Index On Censorship - Publishing Landmarks

Publishing Landmarks

Other landmark publications include Ken Saro-Wiwa's writings from prison (Issue 3/1997) and a translation of the Czechoslovak Charter 77 manifesto drafted by Václav Havel and others. Index published the first English translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Index on Censorship published the stories of the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina and the work of banned poets in Cuba; the work of Chinese poets who escaped the massacres that ended the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Index on Censorship has a long history of publishing writers in translation, including Bernard-Henri Lévy, Ivan Klima, Ma Jian and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, and news reports including Anna Politkovskaia's coverage of the war in Chechnya (Issue 2/2002).

Sir Tom Stoppard’s play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), which is set in a Soviet mental institution, originally performed with the London Symphony Orchestra, was inspired by the personal account of former detainee Victor Fainberg and Clayton Yeo's expose of the use of psychiatric abuse in the USSR, published in Index on Censorship (Issue 2/1975). Stoppard became a member of the advisory board of Index on Censorship in 1978 and remains connected to the publication as a Patron of Index.

Index on Censorship published the World Statement by the International Committee for the Defence of Salman Rushdie in support of “the right of all people to express their ideas and beliefs and to discuss them with their critics on the basis of mutual tolerance, free from censorship, intimidation and violence. Six months later, Index published the Hunger Strike Declaration from four student leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Liu Xiaobo, Zhou Duo, Hou Dejian and Gao Xin.

Index Index, a round-up of abuses of freedom of expression worldwide, continued to be published in each edition of the magazine until December 2008, when this function was transferred to the website. The offences against free expression documented in that first issue’s Index Index listing included censorship in Greece and Spain, then dictatorships, and Brazil, which had just banned the film Zabriskie Point on the grounds that it "insulted a friendly power" – the United States, where it had been made and freely shown.

Index on Censorship paid special attention to the situation in then Czechoslovakia between the Soviet invasion of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989, devoting an entire issue to the country eight years after the Prague Spring (Issue 3/1976). It included several pieces by Václav Havel, including a first translation of his one act play Conversation, and a letter to Czech officials on police censorship of his December 1975 production of The Beggar's Opera by John Gay.

The magazine also carried articles on the state of the Czech theatre and a list of the so-called Padlock Publications, fifty banned books that circulated only in typescript. Index also published an English version of Havel’s play Mistake, dedicated to Samuel Beckett in gratitude for Beckett’s own dedication of his play Catastrophe to Havel. Both short plays were performed at the Free Word Centre to mark the launch of Index’s special issue looking back at the changes of 1989 (Issue 4/2009).