Vladimír Michal

* 1961

  • "Right away, probably in the second or third grade, they brought us to the library, and we actually went there regularly with the group, and we actually exchanged books, and they actually acted as advisors to us in a certain way, as to what were the nice books that would help us they should be interested. And I noticed already while reading like this that they could get, for example, Fast Arrows, those comics, now they would be called comics, and that one of the first books that caught my attention in that library were Foglarovky. I started borrowing it and so I read it regularly except for some Stopy and just such Verne books and such. So these were the books, and I was very surprised that at some point they disappeared from that library. I can't locate it exactly, they just weren't in the sixty-ninth, maybe it was in the seventy-first - the second, but they just disappeared suddenly."

  • "It was probably in the sixth grade that I and a classmate were chosen to go to a school meeting of a pioneer organization. And I, as a timid person, did not say that I am not a pioneer. Well, come tomorrow, don't forget your shirt and scarf, and you'll go somewhere to a pioneer house for a meeting. And now I got home and I don't even have a uniform, I don't have a shirt, I don't have a scarf. So my mother found that my sister had such a red scarf that had such a white border. So they removed the thread, and the scarf was not the right size, but it was red, so they somehow tied it to a shirt that looked like blue. Then I was there, at that conference I was such an object of interest that what I was wearing. Well, this exactly illustrates that kind of passive resistance, it's just that when a person stands somewhere in a corner and just waits until he's called on, he'll do it when called on, but when he's not called on, he won't do it himself and just tries to do it somehow, to make it more or less like that. But at home, when we talked about the fact that simply communists and pioneers and things like that, it was just that they were bad things."

  • "At a certain point, I found out that Egon Bondy is equal to Zbyněk Fischer, whose books about two or three were normally available in the library, that is, probably only in the University Library, probably not in some normal libraries, and one of them was called, that Buddha and it was about Buddhism and we were very interested there, it was that Buddhism was in a certain way a path, one of the possible paths, how to think about life at least then, I don't think so much about it now. And then we found out that actually this Egon Bondy alias Zbyněk Fischer also wrote books that you can't get anywhere, they're just in a samizdate somewhere. And that was, for example, the History of Philosophy. He actually wrote several volumes, maybe ten volumes, where he actually described the history of philosophy. And I don't know how we got to the point where we just had one printout, that is, the typewritten samizdat copy. Maybe because we are in that group of people, we also had all ten parts, we somehow divided it up so that someone writes one part, someone rewrites the other and so on. And so it was done in such a way that you had to get the typo paper, which was also not that easy, because not every stationery store had it, and when you went there and bought two packages of typo paper, they looked at you very strangely and then the copy paper had to be found, and it was also not easy to get enough of the copy paper. That when you came to a stationery shop, not everyone had a copy paper, but when you needed a hundred copy papers, they didn't. And you had to have a typewriter on the one hand and these papers and the original on the other hand. And then some practice was needed, very carefully putting the papers together, and I think we made eight or nine copies."

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    Bratislava, 28.11.2022

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The most important things in life are relationships

