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The story of one advertisement: when Rudé právo congratulated Ferdinand Vanek from Malý Hrádek

Publication at Faculty of Education |
2022

Abstract

The author describes the circumstances of the creation of one of the most famous advertisements in Czechoslovak contemporary history. It is a birthday greeting addressed to the dissident Václav Havel, alias Ferdinand Vanek.

The study makes extensive use of narrative sources, taken using the oral history method. On this basis, it depicts the background of the creation of the advertisement, but then also presents the personality of its initiator and author, Petr Rygr's.

The present text is a microhistorical look at the life of a man oscillating between the worlds of dissent, parallel culture and the grey zone in the Náchod region in the 1970s and 1980s.