SOURCE: Vladislav, Jan. “Poets and Power: Jaroslav Seifert.” Index on Censorship 14, no 2 (April 1985): 8-12.

This historically-grounded article describes the Communist regimes attempts to suppress the writing of Jaroslav Seifert, the samizdat or émigré publishing houses used to disseminate censored literature, and Seifert's importance as a literary and historical figure.

Following his 1984 Nobel Prize, the communist authorities in Prague now claim poet Jaroslav Seifert as one of their own; only a year earlier, possession of his books was deemed a crime. ‘Force does not tolerate another force,’ wrote Gustave Flaubert in connection with the planned but then hushed-up trial of his young friend, Maupassant, thinking when he wrote those words of one of the two chief enemies of every good author. The first enemy are his readers, because a good book ‘forces them to think, to work’. More dangerous, however, is the second enemy Flaubert had in mind—those...