COURAGE

Підключення Колекцій

Ferenc Fejtő was an original, democratic leftist thinker. His library is a unique trace of the criticism of Eastern European rightist, authoritarianist, socialist dictatorship, and Western European leftist romanticism. Fejtő, who maintained strong connections with European intellectual elites, left Hungary for France in 1938, yet remained deeply committed to the fate of freedom-lacking Eastern Europe.

The collection holds various documents (manuscripts, letters, etc) relating to the Lithuanian historian Ignas Jonynas. His works written in the interwar period laid the foundations for modern Lithuanian national historiography. During Soviet times, Jonynas was a professor of history at Kaunas and Vilnius universities. In 1949, he was severely criticised by Party activists for ‘bourgeois objectivism’ and nationalism. However, Jonynas was still very popular among students, and had a huge influence on the younger generation of Lithuanian historians.

The Igor Cașu Collection represents above all an alternative collection of archival materials about the history of the Soviet Regime in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR), originating from major public archives in the Republic of Moldova that preserve such documents without granting free access to them. The founder of this collection had privileged access to the items that are now part of his collection in the short time span when he acted as vice-president of the Commission for the Study and Evaluation of the Communist Regime in Moldova in 2010.  In contrast to the public archives, the Igor Cașu Collection, which also includes an oral history interviews section, is shared with fellow researchers.

The collection is important proof of the activities of a left-thinking historian, a "spiritual father" and co-founder of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS), a co-publisher of unofficial periodic Dialogy, who was imprisoned several times and forced to go to exile, where he collaborated with dissidents from other socialist countries.