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Since the Czech policy became a mere component of the westernpart of the Empire after the Compromise 1867, the Czech political elite,with an orientation to the conception of historical rights, strove for an equalnational position. As a result, they lost interest in the Slovak policy as an allyand the Slovak question as a part of a wider conceptual solution. The Slovakpoliticians with a natural right conception rejecting historic rights as “oldrubbish” were placed in a complicated situation. On the base of historicalrights there were many attempts to realize the cooperation between the partof the Czech politicians and Hungarian opposition against the Vienna court.Such cooperation, however, did not have a chance of success and only arouseddiscontent among the Slovak political elites. Slovak policy after decades on thecrossroad between Vienna, Budapest and Prague came with the beginning ofthe WW1 into the new geopolitical situation. In May 1917 the Czech politicalprogramme, for the first time, abandoned the principle of historic rights, crossedthe river Morava and included Slovakia and the Slovaks in its sphere of interest.After the Czechoslovak Republic was declared, the struggle – propagandist,mental, military and diplomatic – for Slovakia was only beginning.
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List of reviewed books: PIETER M. JUDSON, The Habsburg Empire. A New History (Rudolf Kučera) INES LUFT, Eduard Winter zwischen Gott, Kirche und Karriere. Vom böhmischen katholischen Jugendbundführer zum DDR-Historiker (Petr Husák) JOSEF SERINEK, JAN TESAŘ, Česká cikánská rapsodie (Pavel Baloun) PAVEL KOLÁŘ, Der Poststalinismus. Ideologie und Utopie einer Epoche (Jiří Růžička) PETR ROUBAL, Československé spartakiády (Karel Šima) PETR ORSÁG, Mezi realitou, propagandou a mýty. Československá exilová média v západní Evropě v letech 1969–1989 (Pavel Horák)
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Es scheint, als hätte Böhmen für die deutschen Intellektuellen des 18. und beginnenden 19. Jahrhunderts nur eine geringe Bedeutung besessen. Keineswegs gehörte das Land zu den beliebten Reisezielen der gebildeten Deutschen, die bekanntlich in jener Zeit Aufenthalte in Italien, Frankreich, der Schweiz oder England bevorzugten. Und doch fuhren alljährlich in den Sommermonaten hunderte Auswärtige über die Grenze in das Land hinein. Es waren vor allem die Bäderreisenden, die Kranken, Rekonvaleszenten, Hypochonder aller Couleur sowie die repräsentationssüchtigen Standespersonen, welche Teplitz, Marien-, Karls- oder Franzensbad aufsuchten.
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The article analyzes the discussion about Czech literary classicism in the journal Listy filologické. It is based on the currently ongoing research of discursivity of 19th century Czech and Slovak literature. The research showed that due to its interdisciplinary nature the Listy filologické journal became in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century an important platform for discussing issues and terminology specification of classicality and classicism in the Czech culture. With the remarkable scholar Arne Novak, the question of the nature of the Czech classicism came to the fore in the first half of the 20th century, which, unlike previous studies on this topic, was not primarily descriptive but analytical. Therefore it attracted attention of the classical philologist Jaroslav Ludvíkovský, who gave more precision to Novák’s definition of classicism in the Czech literature. Due to the violent ideological limitation of the intellectual influence of Czech classical philology in the second half of the 20th century, however, it was apparently not possible to prevent the gradual reduction of understanding of literary classicism.
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The review of: Jiří Strejc: Žalmové neb zpěvové svatého Davida. Žalmové parafráze Jiřího Strejce podle vydání z roku 1598 s variantami podle vydání z let 1587 a 1596. Ed. Tomáš Matějec. Praha: Strahovská knihovna, 2014. 457 s.
