Tamizdat translation agent as cultural mediator: an archival exploration of trajectories in the case of Ota Filip

This study explores the trajectories of cultural mediators and their movements between various literary circulations, namely official, samizdat (self-published), or tamizdat (produced in the country of exile and smuggled to the homeland). Following Pierre Bourdieu, a trajectory is understood here as a series of positions that the specific agent occupies, in this case within the tamizdat distribution of Czech literature in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. Trajectories are traced through an analysis of the activities of Czech author Ota Filip during his time in exile in the Federal Republic of Germany. Findings are based on archival materials from the Czechoslovak Security Services Archive and the Bavarian State Library and focus on three main positions within the literary field: Filip's role as author, promoter, and translator.