KOČÍK, Tibor. Poets from Second City against the backdrop of totalitarianism. A glimpse at the literary topography of Košice until November 1989

In a study entitled Poets from the Second City, the author briefly approaches the literary topography of Košice in the second half of the last century. If we evaluate the artistic and cultural atmosphere of this city, he says, it is most affected by visual artists. Košice was not particularly interesting in terms of literary events until industrialisation, which heralded the literary dawn of the city. This happened at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. The text becomes more dramatic with references to the normalisation years. The author discusses them from different perspectives, either from the point of view of the incredibly massive invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, or when he talks about the opposite attitude of groups of citizens who either disobeyed or ignored the "red" authority, or when he mentions the literary scene against the backdrop of the misery of normalisation, when describing the normalisation machinery, which, through harsh repression, expelled from the literary life of Košice those authors who, during the 1960s, brought an innovative spirit to the stale literary scene (Alexander Reis Francisty, Ivan Kadlečík, Ján Patarák, Marína Čertková-Gállová, Pavol Suržin et al.). He notes that it was precisely unfreedom, together with the totalitarian dictate of the communist regime, that encouraged young artists to ignore official culture and create alternative works. Young writers from Košice found an alternative publishing background in samizdat, and it was they who dared to create unmuzzled.