PRAGUE: Novelists hailing from countries as diverse as the United States, Russia, Mexico or the Czech Republic say the events of 1968 set off an internal revolution that brought to the surface the writers they are today.
Michael McLure, Paul Auster, Ivan Klima, Margaret Atwood, Natalia Gorbanevskaya and Homero Aridjis recounted their experience this week at the 18th Prague Writers Festival, which bore the theme 1968: Laughter and Forgetting .
My own story stands as a rebel of these days, said Auster, paraphrasing the character from one of his novels, Moon Palace.
Fifteen or so authors with a multitude of backgrounds spoke throughout the week about their memories and dreams in 1968.
That year was the most important of my life… so many paradoxical things happened during that period when ideas were petrified into ideology, said Czech novelist Petr Kral, who left his country shortly after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring .
Ideals and rebellious impulses form the thread uniting the patchwork of different experiences and memories the authors have of that time.
For Auster, the great strike at Columbia University in April stands out, but for Russian Gorbanevskaya the year started with the trial of Alexander Ginzburg in Moscow in late 1967.
Memories of facing up to the junta in Athens are still vivid for the Greek Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, while Aridjis recounted the bloody repression of student protests at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City in October 1968.
All were affected by the waft of idealism that emanated from Paris s Latin Quarter in May, and the rumble of the tanks in Prague in August.
Not everything was political though.
For McLure, 76, one of the Beat generation poets, California was at the centre of it all: It was a tumultuous time; it was the year of rock n roll and drug and pills and sex.
Canadian author Atwood was at the time working on her first novel, The Edible Woman, and saw what was happening at the time as the women s movement in its second wave .
Atwood s 1968 was marked by the emergence of the mini-skirt and contraception, long before AIDS and religious fundamentalism once again changed the horizon.
Others were far from the sexual liberation movement, battling the Soviet empire.
For five minutes of freedom on Red Square, we were ready to spend our life in prison, said Gorbanevskaya.
Like many, Czech authors Ivan Klima and Ludvik Vaculik look back with nostalgia at 1968.
Culture had meaning then, it was the freest voice we could hear, said Klima.
This, for Vaculik, was because the enemy was easier to identify .
But for Pakistani-born Tariq Ali, the final result has been bitter disappointment.
Some, who once dreamed of a better future, have simply given up, he said.
The French intelligentsia, which had from the Enlightenment onwards made Paris the political workshop of the world, today leads the way with retreats on every front.
Renegades occupy posts in every west European government defending exploitation, wars, state terror and neocolonial occupations; others …. specialize in producing reactionary dross on the blogosphere, displaying the same zeal with which they once excoriated factional rivals on the far left. -AFP
