ABSTRACT
During 1994-19955, the author conducted 67 life-story interviews in the Czech Republic. This chapter focuses on outspoken dissent rather than on the apolitical, independent art scene: that is, on the 13 life-narratives of members of Chartist circles, plus the marginal case, the politically outspoken performance artist who refrained from joining the political dissident networks. It lists the activities of dissidents qua dissidents that have been mentioned in the narratives at least in passing. The chapter examines the facts contained in, and the stance adopted by, the accounts of victimisation under the old regime and the reverses of fate brought by the revolution. It also examines overall narrative construction and its dominant themes. Each life-narrative in dissident sample was, of course, different from the rest; it was a construction of an individual subject. But the narratives were all told in the knowledge that the telling was occasioned by the narrator's participation in a shared social identity, that of the dissident.
