Šiel som za jej (Slobodným) Hlasom, ale Európa ma nechcela... Autobiografia vyhnaného utečenca
I Followed her (Free) Voice, but Europe didn´t like me... The Case of the Expelled Refugee´s Autobiography

Summary/Abstract: The basis of the paper is the life story of Henrik (born 1968, basic education) recorded in January 1990. The story of a man, who in the 1980' attempted several times, unsuccessfully to emigrate from communist Czechoslovakia, is analysed here mainly with respect to his efforts to construct and negotiate a worthy social identity. The contradictions in the interpretation of his life story are also the distinct topic of Henrik's narrative. The paper shows how the anticommunist narrative framework, adopted by him from Western broadcasting, helped Henrik to rework his story from succession of failures in his intimate world into a succession of "endemic" failures of the authoritarian regime to deal with human beings. Then the paper compares the ways Henrik was treated by the Czechoslovak police and by foreign institutions for refugees and suggests that they both shared common standard expectations of a plausible emigrants' profile that excluded the possibility of the "lonely rebel career". The common features of sociological and institutional treatment of atypical life stories are also discussed. The author thinks that both approaches are sometimes jointed by underlying commonsensical understanding of social isolation as an indication of "otherness" and "insanity".

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