HISTORIOGRAFIE VE VLEKU POLITIKY DĚJIN: PŘÍPAD ŠTEFÁNIKOVSKÉ LEGENDY ĽUDOVÍTA HOLOTÍKA
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE WAKE OF THE POLITICS OF HISTORY: THE CASE OF ĽUDOVÍT HOLOTÍK’S BOOK ŠTEFÁNIKOVSKÁ LEGENDA

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyses the issue of a fight against the bourgeois legends about the foundation of Czechoslovakia in 1918. It uses the example of a Slovak historian Ľudovít Holotík and his book Štefánikovská legenda a vznik ČSR. It also focuses on the changes experienced in the period 1960–1968 by the Czech and Slovak historian communities and historiographies describing the First World War and the fight by Czechs and Slovaks for an independent country. In the period following the assumption of power by the Communists in February 1948, the fight against the bourgeois legends about the foundation of Czechoslovakia was one of the main tasks of the official Czechoslovak historiography. Book and journal production devoted to this subject culminated in 1958 with a book by a prominent Slovak historian Ľudovít Holotík Štefánikovská legenda a vznik ČSR. Its author set out to prove the claim that the work of M. R. Štefánik (and the whole Czechoslovak resistance abroad) during the First World War could not lead to the liberation of Czechs and Slovaks from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The book received a lot of positive responses from Holotík’s colleagues at the time it was published, but in the changing political and social climate of the 1960s it was subjected to sharp criticism. The disapproval culminated during the Prague Spring of 1968. Holotík became gradually isolated and so did his colleagues, who in the new climate refused to uphold their reviews from ten years before. Due to the public pressure, Holotík had to resign from his post as the director of the Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in October 1968.

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