The book “Magor Ivan Jirous” is dedicated to the post-revolutionary poet, art historian and essayist Ivan Martin Jirous, also Magor. He is best known for being the grounder of the Czech psychedelic rock group “The Plastic People of the Universe”, whose prohibition by the regime was one of the causes for the Charter 77. Jirous was later one of the organisers of the underground movement in communist Czechoslovakia. His work reached its most intense effect at the time of the so-called “normalization” of the 1969 – 1989. The works of Ivan Magor Jirous were prohibited until the Velvet Revolution and were published only in samizdat. The book makes not only the work of this important poet, writer and critic in the German-speaking countries known, but also sketches a picture of the Czech underground situation at that time.
“Magor Ivan Jirous” includes selected works of his poetry and poems, samizdat literature such as articles, polemics and reviews, letters from prison, award-winning children’s stories, his political texts about the “Underground” and the “second culture” in Czechoslovakia as well as his memoirs “The true story of the Plastic People”. The publication is completed by a foreword of Josef Haslinger, articles by Václav Havel, Paul Wilson, Zbyněk Petráček, more detailed discussions with Jirous and other personalities from the world of the underground, contemporary documents and photographs from the underground and from recent years.
This publication is available at ERSTE Foundation Library.
