The basis of the Open Diary of Jan Vladislav (1923-2009), poet, essayist, translator, editor and author of fairy tales, are the diary entries he kept as a signatory of Charter 77 in Prague from January 1977 to January 1981, when he was forced to go into exile in France. Over the next nearly thirty years, he enriched the texts of his entries with reflective and essayistic passages, creating the sum of his lifelong experience as a writer and a generally valid testimony to the fate of the humanities scholar in twentieth-century Central Europe. Although Jan Vladislav did not complete the work on his seminal work, his Open Diary is one of the most important modern Czech literary works written on the diaristic plane, alongside Jan Zábrana's The Whole Life, Diviš's Theory of Reliability, Pavel Juráček's Diary, and Josef Hiršal and Bohumila Grögerová's Flight of Years. The book is supplemented by an editorial note and a name index.
Czech edition