COURAGE

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In 1980 Mirota photographed the strike in Gdansk Shipyard. His pictures show protesting Shipyard workers, local habitants who gave their support to the protesters, numerous signs painted on the walls, but also the everyday life in the context of the strike (like the famous photo of a woman pushing the stroller along the Shipyard wall, from which she is watched by the workers).

Tanasije Mladenović was a Serbian poet and essayist. He was born in 1913 in Smederevo, Serbia, and in 1937 graduated from the Law Faculty in Belgrade. During the Second World War, he fought on the side of the partisans and held various military and political positions. He was a member of the editorial staff of  ‘Književne novine’ from its foundation and headed the journal as chief editor from 1954 to 1968 when he was ousted from the editorial board after several months of pressure by the party for having published nationalist texts. He spoke out as a critic of ‘detrimental aspects’ of socialist society: ‘I believe (…) that different opinions about certain things should exist on the platform of socialist democracy. Otherwise, we will go to hell as a society, as the League of Communists’ (R. Vučetić, 2016, p. 169).

In 1977, he was accused in the media of nationalism for his poem, ‘Triptych’, published in the April 1 issue of ‘Književne novine’. In this poem, he expressed fear that Serbia might cease to exist (Književne novine, 1 April, 1977, nr. 6). In a semi-allegorical play on landslides in the south of Serbia, he posed the question of whether Serbia would:

‘Vanish among mountains and nations, and, in the last storm,

Blown to pieces by an apocalyptic force, sink into itself, to the bottom?’

He called for radical changes, and for Serbia to recall, ‘the cry of ancient times and to vigorously resist the spectres’. ‘Arise! On the crust of every step imprint your name; that oblivion and calamity do not overwhelm you. Remember the deaths of many, but let life triumph!’ In the press, the poem was portrayed as a nationalistic pamphlet.

Mladenović published 14 anthologies of poetry. He was elected as a delegate to the Federal Assembly of the SFRY and to the Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Serbia several times. He was the recipient of numerous literary awards.

Tanasije Mladenović died on 12 January 2003 in Belgrade.

Jan Viktor Mládek was born in Galicia, studied law in Brno and national economics in Prague. In the second half of the 1930s he left for Paris (where he studied at the Sorbonne) and then for England (Cambridge), where he participated in the work of the exiled Czechoslovak Ministry of Economy. Beginning in 1947, he represented Czechoslovakia at the UN. After the events of 1948, he applied for asylum in France and became an important employee of the International Monetary Fund. After 1948, he supported Czechoslovak authors in exile, he was a Maecenas, and he collected art.

Meda Mládková (Sokolová) studied economics and political science in Geneva, where she moved right after the Second World War. In Switzerland she worked for a journal called Skutečnost. Later on she moved to Paris, where she studied art history and met her future husband Jan Viktor Mládek (employee of IMF). Thanks to him, she was introduced to František Kupka, whose work became the core of the Jan and Meda Mládek colection. In the 1960s Mládková visited Czechoslovakia and saw the studios of the artists that she collected. Beginning in 1984, she was not allowed to visit Czechoslovakia, but she was able to return to her homeland for good in 1989. She founded the Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation and Museum Kampa.

Bálint Modor, Ádám Modor’s son, was born on 2 July 1988 in Budapest. He completed secondary school in the Budapest University Catholic Grammar School in 2007, then graduated at the Hungarian and Aesthetics Departments of Péter Pázmány Catholic University (in 2013 and 2017 respectively). He has been publishing since 2010, mostly fiction and he has also been active as an editor and an artist.