Zdena Salivarova, a Czech publisher and writer "who established an émigré press that kept her country's literature alive for years after Russian tanks stamped out Czechoslovakia's renaissance in 1968," died August 25, the New York Times reported. She was 91. Salivarova "was overshadowed by her famous husband, the novelist Josef Skvorecky, whose depiction of how individuals cope with the tyrannical Czech state made him one of his country's leading late-20th-century writers, along with Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera."
Salivarova published all three of them, along with many other writers, after establishing 68 Publishers in 1971 in the couple's Toronto apartment when they were in exile. Eventually they moved the operation to small offices in the city, where Salivarova managed the operation, typeset the books, took them to the post office and sometimes sent them back across the Iron Curtain for free.
The works of more than 200 writers, including her husband, had been banned by the Communist regime, but 68 Publishers was launched "into competition with Czechoslovakia's official publishing establishment," Times reporter Michael Kaufman wrote in 1983.
By the time the company ceased operations in 1993, "after the Velvet Revolution in Prague had overturned the Communist regime and made the couple's work superfluous, they had published 227 books by dozens of exiled and underground writers, and some 12,000 people were on their mailing list," the Times wrote.
"At a certain point she did almost everything: typeset, design, she hired people to do the art for the cover," said Paul Wilson, who was Skvorecky's translator and knew the couple well. "She laid out the books. She was there all the time. She came in early and stayed late."
In an interview contained in The Achievement of Josef Skvorecky (1994), edited by Sam Solecki, Salivarova recalled when the idea of starting a publishing house first came up, "Josef was very insecure, anxious, nervous. He said, 'What if we get bankrupt? Everybody in Prague will be so happy.' " The company's first book was Skvorecky's unpublished early novel The Republic of Whores, which earned enough money to publish another book, and the press was on its way.
68 Publishers "was far and away the most important of the émigré publishing houses," said Derek Sayer, an expert on Czech literature and an emeritus professor at the University of Alberta. "It basically kept Czech literature alive."
Salivarova put aside her own literary career to sustain the operation. Her novel Honzlova (1973, published in English as Summer in Prague) received good reviews and went through four editions at 68 Publishers, but like her husband's work, it was banned in Czechoslavakia.
In the early 1960s she had been an actress and singer. In 1965, she was admitted to the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where she studied script writing and worked under Milan Kundera, whose "misogynistic treatment of his women characters 'provoked' her," she said, into writing a collection of novellas published in 1968, Panska Jizda (Gentleman's Ride). She also acted in several major films under leading Czech New Wave directors.
She later said that her legacy, 68 Publishers, was almost an accident, telling Solecki: "You know, when all this started I didn't plan to be a publisher forever. It was a solution to an immediate problem--what was I going to do in Canada, and how were we to publish Josef's novel."