Читать книгу Sketches from Childhood - Milan Svanderlik - Страница 4

Sketches from Childhood is essentially the memoir of an early childhood that simply happened to coincide with matters of great political moment: Milan Svanderlik was born on the very day that the Communist Party effected a coup d’état in Czechoslovakia, the country of his birth, transforming a struggling, post-war, liberal democracy into a brittle, Stalinist dictatorship, under the heel of the Kremlin. Overarching what it is hoped readers will find a happy admixture of childhood recollection, juvenile imaginings and engaging whimsy, shot through with a thread of pathos, evoked by a family where burgeoning discord reflects the gathering storm that will soon engulf the body politic, is this simple truth: we none of us choose when or where we are born, and inevitably, we must all be products, to a greater or lesser degree, of the manner in which the inexorable tide of history impinges upon the conditions of our home life, our upbringing and our education. Tragically, we are, every one of us, prisoners of circumstance.