Literární úkol, jak něco napsat, i když člověk vlastně nic napsat nemůže. Cenzura korespondence politických vězňů v období tzv. normalizace
A literary task to write something when one actually cannot write anything The censorship of political prisoners’ correspondence in the period of so-called normalization

Summary/Abstract: The present study focuses on one of the aspects of the normalization of prison life – the prison correspondence of political prisoners as the most common and the most widespread official (sometimes also unofficial) creative verbal expression behind bars which is, however, highly regulated and censored. The author describes the complexity of the supervision of this type of communication, with an emphasis on the concurrence of various censorship interventions, outlining the basic typology of interventions and systemic limitations of correspondence in the normalization correctional institutions or, as the case may be, in remand prisons, their consequences and defensive mechanisms of the affected authors. In spite of both internal and external censorship interventions, the writing of prison letters remained a key creative and often even self-preserving mental manifestation of the prisoners. However, prison letters were important not only for the direct participants in such communication, but also for the wider cultural-opposition public at that time, and they were commonly disseminated in samizdat copies or read out together. Nowadays, with hindsight, many prison letters, which, with few exceptions, were not primarily conceived as literary or philosophical, can be perceived as distinct works of art representing the specific literary genre of prison epistolography, which in the broadest sense can be characterized as a literary task to write something when one actually cannot write anything.

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