In December 1964 he became editor-in-chief of the magazine Tvář
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Jan Nedvěd was born on 1 March 1939 in Prague. After finishing his studies, he went to the army, but was discharged early into civilian life when he faked mental problems. At the beginning of the 1960s he worked as an editor of Literární noviny. In December 1964 he became editor-in-chief of the magazine Tvář. The editorial board at that time included prominent personalities such as historian, political scientist and journalist Emanuel Mandler, literary critics Bohumil Doležal and Jan Lopatka, writer Věra Linhartová and playwright Václav Havel. Under Nedvěd’s leadership, Tvář was critical of official culture and courageously published foreign authors and philosophers who were unacceptable in communist Czechoslovakia at the time. Jan Nedvěd had to undergo countless clashes with the founder of the magazine, the Union of Czechoslovak Writers, as well as with the ideological department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He had to explain and defend published texts and defend members of the editorial board and external authors. In January 1965, Jan Nedvěd was expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and in the same year, under the pretext of improving the quality of his creative work, the magazine Tvář was closed down and replaced by Sešity pro mladou literaturu. Nedvěd remained a freelance writer and spent the next few years writing lecture reports and doing freelance work for Czechoslovak Radio. In 1968 Tvář was restored and Jan Nedvěd became its editor-in-chief again, mostly with the same collaborators. In addition to the cultural sphere, Tvář expanded its content to include political and economic texts, and quickly returned to its position as a leading magazine critical of the reformist communists. Nedvěd was again regularly summoned to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and even in a relatively freer atmosphere than in the first half of the 1960s, he had to defend Tvář’s articles and opinions vigorously. The magazine was finally banned with the onset of normalisation in 1969. Jan Nedvěd then earned his living by working manually. With two colleagues from the former Tvář, he first worked as an assembler at the Universa cooperative, and later they made animal figures out of plastic for the municipal services. In 1974 he became a programmer, but after signing the Charter 77 declaration he was fired from his job and worked for three years as an assistant planner in the tool works. He returned to the programming profession in the early 1980s and made a living at it until retirement. (The interview with Jan Nedvěd is thematically focused on the events related to the double creation and termination of the magazine Tvář and on the personalities of Václav Havel and Emanuel Mandler.)
