"That night I called all my friends we were already meeting with. Then I went with my mum, and she went to the radio building, so I went with her, just in case something happened to her. And there I was in Vinohrady, right, on Vinohradská Street, and there was a long line of Soviet soldiers walking towards us, but mostly it looked like they were some kind of Mongols or something. It was bad there." - "And you were inside the radio station with your mum?" - "No, I didn't go in there with her, she ran in there on her own, I walked her in there so she wouldn't get hurt."
"I used to go to the theatre Na Zábradlí. And at the Vinohrady Theatre. The Vinohrady Theatre, when there was no longer a Theatre of the Czechoslovak Army. There they used to have these, what they were called, poets on Saturdays and Sundays, and they used to go there and read and stuff like that. I liked going there very much. I fell into the poetry thing after that, I wrote a lot of poetry, but even some people said I was great."
"Every year [my father] went to America for the UN. I don't forget one time when he came with two cars from the airport - I mean, in one car - in the other car he had a lot of [things], it was a taxi, he probably bought those things somewhere in America. So he brought me a bunch of records, LPs, Frank Sinatra and stuff like that. That was very nice. But he also brought a big pile of chewing gum."
Miroslav Drozd was born on 9 November 1943 in Hradec Králové. Both his parents were journalists and members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). In 1952, the Drozd family moved to Prague, where they lived in Vinohrady. After completing his primary education, he continued his studies at the general education school (similar to today’s grammar schools) in Londýnská Street. After graduating from secondary school in 1959, he entered the University of Economics in Prague (VŠE). After graduating from the university, he started working at the Research Institute of Economics, which was headed by Věnek Šilhán. There he was offered an internship at the International University of Nancy in France, where he went in the autumn of 1968. After returning from abroad, he was unable to find a job as he was politically unreliable. For many years, he worked in blue-collar professions. In 1975 he married. Together with his wife, they began to work for samizdat. He translated French and English works. In 1977 his mother signed the Charter 77 declaration, and he later joined the signatories. After the Velvet Revolution, he continued his translation activities, became editor of Lidové noviny, then worked as director of the Orbis publishing house and as director of the Czech Music Fund. In 2025 he was living in Prague.