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In the Old Czech composition Tkadleček (The Weaver; after 1407) the late medieval Bohemian literature achived its pinnacle; it is considered one of the most important works of Czech literary canon. The origin of this anonymous work can be traced back to an extraordinary German text Ackermann aus Böhmen (The Ploughman from Bohemia; around 1400) by Johannes von Tepl. Both compositions are linguistically sublime and present compelling problems, aspiring to more than mere linguistic artistry. The paper focuses on a genre analysis of the text, demonstrating that Tkadleček belongs to the tradition of consolatory rhetoric, drawing special attention to the context of lay piety and pastoral care in Late Middle Ages.
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This study deals with educational texts of two Czech women writers who formed the spiritual climate of the Czech culture in the second half of the nineteenth century – Sofie Podlipská and Teréza Nováková. It demonstrates that the discussion of the varied and inherently dynamic nature of literary realism in the Czech lands was spread to a wider readership through the cultural education and the involvement of the forming women’s movement. The coexistence and the interpenetration of different discourses is particularly evident from the example of the analyzed magazine Domácí hospodyně (The Housekeeper). The initiative for its establishment came from a lingering romantic idea personified in Olomouc by Jindřich Wankel. The composition of the magazine, its focus and the personality of the editor Miloslava Procházková unequivocally refer to the Biedermeier period. This, however, did not prevent the publishing of articles and essays on realism and naturalism, or those advocating these movements.
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Historical and cultural memory is put into practice through narratives. As a narrative medium, literature plays an important role in the process of transformation of the past events in cultural memory. This transformation includes critical reflection or affirmation of various aspects of memory and its social context. Literary texts in this paper include short stories of Jan Drda, Josef Škvorecký and Zdeněk Rotrekl which deal with the final days of the World War Two.
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The end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century appear to have been a turning point in many ways as well as a key period for understanding the subsequent literary evolution. Areas in which tensions caused by historical processes became strongly evident were, for instance, the life styles and attitudes of the aristocracy, the intellectual atmosphere, the status of women in the society and the emergence of ego-documentary genres. With reference to the above-mentioned topics, this essay deals with two editions of ego-documentary texts written by two young noblewomen who spent their youth during the period of sentimentalism and romanticism. This essay demonstrates how strong the preserving role of states and cultural traditions was and to what extent individual – and in some passages even literary – features of the authors can be considered. (This literariness may also be caused by the fact that ego-documentaries have gradually become a valid part of literary context as well as by the fact that through ego-documentaries even traditional prose genres have been modified.)
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Hymnography of the Habrovany community is, besides the Utraquist and Brethren (by Unity of the Brethren) production, an essential source of investigating the hymns of the 1st half of the 16th century and Czech poetry of the Humanism and Renaissance periods in general. The quality of the new Habrovany hymns nearly matches that of the hymnography of the time. All editions of the hymn books present the theological teaching of the Habrovany community with a relative conceptuality, the hymns being part of their religious works, the literary-aesthetic aspect is only secondary. It is the dominance of the teaching aspect at the expense of the aesthetic one that was probably the obstacle to accept the hymns into the hymnographic sources. Later the Habrovany hymn books became a prototype of its kind, with functional syncretism being typical for them (singing during a liturgy and the guide for the religious life of an individual). From the point of view of the content and motivation, the hymns correspond to the concept of the Middle Ages rather than the poetics of national Humanism (that can rarely be seen, e.g. in hymns by Beneš Optát), the Habrovany hymnography with its didactic approach and simple vocabulary represents rather a continuation of the Tabor or Brethen poetry. The specific position of the Habrovany community led to only a very small number of hymns being included in the later hymnography canon.
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This study deals with Adelheid (1969), František Vláčil’s film adaptation based on Vladimír Körner’s novel of the same name. The director does not disrupt the main story line of the original text; nevertheless he simplifies it by omitting some episodes. With his “open adaptation” Vláčil offers greater space for the viewer to reflect on a still traumatic historical topic: the expulsion of the German minority from post-war Czechoslovakia. Such a shift is made possible thanks to the “unorthodox material” of the literary text. This study explores the creative avant-garde methods used in the film, which above all demonstrate Vláčil’s exceptional cinematic poetics. The adaptation itself is then examined as a distinctive process of intermedial transposition. The outcome of such a creative process is a new audiovisual work of art constructing a fictional world that portrays human freedom, the relationship between an individual and external unfortunate events and the topic of misunderstanding. Vláčil’s Adelheid is shown ultimately to provide universal testimony about human existence in a disturbed world.
