SOURCE: Hajek, Igor. “Samizdat Literature: An Introduction.” In Goodbye, Samizdat: Twenty Years of Czechoslovak Underground Writing, edited by Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz, pp. 3-6. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Hajek provides a brief overview of Czech underground writing during the 1970s and later.

Placed in Bech's hands, it felt lighter than, from the thickness of it, he had expected. Only the right-hand pages held words; the left-hand held mirrored ghosts of words, the other side showing through. He had been returned to some archetypal sense of what a book was: it was an elemental sheaf, bound together by love and daring, to be passed with excitement from hand to hand. Bech had imagined the pathos, the implied pecking of furtive typewriters, but not the defiant beauty of the product.

—John Updike, Bech in Czech

These books irritate the Western reader by what they're saying—by the...