Talk:Egon Bondy

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Relationship to the Communist Regime
Bondy was an odd fish. He was a contrarian, for sure, outspoken, and a critic of the regime. But then it is also documented that he cooperated with the StB for many years without the coercion that was evident in other such cases; on the contrary, he cooperated through ideological commitment and, for one stretch, worked under the name "Mao". Since The Plastic People of the Universe are recognised to be key to the story of Charta 77, the fact that Bondy, who had written the texts they would later repurpose, had, as an agent of the StB, written reports on Jan Patočka, is significant. (Patočka died during interrogation by the StB following his involvement with Charta 77 and support for The Pastic People.) Not only, besides, was Bondy permitted to study, and to study philosophy at that (the humanities were for obvious reasons more restricted than, say, engineering), he also lived on a kind of welfare benefits (invalid pension) and didn't have anything like the hassle he might have had considering the force of his writing was such that an underground band heading for a clash with the authorities could make use of them twenty years after they were written. All of which gets lost in English sources, for sure, but an additional problematic here is the difficulty of finding Czech sources without an axe to grind one way or another. The Czech Wikipedia page, meanwhile, has little in the way of citation, much in the way of gossip, and some wild statements, which might well be true of a man who died by setting himself on fire with a cigarette: did Bondy really make an offer to the French secret services to do away with the Soviet leadership by releasing a number of matchboxes of infected fleas in Red Square? An adequately informative article would, I think, certainly mention Bondy's ideological ambivalence and collaboration with the StB. Probably, however, it would want to be expanded to become a more Wikipedia-standard biographical page before such amendments are made. Krozruch (talk) 22:31, 22 September 2022 (UTC)