Vladimír Michal was born on August 4, 1961 in Banská Štiavnica in the family of Anton Michal (1932) and Daria Michalová, née Grečová (1938). Paternal grandparents Štefan Michal and Anna Michalová were born in the small village of Považský Chlmec near Žilina. They lived a simple village life, mowing meadows, digging potatoes, taking care of farm animals. Grandparents on mother’s side born in Banská Štiavnica. Grandfather Viktor Greč and grandmother Magdaléna Grečová worked at the municipal office and were actively involved in social life in culturally rich Banská Štiavnica. Both families of the grandparents were religious. Mother’s family participated in church festivities as well as the traditional Salamander festival, the tradition of which has been preserved in Banská Štiavnica to this day. Both families of the grandparents were religious. The family in Považské Chlmec did not perceive the war or the Holocaust as specific events, the Jewish population did not live directly in the village. Jews lived in Banská Štiavnica, but the family history does not remember the violent events of the deportations. There were people living in the city who were both positive and negative towards the Jewish population. After the war, however, it was obvious how many people were missing in the town. Grandparents in Banská Štiavnica remembered the SNP through people they knew from their surroundings, while not everyone who joined the partisans was considered a good person. They remembered the war mainly by crossing the front at its end, when first German and then Soviet soldiers passed through the territories they lived on. Both families housed officers and soldiers of both armies for a short period of time. When Vladimír was two years old, his father acquired a company apartment and they moved to an estate in Žilina, where he lived with his parents until he was eighteen. After kindergarten in 1967, he started elementary school. As a freshman he spent a lot of time in the school club (an activity after regular classes in the school premises under the guidance of female educators, note ed.), where the lady who was in charge of them read to them a lot from various books. The fact that cultured, educated and kind people took care of them back then, Vladimír still considers lucky and a very important thing for his future life. The day of the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, August 21, 1968, Vladimír experienced with his father and a neighbor on the mushrooms in Stara Bystrica. The adults noticed that there were unusual planes flying over their heads. After returning from the forest, they heard from the radio what had happened. They met tanks on the way home. Vladimir remembers these events as very traumatic for the whole family. Vladimir’s parents were passive opponents of the communist regime and tried to avoid everything that the regime did not expressly require. This is also why Vladimír did not become a spark (the first stage of the socialist youth organization, at the age of older pupils and students followed by pioneers and binders note ed.). When classmates took the pioneer oath, Vladimir was absent from school and therefore did not become a pioneer either. Vladimír went to grammar school in Žilina. He already had information about books and music that did exist but could not be accessed. He was greatly influenced by the Melodie magazine, which was not only about music and which he happened to discover at the PNS stand (newspapers and magazines were sold here, ed. note). He had a subscription to the magazine for several years, but after some time, under the pressure of the regime, the magazine changed its content so much that its original character disappeared and Vladimir stopped reading it. Membership in SZM (Socialist Youth Union) was perceived by Vladimir as a necessary evil, and activity in this organization was characterized by passivity. During his high school studies, Vladimír also worked in the local Theater of Small Stage Convergences Maják. Vladimír made his decision for further studies mainly with the aim of getting to university in Bratislava from Žilina, which was in the province at the time. Originally he wanted to apply for film direction at VŠMU, in the end he applied for the Electrical Engineering Faculty of the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. During the first year, they founded a theater with their friends in the dormitory, the only play of which was marked as anti-state, so the theater ended in a short time. Later he also worked in the university club Primaf. At university, he met Juraj Kušnierik, who made a fundamental contribution to shaping Vladimir’s life. Sporadically, they came into contact with samizdat literature, they even created some samizdat themselves. Together with Janka, later Vladimír’s wife, they transcribed two volumes of Bondy’s History of Philosophy on a typewriter through typographical papers. Vladimír also maintained contacts with friends from Prague and Zlín from the underground environment. Through these contacts, he got access to other music, books and other samizdat. After finishing school, Vladimír married Janka and subsequently enlisted in the war. After returning from the military, Vladimír started working at the Research Institute of Computing Technology in Žilina, where they got an apartment. They managed to replace it and returned to Bratislava in 1989. They signed Několik vět. On November 16, Vladimír with Janka took part in a student protest in Bratislava, which ended at Hviezdoslav Square. They participated in the SNP square demonstrations, and soon after the revolution they started thinking about Artforum as a cultural organization and then a bookstore. These plans and their subsequent implementation completely absorbed them. The first public event of Artforum took place in the Shipmen’s House on February 19, 1990, where two bands performed and books printed in England were sold at Alexander Tomsky’s exile publishing house in London. They managed to get premises on Červená armády street number 7, where the first official Artfórum entered. He perceived the division of Czechoslovakia as a sad event. At that time, Artforum was already located on Kozia Street in Bratislava. Despite various obstacles, Artforum became a place for meeting people, launching new books and especially a place for the adventure of thinking, which, even after more than thirty years since its establishment, it remains to this day.