"This Prague [surrealist] platform conceived the idea of publishing the surrealist review Analogon and indeed the first issue was published in 1969. That first issue was called The Crisis of Consciousness, and there is a kind of philosophical editorial that emphasizes that the reason to engage in surrealist activity is precisely the crisis of consciousness, the crisis of understanding the world and what is happening, the incompatibility of particular interpretations, which simultaneously generates geysers of black humour, but at the same time makes it clear that what we interpret about the world, its perspectives and our own role is far from capturing the nature of being and, on the contrary, creates an open space for necessary philosophical reflection. That first issue was very successful, carried in those articles by such a hard surrealist diction that does not hesitate to use hard invectives. So it was a kind of hard surrealism. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, the next issue never came out. The action core of young surrealists in their prime at that time - Petr Král, Stanislav Dvorský, Prokop Voskovec - emigrated to France, which outraged Effenberger very much, because they didn't tell him anything. He considered it such a betrayal and cowardice. He thought that the task of the surrealist was to map what was happening through the eyes of a person equipped with the perfect apparatus for surrealist relating, to document what was actually happening and how everything was changing. So instead of taking on that task, they betrayed it and so on. So of course there were these contradictions, and then it slipped into the general atmosphere of the seventies, which was really very sad, sour."
"Czech surrealism or the surrealist movement is one of those specifics that should be protected by the monuments authority. The surrealist activity is actually a kind of continuous institution that has been continuously practiced and cultivated since the 1930s, when it was created in the wake of the founding activity of André Breton and the Parisian surrealist group - Dalí, Aragon, Péret - in the Teigeov-Nezvalovsky circle. And this, thanks mainly to the integrative personality of Karel Teige, continued continuously during the war and the post-war period. The pre-war generation, like Styrian, Toyen, moved more to France. But various activities continued to be organized, clearly identifying themselves with surrealist activity and that Breton exchange that surrealism is not art but a way of searching for an answer to what the world is. Since the fifties, the leading figure has been Vratislav Effenberger, who had his centenary this year (2023) and on that occasion a two-day conference was held. There were a lot of theoretical, theatrical and philosophical outputs. The conference was quite stimulating and interesting in its own way. And in any case, a generation of young, surrealist-oriented, very intensive contributors gathered around Effenberger: Petr Král, Roman Erben, Prokop Voskovec, the phenomenal artist Mikuláš Medek. This generation was continuously active until the sixties, and the activities of the sixties were very intense."
"Back then, at that high school, the turmoil around '68, '70, that was worth seeing too! That was a great school, too. First there were all kinds of revolutionaries and then they started 'we have to keep order', and there were these hatchet men among the teachers who were making it hard for the others. There was a bulletin board that was occasionally made, which was on both sides, but of course it was clear that they were all fed up and didn't want any trouble. It's just disgusting. And we went past one of these boards once and wrote on it, 'Fuck this shit, fuck you!' and then we moved on. The next day we came to school and now - cancellation of classes and that we have to go to the principal's office. We were expelled from all secondary schools in Austria-Hungary, we got an F in behaviour and we were not allowed to come to school anymore. That was so stupid. We were quite puzzled about that." - "And you were in the graduating class?" - "That was senior year. That was all sorts of things after that. And my father was an old Bolshevik, a Communist. He came to the headmaster: 'Well, you know what, we're packing it up, comrades, we're going to the district committee for a consultation.' The headmaster said: 'Well, we'll take him back...' So I stayed, and this Jirka Koubek, my father got him into a grammar school in Říčany, where he had a friend. So he graduated in Říčany. We got a D in behaviour and a suspended sentence. And it was kind of nice that the vast majority of teachers, when I had a grade between a B and a C, gave me the worse. Only there was this one gym teacher, a tough guy. He could beat me really well, because as kids we often went to the Jauris' pub instead of gym class. When gym class was over, I'd pick myself up and go to the pub. He could have had me fired easily. But he did the opposite. I got a C in PE all through high school, but I got an A in the end. That was nice, positive. But it wasn't fun with that D in behaviour."
"I really remember what it was like. I remember that when we were in Liberec in 1957, everybody - parents, neighbours - sat by the radio and listened to 'pi pi pi' with their eyes wide open. That was Sputnik. And they said: 'How is this possible? Now there's really nothing standing in the way if you can do something like that. It's unbelievable!' Nobody would believe it today. But basically, until 1962, 1963, according to Karel Havlicek Borovsky, 'who doesn't have his musicians, whistles his mouth off'. Either you had to go to a concert or you had those heavy shellac records at home. My father was also a musician, we had those operas at home. And each opera weighed ten to twenty kilos. And now, in the sixties, suddenly there was a vinyl record! Then there was the tape recorder, the transistor radio. There was nothing like it before. And the typewriter! There was no denying that something was happening in that world. And everybody said, "This is really a prophecy of a better life. And we're all moving towards that, we're all better off, and maybe there really will be communism. We're going to put a human face on it and so on.' That's what people really thought, believed, it wasn't some platitudes. Anyone who hadn't experienced it couldn't imagine it, the hope that went with it. And then this hit a wall. And it hit everywhere. May 1968 in Paris. There was that Woodstock thing in America. And these really vibrant protests that showed that this new world had potential. But by the seventies, 1971, it was gone. And all those protagonists, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix... it all fell away. And it was a time of this sort of sour... that I don't think it's gonna be like that. That with all this progress, there's nothing to stand on. And it was intertwined with science. In the sixties, everybody believed that scientists were the ones doing good. And that evaporated from the popular opinion in the seventies. This has really changed."
"At that time you didn't go anywhere, in the sixties, seventies. When someone went to Slovakia, it was really a journey beyond the everyday. And somewhere to nowhere, to the Balkans... Even in my group of teachers, they did go, but in the sixties. And in the seventies, how it was all preserved... In fact, nothing could be done. Nobody preferred not to go anywhere much, in case - when they came back - they were already fired. And so you didn't really go anywhere. And if one went, one had to go to State Security to write a report. Everybody gave up on that. You didn't go anywhere, and that included people at the faculty. You really didn't go anywhere."
Ivan Horáček, professor of zoology and doctor of natural sciences, was born on 10 April 1952 in Havlíčkův Brod. His father worked as an engineer of Military Constructions. Because of his profession, the family moved several times. In 1961-1964 they lived in Pardubice, where Ivan’s interest in nature began to develop in the ornithological club. In 1964 they moved to Prague, where he continued his first researches in the Station of Young Naturalists. He was also interested in speleology. After finishing primary school, he entered the Ohradní Grammar School. In the second half of the 1960s, he attended lectures on surrealism and psychoanalysis at the Municipal Library, which led to his lifelong interest in these movements. He is still a member of the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists and the editorial board of the surrealist review Analogon. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops, he was on the strike committee of the gymnasium. In his final year he was suspended from school when he and a friend wrote several vulgar words on an ideological bulletin board. After graduating in 1970, he first entered the College of Agriculture, and after a year he was admitted to the Faculty of Science at Charles University. He specialized in the study of bats. Since 1973 he went with colleagues to study bats in Bulgarian caves. Since graduation in 1976 he worked at the Geological Institute of the Academy of Sciences. In 1990 he returned to the Faculty of Science, where he defended his professorship. He has published more than 210 scientific works and is the President of the Czech Society for the Conservation of Bats. In his spare time he enjoys music and fine arts.
