“There have been thousands of dispatches, reports, exhibitions, books, albums and documentary and feature films about the war in Bosnia. But as soon as the war ended reporters packed up their cameras and immediately set off for other conflicts,” writes Wojciech Tochman in the book Jako bys jedla kámen (As If You’d Eaten a Stone). Tochman returned repeatedly to Bosnia and spoke mainly to women, whose stories tell us more about the nature of the war than statistics or political analyses. The seasoned reporter is the author of numerous books of reporting from Poland, but also from impoverished areas in the Philippines and the Rwandan genocide. In 2015 he received an Amnesty International award for his work promoting and defending human rights. Tochman’s book from 2002 was published in Czech in 2017 on the Absynt imprint in a translation by Lenka Kuhar Daňhelová.

The journalist, dissident and Charter 77 signatory Jan Urban was a war correspondent in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to where he also helped deliver humanitarian aid. Urban’s book Všem sráčům navzdory: válka, o které nechcete nic vědět) (Despite all the Bastards: The War You Don’t Want to Know Anything About) was first released in 1997 by the publishing house G plus G before being reissued in 2017 by Absynt.

“Sarajevo is for me the centre of the world. Its conscience and future,” Urban says in the book.

The book will be presented by the author of its foreword Tomáš Kubíček, a professor of Czech literature and the director of Brno’s Moravian Provincial Library.

Followed by a discussion with the writer moderated by Radim Kopáč. The author will read selected excerpts.

The first of a series of three evenings will be dedicated to why and how a group of young neuroscientists, psychologists and psychiatric patients are tackling the problem of insufficient awareness, stigmatisation and neglected prevention in the field of mental health and illness in the Czech Republic. The discussion will touch on the Nevypusť duši (Don’t Let the Spirit Go) project, as well as inspirational campaigns in other states. On why it is necessary to focus on the language and vocabulary that we employ when we speak about psychiatric health and illness and how the use of personal stories can best spread facts and bust myths about mental health and illness.

There will be room for questions and a debate, while attendees will be able to draw on seven tenets of mental hygiene as well as a Manual for Loved Ones, which provides advice on what to do if somebody close to you has mental problems.

A series created by the non-profit Nevypusť duši (Don’t Let the Spirit Go), which is run by a team of young psychologists, neuroscientists and students of those disciplines. It also comprises psychiatric patients and people with experience of psychiatric illness at a young age. Nevypusť duši circulates information, busts myths and informs the Czech Republic about mental health.

Interwar Czechoslovakia was an important centre for the Russian émigré community, whose number included important scholars, literati and intellectuals. While Czechs celebrated the arrival of the Red Army in May 1945, for Russian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) exiles, who had in many cases become Czechoslovak citizens, the end of WWII spelled disaster: death, imprisonment, the Gulag. The situation was all the more painful given that speaking about their fates was barred because recalling the non-Communist “Russia outside Russia” had no place in the Soviet-Russian imperial narrative. Who were these Russians? How was Czech-Russian coexistence at that time? How does today’s Russia view its past? And what kind of Russians (East Europeans) live in Prague and the Czech Republic today? Are they enriching to us? Or are they a challenge or threat?

The spark for the debate is the new book Rusové v Praze. Ruští intelektuálové v meziválečném Československu (Russians in Prague: Russian Intellectuals in Interwar Czechoslovakia), which was published in 2017 by Vydavatelství FF UK. Taking part in the discussion of the transformations in the Russian presence in Prague and the Czech Republic will be Alexej Kelin, a member of the Czech government’s Council for National Minorities, journalist Ondřej Soukup and Slavic Studies specialist Mychajlo Fesenko.

Historian and philosopher Petr Hlaváček will moderate the debate.

He was responsible for official and unofficial contact with musicians. He organised a musical evening with Bill Clinton at Reduta jazz club (1994), was co-organiser of the first ever mega-concert in this country, an appearance by the Rolling Stones at Strahov stadium (1990), and helped set up and took part in Havel’s personal meetings with the Velvet Underground, Mstislav Rostropovich, Bob Dylan, Dizzy Gillespie, Tina Turner, Pink Floyd, Sinéad O’Connor, Sting, Lou Reed and many, many more.

Vladimír Hanzel will discuss those subjects and more and play examples of the music concerned.