"By the application of certain principles, civilizations are first led to flourish - and then, by persisting in these principles in their later, hypertrophied form, to perish."
The so-called Heracleite's Law formulated by Miroslav Bárta
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The personality of Bohdan Chudoba was virtually unknown in Czechoslovakia after 1990, as if not, almost nobody knew what was really going on behind the barbed wire, in the West. Of course, there were various people trying to keep the exile alive, there was the Voice of America, Free Europe, Škvorecký with his Toronto publishing house... But we had our own worries, plans, ideas. In our everyday life, however, "exile" began to be remembered, we began to see it as part of our culture. And so there were personalities who were not such household names as Ivan Medek ("Voice of America, Vienna", as many have heard it). In 2000, under the care of Milan Drápala, the publishing house Prostor published a meritorious (and voluminous) book, On the Lost Gate of the West: an anthology of Czech non-socialist journalism from 1945-1948, with an introductory essay on Bohdan Chudoba and excerpts from his work. The chapter entitled "On a Crusade through the Twentieth Century" was written by Zdeněk Beneš and Milan Drápala; the article itself suggested that in Chudoba's case it was a bit of a "hot potato"; we learned about someone who was almost unknown until then, but we learned little enough about him to understand the nature of why he "could not be swallowed."
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