SOURCE: "Poets and Power: Jaroslav Seifert," in Index on Censorship, Vol. 14, No. 2, April, 1985, pp. 8-12.

In the excerpt below, Vladislav relates the problems of censorship faced by Seifert while living and publishing in Communist Czechoslovakia.

[The Swedish Academy's decision in 1984] to give the Nobel Prize to an 'unknown' Czech poet puzzled many people, and the Czechoslovak authorities had not the slightest interest in trying to remedy the situation. On the contrary, despite their statements claiming that the recipient of the prize, poet Jaroslav Seifert, was greatly and universally respected, his works published in large quantities, Czechoslovakia's official representatives in fact shared the view of those foreign journalists who chose the most simplistic and banal explanation: that, once again, this was a politically motivated award and that the Swedish Academy was honouring Jaroslav Seifert the dissident rather than the poet. 'In their eyes,' was the verdict of the...