Thread by @TimothyDSnyder

0/5. I am very proud of five forewords to central twentieth-century texts about the human response to oppression that I have been invited to write in the past couple of years.

Foreword 1/5: To Václav Havel's "Power of the Powerless," written in communist Czechoslovakia in 1978, a timeless discussion of individuality and responsibility (Nov 2018). penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/602111/t…

Foreword 2/5: To Józef Czapski's "Inhuman Land," an account of the wartime Soviet Union by a great artist and one of the most interesting figures of the twentieth century (Dec. 2018).
nyrb.com/products/inhum… and lareviewofbooks.org/article/pursui…!

Foreword 3/5: To Julius Margolin's "Journey to the Land of the Zeks," perhaps the single most important Gulag memoir, published now in English, decades after its composition (Dec 2020).
global.oup.com/academic/produ… and tabletmag.com/sections/arts-…

Foreword 4/5: To Myroslav Marynovych's "Universe Behind Barbed Wire," a recollection of the human rights movement and the Gulag in the late Soviet Union (May 2021).
boydellandbrewer.com/9781580469814/… and commonwealmagazine.org/big-zone

Foreword 5/5: To Tadeusz Borowski's "Here in Our Auschwitz," the indispensable literature about German camps and the Holocaust, appearing in a few weeks in an excellent new translation (Sept 2021).
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030011…