Svobodná - Jak jsem dospívala na konci dějin – Ypi Lea (2023)

An international bestseller about growing up after the fall of the Iron Curtain ***** What does it mean to be free? This question was posed by half of the European continent after 1989. And the answer very much depended — and still depends — on when and where a person was born. While under communism people longed for the end of repression and state oversight, in the emerging and often predatory capitalism, they lamented — and still sometimes lament — the existential certainties that are a fundamental prerequisite for any personal realization and freedom. ***** Albanian writer Lea Ypi experienced both. Her childhood in a family of dissidents and intellectuals was split by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, allowing her to observe the sharp contrast between Hoxha's communist Albania, where society was apathetic, and its capitalist version, where the same society nearly fell apart due to unrestrained market logic. Ypi returns to these memories in her internationally successful book Free and attempts to find an answer to how the post-Soviet situation has influenced our understanding of freedom. And whether we can indeed be free…