Tramp at a time of normalization
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Miroslav Marusjak was born on June 19, 1960 in Olomouc. He joined the Scouts from 1968 to 1970, experienced occupation at a scout camp in August 1968, and remembers the ban on Junák in 1970. Soon after finishing elementary school, he was attracted by the large tramp community. Thanks to the camping trips, Miroslav began to discover songs by Karel Kryl or Svatopluk Karasek, through which he got to the underground. Bands like The Plastic People of the Universe and DG 307 enchanted him. He began to look for tapes with recordings, and at the same time he became involved in the samizdat dissemination of transcriptions of poems by Egon Bondy, Pavel Zajíček and other authors who were in favor of the regime. During the normalization years he met the singer-songwriter and emigrant Dáša Vokata, listened to Free Europe and began writing poetry. He was inspired by beat generation, represented in Czechoslovakia by Václav Hrabě or Vladimíra Čerepková. At the same time, he began contributing to the samizdat newspaper From the Region of King Barchmick and the tramp periodical Sem Tam. He developed his passion for poetry after the Velvet Revolution. Under the banner of the underground publishing house Ears and Wind, several collections were published. Miroslav Marusjak is a tireless organizer of alternative festivals in 2021 and an external editor of The Ears and Wind magazine and the resurrected underground magazine Vokno (today’s Voknoviny). In 2021 he lived in Olomouc and worked on the track as a signaller. He and his wife Ivana raised a daughter, Anna.
