COURAGE

gyűjtemények hálózata

After secondary school, Sigitas Tamkevičius started studying at the Catholic seminary in 1955. In 1957-1960 he served in the Soviet army, and in 1960 he continued his studies at the seminary. In 1962, Tamkevičius was ordained a Catholic priest. In 1962-1975, he served as a parish priest in the Lithuanian countryside. He became a Jesuit in 1968. In 1969, the Soviet government forbade him to serve as a priest, and he was forced to work in a factory. In 1972-1983, he initiated and edited the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania. Tamkevičius established a committee for defending the rights of believers in 1978. In 1983 he was arrested and investigated by the KGB. In 1983-1988, he was imprisoned in a labour camp in Perm and Mordovia (Russia). During the national revival, Tamkevičius became head of the Catholic seminary, and in 1991 he was consecrated as a bishop by Pope John Paul II. In 1996 he became an archbishop, and in 2005-2014 he was chair of the Conference of Lithuanian Bishops. He served in this role until 2015.

Writer and journalist Dominik Tatarka belonged to the most important Slovak writers of the twentieth century. He studied at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague Slovak, Czech and French languages. He studied also at the Sorbonne University in Paris from 1938 to 1939. Then, he became a secondary school teacher. During the Second World War he entered the Czechoslovak Communist Party and he actively took part at the Slovak National Uprising in 1944. After the war, he worked as an editor and journalist in several Slovak newspapers and magazines. He was also a screenwriter of the Czechoslovak Film in Bratislava. From an enthusiastic communist, Tatarka gradually developed into an uncompromised critic of the system. His book “The Daemon of Consent” (1963) was a scorching criticism of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. He left the communist party in protest against the communist politics after August 1968. Subsequently, he was expelled from professional associations, forbidden to publish and his books were withdrawn from official distribution. Until 1989, Tatarka could work only as a labourer and his work could be only spread in samizdat, or in exile. At that time, he became one of the most important Slovak dissidents and one of a few Slovak signatories to Charter 77. In 1986, the Charter 77 Foundation in Stockholm awarded him the Jaroslav Seifert Prize for his trilogy “Písačky”. Tatarka died in May 1989, only a few months before the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and official rehabilitation of his work. In 1991, he was awarded in memoriam the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Eight years later, he got the National Prize of the Slovak Republic. Since 1994, the “Dominik Tatarka Prize”, an annually literary award, has been awarded in Slovakia by the Milan Rastislav Štefánik Conservative Institute in cooperation with the Dominik Tatarka Prize jury and the Milan Šimečka Foundation. Today, Dominik Tatarka is considered to be one of the most influential representatives of the Slovak culture of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the most prominent Slovak dissidents.

Karel Teige was a Czech aesthetician, theoretician, art critic, graphic designer and translator. He was one of the leading figures in the interwar avant-garde. He studied aesthetics and art history at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts in Prague from 1919 to 1923. In the 1920s and 1930s, he worked as an art coordinator and editor for numerous Czechoslovak journals and newspapers. His writing focused on art theory, architecture, photography, film and theatre. He formulated the principles of the avant-garde aesthetic. In 1920 he co-founded the Devětsil art association, he was a member of the Left Front (1929–1936) and the Prague Surrealist Group (1934–1938). From 1929 to 1930, he was a guest senior lecturer at Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. He was also involved in art –  for example, in the design of collages. At the end of the 1930s, he criticized the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. After 1948 he was persecuted and could not officially publish. He was involved in the publication of the surrealist samizdat volume “The Signs of the Zodiac” (1951).

Modris Tenisons is a Latvian and Lithuanian artist who established the USSR’s first mime troupe. He directed several professional mime theatre and radio productions, such as Ecce homo (1967), Dream Dreams (1968), Do Butterflies (1969), 20th-Century Capriccio (1970), and Collage (1971).

After graduating from the School of Applied Arts in Riga (Latvia), Modris Tenisons studied and performed mime. In 1967, he moved to Soviet Lithuania. At first, he worked in Vilnius, and later in 1968 he moved to the Kaunas National Drama Theatre. Ecce Homo was the first performance he devised and showed in Kaunas. Later, in 1968, Jonas Jurašas, the director of the Kaunas National Drama Theatre, invited Tenisons’ troupe to join the production Mamutų medžioklė (The Mammoth Hunt). According to Jurašas, it was an interesting experiment, in which every 'real' personage-actor had his 'shadow' in Tenisons’ troupe. As Tenisons recalls, the production was well received by audiences.

Modris Tenisons and his troupe worked at the theatre for two years, and in 1970 moved to Kaunas Musical Theatre, where it worked until the middle of 1972. Tenisons witnessed the self-immolation of Kalanta, because he was rehearsing in Kaunas Musical Theatre at that moment. Later, mass youth protests broke out, but he decided not to join them, knowing the possible negative consequences of taking such a step. Although he kept away from the protests, it did not save him and his troupe from being closed down. After the self-immolation of Romas Kalanta in protest against the Soviet regime, Modris Tenisons and his troupe were dismissed from Kaunas Musical Theatre.