2008
Poetic Dissidents is a testimonial as to what dissidence was in Czechoslovakia under the Communist regime, through accounts and writings of two friends, poets and dissidents, who lived the Resistance from within the closed circle of revolutionaries and who, as victims of incessant harassment, had to seek exile in France.
Prokop Voskovec still lives in Paris, whereas Jan Vladislav returned to Prague in 2003. Both men undertook the task of writing their “memoirs”. Through their writings, they revisit what used to be their lives. They see each other regularly in Prague.
Their words, memories and impressions sometimes blend into each other and sometimes complete one another. Their subjective and uncommon vision of the dissidence and of clandestine pamphlet and magazine editing plunges us into a reality, which is both terrible and absurd, but which was the reality of the daily lives of people in a totalitarian regime. We see this world, first from the inside and then from outside.
