Authors

Discussion

The paper constructs a collective biography of a state-socialist scholarly writer on the example of Czech social sciences and humanities between 1968–89. It centres on the relationship between author, text and the defining “loyalty” of an intellectual, the pursuit of knowledge. Legislation that subjected academic research to censorship in Czechoslovakia was removed in June 1968 and never reinstituted. Nevertheless, because the Communist Party defined scholarly disciplines a priority area in terms of their ideological importance, they were subjected to numerous restrictive measures, whose aim was a complete control over academic life. Despite these efforts, interviews with the then academics suggest that at the individual and practical levels of everyday life in academic institutions, alternative spaces and strategies of resistance developed that enabled scholars a moderate amount of autonomy. The paper explores one area of practice, in which both these efforts met: the journey of an academic writer toward the publication of their own research. The paper will address the levels of approval involved in getting a scholarly manuscript published, alliance building, compromise, agency, and the concept of authorship. The research draws on state-socialist policy documents and propaganda, and on interviews with academic writers from humanities and social sciences who were active within official publishing structures in 1969-89 in Cz.