In the Czech Republic, March is “The month of Books”. The event was introduced in Czechoslovakia in 1955 and was based on similar events throughout the communist bloc. But while the literary discussions, held in rural libraries, schools, and factories, were predominantly a propaganda tool, the promotion of the book was not all unwelcome. In today’s Czech Republic, is the Month of Books just a redundant leftover from communist cultural policy, or does it still have a place in the cultural landscape?
Ales Merenus
(b. 1979) is a postgraduate student at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.
