Samizdat and Underground Literature in the V4 Countries

What exactly was samizdat? A weapon against censorship? An alternative form of communication? A collection of uncensored texts? A form of resistance? A network of creative social and cultural practices? A hard-to-find cultural commodity? How was samizdat perceived by those who were personally involved in its production and circulation? What materials can be categorised as samizdat in the first place? What were the most important samizdat initiatives in Hungary? How were they connected with the Polish and Czechoslovak underground? All these questions will be touched on in a lecture and debate linked to Gabor Danyi’s book The Typewriter and the Travelling Bag: Samizdat Literature in the Kádár Era, 1956–1986.