Markéta Hrbková

* 1961

  • “I know that one time they took me away and interrogated me for a while as always, and then some two other State Security officers came, ones that I didn’t know, and they claimed they would accuse me of and lock me up for selling some watches, like a trafficker. So they wrote up a report with me, and I fell for it. They left me dangling for another fortnight, and then I saw they’d been fibbing. But I was really afraid, I remember I was mainly frightened that people would believe them, and that I’d go to jail for something as absurd as that, and that I wouldn’t be able to prove it wasn’t like that to anyone. I know I felt very strongly about that.”

  • “We were all part of it, all of the people around me. I knew the text [of Charter 77], it had been released two years before, I knew what it was about, I was already part of it all, so it didn’t matter, [the signing] wasn’t some official act, it really didn’t bring about any big change at all.”

  • “That Revolver Revue, to put it together using those cyclostyles, later on there was Xerox, so using Xerox, it wasn’t exactly easy, it meant hours upon hours of work, it’s not like today, when you put it all into the computer and it comes out from the printer; just the technical preparations took an enormous amount of time, and then of course putting it all together.”

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    Praha, 29.03.2014

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    duration: 02:04:34
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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The counters to the falsities of the world are self-awareness and personal responsibility for the world in which I live

Portrait 2
Portrait 2
photo: Archiv Markéty Hrbkové

Markéta Hrbková was born on 13 October 1961 in Prague. She is the daughter of Mojmír Hrbek, a pupil of the philosopher Patočka, and Ruth Hrbková, née Strass. She spent three years with her parents in England. After being expelled from grammar school, she attended an evening school in librarianship. She was under State Security surveillance, she signed Charter 77. In the late 1980s she studied Bohemistics at the “Underground University”. Her tutors were professors who were banned from teaching at Charles University, exams were written, and degrees were under the patronage of Cambridge University. After the revolution she worked as a translator and teacher. She is the author of three collections of poems.