Exilová nakladatelství mezi spoluprací a konkurencí
Czechoslovak Publishing Houses in Exile between Cooperation and Competition

Summary/Abstract: In his book entitled "V různosti je síla: Exilová nakladatelství Sixty-Eight Publishers a Index nejen ve vzájemné korespondenci" [Strength in Diversity: The Exile Publishing Houses “Sixty-Eight Publishers” and “Index” in Mutual Correspondence and Beyond], the Czech literary historian Michal Přibáň focuses on the two most important Czechoslovak publishing houses in exile during the Cold War. Both were founded in the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the new wave of refugees arriving in the West. Sixty-Eight Publishers was founded in Toronto in 1971 and was run by writer Josef Škvorecký (1924–2012) and his wife, writer Zdena Salivarová (born 1933). In the same year, Index publishing house was founded in Cologne by political scientist Adolf Müller (1929–2002) and journalist Bedřich Utitz (1920–2017). All were post-1968 exiles, while Müller and Utitz were reform communists. The reviewer appreciates the fact that Přibáň has set his topic in the overall context of the history of publishing efforts in the Czechoslovak exile sphere and has based his interpretation on rich source material. His ambition was not to cover the history of the two enterprises in detail; he tells the story of their birth and, above all, their complicated relationship. Because of the overlapping concepts and similar authorial backgrounds, competitive tensions between the two publishing houses sometimes escalated into rather sharp confrontations. Přibáň deals in great detail with the individual cases and, by uncovering their causes and roots, offers a more fluid and truthful picture of the exile literary life.

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