Time Is a Mid-Night Scream

Musician, artist and poet, Pavel Z. was one of the leading figures of the Czech underground that operated outside the official culture imposed by the former communist regime. The trial that sent him and several others associated with the experimental rock group the Plastic People of the Universe to prison for their activities gave rise to the human rights declaration Charter 77. Later exiled, Pavel Z. first lived in Sweden and then in New York City, eventually resettling in Prague in the mid-1990s. Time Is a Mid-Night Scream is his poetic testimony of this period, a time of transformation for both himself and his city.