[Fišer, Zbyněk]
(b Prague, 20 Jan 1930; d Bratislava, 9 April 2007).Czech philosopher, writer, and poet, and a leading figure of the Czechoslovak underground. Egon Bondy’s legendary career began in 1947, when he briefly joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia only to resign immediately after the party’s takeover in February 1948. For the next ten years Bondy freewheeled on the edge of the law, proto-beatnik style. During those years he gained visibility among members of the underground by cofounding the illegal samizdat review Půlnoc (‘Midnight’). With the 1949 Půlnoc collection Jewish Names he started to use the name Egon Bondy. In 1957 he enrolled at Prague’s Charles University on distance study while working as a nighttime security guard. He received the PhD in 1967 with a dissertation entitled Útěcha z ontologie (‘Consolation from Ontology’). From that year Bondy lived on disability while continuing to write, but other than his study ...
