Space, Paper, Transition/ality at Bolzanova 7. The Dissolution of the Czech Samizdat Scene and the Growth of Zine Culture in the 1990s

The present contribution takes a relatively unconventional angle for its investigation of the abrupt shift in Czech unofficial journalistic culture from severely repressed samizdat before November 1989 to significant social force in the first years of the subsequent decade. It takes as its locus the Prague office building at the address Bolzanova 7, a former Czech Rail property assigned to the samizdat-based independent journalistic agency Informační servis at the end of 1990. Here, in the hectic early years of uncensored publication, the rapid diversification of Czech independent periodicals witnessed the emergence of both culturally prestigious organs (the weekly magazine Respekt, the quarterly cultural journal Revolver Revue) and of attempts to reformulate a counterculture under radically different conditions – specifically the transformation of the underground information bulletin Voknoviny into the anarchist periodical A-Kontra. My interest in the present study is in examining the processes involved in this particular historical moment, as much from an analytical as well as a (necessary) descriptive aspect.