Professor Přemysl Rut

"The only person in my year with whom I had closer friendship and with whom I had a deeper understanding was my classmate Jaroslava Odvárková, now Šiktancová, who signed the Charter. She confided it to me in the café at the Golden Snake and I told her she was a cow. I told her that because it was clear to me what would follow. There was no careerism behind it, and she knew that. I told her, 'We are the generation that hasn't done anything yet. You're going to be cleaning up now, they're going to stop you from learning anything, and their main Bolshevik argument is that there are nobodies in the opposition who wouldn't normally apply themselves, so they call attention to themselves by tearing down socialism, and they're such Hérostrats. And we, if we let them drive us to the bucket and the rag at the age of twenty, will give them arguments for it.' Shortly after that Jarka really had to leave the school and I remember, that our class teacher, and director from the Vinohrady Theatre, called upon us to distance ourselves from our former classmate and her deed. I told him in front of the class: 'Mr. docent, we did not have the opportunity to see the document. If you'll be so kind as to bring it to us, I'll decide if I want to distance myself from it or not.' Of course, he never brought the document to us, so I did not distance myself from anything.' On the contrary, I have spoken many times at the school about continuing to associate with Jarka and I not seeing anything to condemn in that. I saw the problem in what I just described. I think that Jarka remembered our meeting many times when she was first getting into directing, the things she had applied to the school for, at a mature age in the late 1980s."

"A story happened to me that opened my eyes. Professor Marie Kubýová invited me to her office one day and said to me: 'Think about it, you probably want to go to university, don't you? But you're not in the Socialist Youth Union. You'll have a hard time, you won't be admitted to university.' 'But there are many people who are not in the union,' I argued. She retorted, 'No, there are only two of you in the class who are not in the union.' I remained staring at her and realized that all this time [in high school] - it was probably 1972, maybe 1973 - there had been a quiet process of slipping into a subtle collaboration with the newly-established conditions around me. She thought it was for my benefit, and in her kindness she thought if it wasn't worth joining the union after all, to get me into the school, that it wouldn't work any other way. I remember exactly what I said to her: 'I'll try to apply without that.' That was the end of our conversation, and I got - at the second attempt - into DAMU, where the ratio of applicants to admissions is particularly steep, at the second attempt. I don't consider myself an exceptionally talented person who had to be accepted. I could very well not be accepted! I am living proof that we made normalization ourselves, and that the 70s and 80s could have been much more fruitful, interesting, free, dignified, if Czech people had not been so willing to accept it."

"I think that the emphasis on language and the precise naming of things is even one of the reasons for the crash of the 60s, because it was as if we believed that if we make a thing impossible with a precisely aimed joke, it will actually disappear. But it didn't disappear, it just waited until it could deprave and control us. The popular and intellectual press of the time is full of jokes, quips, observations, aphorisms... Reading it, you notice how high the stakes were for wit, for precise phrasing. As if the adversary had already been dealt with! That was the illusion. And therein, for me, is certainly the reason why the 1970s are the years of the crisis of confidence in language, why [in the 1970s] the odds of precise phrasing suddenly plummeted. For me, the difference between the poetics of Jiří Suchý and Jan Vodňanský is an exact reflection of this."