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Theatrum passionale domini nostri Iesu Christi anebo Zrdcadlo umučení Pána našeho Ježíše Krista Spasitele, shortly Passion Play of Železný Brod, is a North Bohemian passion play from the second half of the 18th century. The article focuses on the genre-specific character of the play, including contemporary designations comedy and mirror. It pays attention to the religious context of the play, to the influence of Jesuit drama and contemporary poetics (Kolčava, Balbín) and evaluates the relations between passion plays from the regions of Giant Mountains and Lužické Mountains, whose still uncertain dating greatly problematizes this research.
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František Xaver Jiřík ist in der tschechischen literaturwissenschaftlichen und theatrologischen Literatur eine fast unbekannte Persönlichkeit. Seine Wirkung auf den deutschen Bühnen in Ofen und Pest registrierte mit einigen Bemerkungen nur die ungarische und deutsche wissenschaftliche Literatur. Der Autor bezieht sich auf seine langjährige Forschung in den ungarischen Bibliotheken und Archiven. F. X. Jiřík war ein Mitglied des Opern- und Schauspielenensembles bei den deutschen Theatern in Ofen und Pest in den Jahren 1789–1813. Neben den Hauptrollen in den Harlekiniaden und Kasperliaden des älteren Typus brillierte er vor allem in den komischen Rollen in romantisch-komischen Märchen- und Volksopern von Vincenc Ferrerius Tuček und Wenzel Müller (man könnte seine Titelrolle in der komischen Oper von Tuček Hans Klachel im Jahre 1802 besonders hervorheben). Oft trat er auch in den Opern Mozarts auf (er war z.B. ein langjähriger Papageno in der Zauberflöte). Er war aber auch in kleineren Rollen in den Schauspielen von Shakespeare und Schiller zu sehen. Ein wichtiger Teil des Lebenswerkes Jiříks waren die Übersetzungen der italienischen Opernlibretti ins deutsche. Jiřík übersetzte Libretti zu den Opern Haydns (Armida, Ritter, Roland der Stärke), Mozarts (Don Juan und Die Großmut des Titus), Salieris (Axur, König von Ormus), Guglielmis (Die adelige Schäferin), Paisiellos (Die Müllerin) u. a. Er schrieb auch zwei originelle Libretti zum Singspiel von Johann Panneck Die christliche Judenbraut (1789) und zu der biblischen Oper von Vincenc Ferrerius Tuček Israels Wanderung durch die Wüste (1810). Er unternahm auch Versuche um eigenes dramatisches Schaffen. Neben der Tragödfie Achilles und Polyxena (1808) dem „historisch-militaristischern“ Schauspiels Die Einführung des Prinz-Eugenius-Thores oder Temeswars Befreyung (1813) schrieb er vor allem das Schauspiel Stephan, der erste König der Hungarn (1792), und das als Vorlage für das gleichnamige Stück des bedeutenden ungarischen Dramatikers József Katona diente. Die ungarischen Zuschauer wollte Jiřík auch mit der komischen Oper mit Ballet Hungarns Gastfreiheit (1802), wo er der Autor des Textes und vielleicht auch der Musik war, gewinnen. Das Autorenwerk Jiříks zeichnet sich abgesehen von den dramaturgischen Mängeln (schleppende Handlung, langwierige und nicht funktionelle Dialoge u.a.) durch aufklärerischen Widerwillen gegen die Stände- und Rassen Vorurteile und demokratisches Empfinden aus. František Xaver Jiřík vereinte in sich das österreichisches Bewußtsein und den europäischen Ausblick mit Aufklärungseinsichten. Dem Verlust der tschechischen Identität setzte er seinen Beitrag zu der deutschen und ungarischen Kultur in Ungarn entgegen.
