I signed the Charter without reading it, I trusted its authors completely
Stáhnout obrázek
Bohumír Slavík was born on 5 January 1952 into a Prague family. Since his childhood he has lived continuously in Prague‘s Vinohrady district. He graduated from the Secondary School of General Education. He experienced the 1960s as years of social and cultural liberation, and therefore the events of 1968 were not only a shock to him, but also shaped his future attitudes. After graduating from secondary school, he began to study law, but did not complete his studies. He worked as an airport worker and was briefly employed at the Museum of National Literature, where he first encountered visual art and its creators at the time. Driven by his interest in this field, he moved to the Dlážděná antique shop, whose environment influenced him for the rest of his life. After completing his military service, he returned to the same antiquarian bookshop and it was here that he signed Charter 77. He was then monitored by State Security (StB) as an enemy person, a file was kept on him and he was interrogated several times in connection with his contacts with the underground and other signatories. In 1978, he founded the band Žabí hlen, on which State Security also focused. In 1983, he founded the band Big Romantic Pigs and at the same time in the mid-1980s he fell ill with tuberculosis. After his recovery, he returned to the Dlážděná antiquarian bookshop and later worked in the antiquarian bookshop in Karlova Street, where he experienced events of November 1989. From 1991 to 1995 he worked in the publishing shop of Prague Imagination (Pražská imaginace), where he continued to meet artists such as Bohumil Hrabal. In 1993, together with Vladimír Zadrobílek, he wrote the book Žabohlenění, which traces the history of the band Žabí hlen. In 1995, after the closure of the Prague Imagination, he began working at the antiquarian bookshop Ztichlá klika, where he worked together with the poet Ivan Wernisch for almost twenty years. At that time he was very friendly with Ivan Martin Jirous. Bohumír Slavík has connected his entire professional and private life with the art world and writes poems himself. In 2024 he was living in Vinohrady.
