My Life with Hitler, Stalin and Havel - Volume 1

The first volume of Kohout's autobiographical cycle contains two works in a genre for which the author invented the term "memo-novel": FROM THE DIARY OF A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY, Kohout's first prose work, which he wrote in 1969 after his fortieth birthday as a "civic testament in case of premature liquidation", maps the time from the tanks that liberated the Czech lands in 1945 to the same tanks that occupied them in August 1968, in three ever-intertwining narratives: authentic records of the political Prague Spring (From the Diary of Writer PK) alternate dramatically with its fictionalised causes (From the Diary of a Citizen) and consequences (From the Diary of a Tourist). The book has been published in numerous languages as a fundamental testimony to the development of the post-war generation of Czechoslovak citizens. WHERE THE DOG IS BURIED, the author's fifth prose work, by then already famous for *Katyně*, was published in exile in both German and Czech in 1987. According to Kohout, it was waiting "until my horror and my anger, the feelings of a normal person within me, had subsided, and a reporter, a narrator, could sit down at the typewriter". In two timelines, it describes the extraordinarily ordinary life of a group of banned writers and their friends, as well as their opponents from the ranks of the regime's supporters. Stories from the entire 1970s, dominated by the birth of Charter 77, alternate with an absurd detective story from the summer of 1978, in which the State Security played "cops and robbers" with the writer, simultaneously posing as evil blackmailers threatening the author's family with death, and as kind detectives supposedly protecting them, all to keep him under control. The story is told to the main hero – a dachshund named Edison.