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The study deals with the malaise threatening democracy in Europe and its projection into the Czech intellectual milieu. It focuses on the First Republic, its ideas based mainly on Masaryk’s and Čapek’s pragmatism and humanism in contrast to the rejected Catholicism represented by Jaroslav Durych, Jan Zahradníček, Josef Florian, Jakub Deml and others. The Munich dictate meant a tragic change in the situation and different interpretations of this historical event occurred. The Catholics interpreted that as a “God’s Punishment”. This may be the reason why Catholic authors were blamed for their sympathies for Fascism due to their attitude to Antisemitism. This study stresses the ambivalent attitude of Catholic authors to Antisemitism which is usually misunderstood. Just one of them, Jakub Deml, showed the primitive Antisemitism based on racial intolerance. These attitudes were used later on by Communist propaganda to condemn Catholic authors.
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In this article I sketch out the general outlines of the so-called ‘Great Polish Emigration’ after the November Uprising (i.e. after 1831) from the (broadly understood) intellectual history perspective. Subsequently I present the wider intellectual background, attempting to place the output of the émigrés in the longer-term intellectual perspective of Polish history. I focus on the main dimensions and reasons underlying the ideological and conceptual evolution of the Polish community that emerged in exile. By evoking the most striking examples of their conceptual and organizational innovations and examining the scale of their publishing activity, I conclude that they brought about substantial changes in many spheres of action and reasoning. In the last part of the article I compare the Great Polish Emigration with similar phenomena in Europe, as well as with precedents and succeeding emigrations in Polish history. In conclusion I try to answer the question posed in the title, i.e. whether the emigration after the November uprising was really ‘great’.
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Based on the analysis of documents from the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav archive collections, the paper deals with the emigration of Czechoslovak citizens to the West through the territory of socialist Yugoslavia. Even though this phenomenon appeared already in the 1960s with the boom of Czechoslovak mass tourism on the Adriatic coast, our chronological focus lies on the 1970s and 1980s. During this period of so-called “normalisation”, the Yugoslav road became one of the most important paths of emigration to the Western countries. The paper argues that despite the efforts of Czechoslovak communist government to hinder the emigration, the urgent need to grant the raising consumption demands on the side of citizens, drove Husák’s leadership to gradually loosen the requirements for tourist trips to Yugoslavia. Thus, in the mid-1980 far more than half a million of Czechoslovaks were allowed to spend their vacations on the Yugoslav sea per year, even if thousands of them used this opportunity to flee to the West.
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The study focuses on the statistical evaluation of data on crime in1882–1911 published in contemporary records. Firstly, a descriptive analysis is used to compare selected characteristics of persons condemned to death. Secondly, a multinomial logistic regression model is used to identify and statistically test factors determining whether a felon deserved pardon or was eventually executed. The final evaluation of the results of both analytical methods points out the differences in various parameters of criminal behaviour and its treatment on the side of the state across the lands of the Cisleithanian part of the Habsburg Monarchy.
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"Obrazy nepřítele v Československu 1948–1956" [Images of the Enemy in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1956] by Czech cultural historian Denisa Nečasová examines four groups of enemies constructed by the Czechoslovak media between 1948 and 1956: the bourgeoisie; the so-called “kulaks”; Catholic priests; and the United States of America. The study follows the postmodern linguistic turn and focuses on the relationship between power, ideology and language. The discourses she examines are described and interpreted in four consecutive chapters. Nečasová captures the generally diminishing intensity of pejorative images, which corresponds to the loosening of the regime after the deaths of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin and Klement Gottwald. The book’s major contribution is that it elucidates the way in which the use of long-term stereotypical constructs helped the Czechoslovak communist regime shape images of its enemies and also that it draws attention to the interconnectedness of Czechoslovak discourses with discourses in Western Europe in the eight years covered by the book. The review is critical of the predominantly descriptive nature of the book and Nečasová’s decision not to attempt to reconstruct how Czechoslovak society at the time reacted to the – highly performative – “images of the enemy”.
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