“What was the life course of a thought under the politically repressive conditions of state socialism?” (2)? Libora Oates-Indruchová's second book—part experiment in historical writing and part sociology of language in service to academic production—explores answers to this question and others in the comparative contexts of the Czech lands and Hungary. Drawing artfully on a set of interviews conducted about a dozen to fifteen years after the end of Communist rule, Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing is a welcome addition to a literature on censorship and the relationship of subjects to state power.
Censorship opens with the author's own astonished observations about what the purges of Czech library collections after 1989 suggested about the perceived value of communist era research and writing. She was further frustrated that taxonomies of censorship that emerged in the literature at that time generally did not account for its “reverse process”: strategies of circumventing it (8). Richard Burt's (1998) attention to complicity and collaboration and Alexei Yurchak's (2006) insights on authoritative discourse in late Soviet life inspired her own look at how the language of academic texts reflected compromises and savvy strategies for getting particular ideas in print. Censorship looks in turn at “the institutional and policy contexts of scholarly publishing, the author, the receiver in the sense that the authors were also readers of scholarly texts, the publication venues, and the language employed to write scholarly texts” (16).
A short chapter exploring policy documents follows the introduction, intended to outline formal measures for censorship that governed academic life in the Czechoslovak state. The heart of the book consists of five chapters of oral history interviews organized according to themes of navigating academic institutional life, moving a manuscript toward publication, notions of authorship, varieties of expression in academic writing, and the relationship of the present to the past. The subjects of the interviews include twenty Czech scholars in history, literary studies, philosophy, and sociology and eight Hungarian counterparts offering a small comparison with a different contemporary national context. Approximately the last third of the book offers a methodical analysis of the interviews, developing answers to the author's opening questions.
The book's experiment in post-academic writing, manifested in the organization of oral histories into what the author calls “imagined conversations,” is a distinguishing feature. Each of these chapters has been arranged into a workshop-style discussion out of coded interview material, with Oates-Indruchová inserting herself as the voice of a “novice” scholar-convener. Her questions apparently reflect the interviews, the pivots in conversation between interlocutors who were never drawn together from supporting or contrasting links in the transcripts. This arrangement of the material, inspired by feminist methodology and literary studies, makes for an engaging read. The author's creative licenses of inserting technical problems when Hungarian interlocutors were trying to join, or pauses in the discussion for refreshments, evoke actual contemporary international scholarly workshops. The non-traditional presentation of these contemporary histories is complemented nicely by the meticulous review of passages from the interviews in the analytical second half.
The advances that the book makes in the historical sociology of censorship do leave gaps. Some readers might wonder how a measure for selecting participants of those who “enjoyed peer respect” (22) was determined. There is also little sustained exploration about how diversity of experience in the country's regions might afforded different intellectual spaces. For instance, the book includes reference to a post-Prague Spring sociological study by Pavel Machonin, but makes no comment about the fact that the work was actually published in Bratislava, suggestive of the potential importance of considering the larger Czechoslovak state. The book largely does not engage with work on intellectuals under state socialism (Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism, 1991) despite its keen interest in questions of knowledge production. Finally, there is the haunting absence of commentary on how collaboration with the secret police might have served as a strategy for getting published, given its potential uses for self-advancement. The author was clearly sensitive to how certain direct questions might have only yielded defensiveness, but it would otherwise seem that some speculative reconstruction of such collaboration would have fit with the analysis in Chapter 8.
Despite these places where Censorship leaves stones unturned, the book unquestionably unpacks thoughtfully several aspects of censorship under state socialism to offer a balanced appraisal of how academic authors navigated the era's constraints, with insights into more recent worlds of academic publishing. It will enrich future work in this area.
