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Anotace

Author(s): Marek Šmíd,Lucie Dušková,Jiří Křesťan,Dalibor Vácha / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2016

OLEXÁK, Peter – SAFANOVIČOVÁ, Anna (ed.): Antológia časopiseckých a novinových článkov Andreja Hlinku. Martin, Matica slovenská 2013, 265 s., ISBN 978-80-8128-087-0;LETZ, Róbert (ed.): Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov. Bratislava, Post Scriptum 2014, 360 s., ISBN 978-80-89567-36-2.PAŽOUT, Jaroslav (ed.): Každodenní život v Československu 1945/48–1989. Praha – Liberec, Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů – Technická univerzita v Liberci 2015, 239 s., ISBN 978-80-87912-35-5 a 978-80-7494-250-1.SEIFERT, Jaroslav: Publicistika (1933–1938). Dubia. Společná prohlášení. (Dílo Jaroslava Seiferta, sv. 13.) Ed. Michal Topor. Praha, Filip Tomáš – Akropolis 2011, 615 s., ISBN 978-80-7304-006-9;SEIFERT, Jaroslav: Publicistika (1939–1986). Dubia. Společná prohlášení. (Dílo Jaroslava Seiferta, sv. 14.) Ed. Jiří Brabec a Michal Topor. Praha, Filip Tomáš – Akropolis 2014, 621 s., ISBN 978-80-7304-006-9.SEIFERT, Jaroslav: Všecky krásy světa. Co všechno zavál sníh. Dodatky. (Dílo Jaroslava Seiferta, sv. 15.) Ed. Marie Jirásková. Praha, Filip Tomáš – Akropolis 2015, 713 s., ISBN 80-7304-006-9.STEHLÍK, Michal: Slovensko: Země probuzená, 1918–1938. (První republika, sv. 1.) Praha, Academia 2015, 193 s., ISBN 978-80-200-2405-3.UNOKI, Ko: International Relations and the Origins of the Pacific War. New York, Palgrave Macmillan 2016, 246 stran, ISBN 978-1-137-57202-8 (tištěná kniha i e-kniha).

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Карел Крамарж - отец русской эмиграции

Author(s): Jana Shetrzhilova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2001

≪В одной из своих волнующих речей К. П. Крамарж говорил: „Придет день, когда Россия будет опять великой и сильной, и тогда возле нее будем стоять и мы, те. кто в пору несчастья остался верен Руси и гордо нес знамя славянства...“ Так и будет. Я твердо верю, что в тот, желанный для нас день, не только мы, эмигранты, разбросанные по всему миру, но и скованная по рукам и ногам цепями рабства Россия выплатит свой долг искренней благодарности своему истинному Другу≫

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Lubica Harbulová. Ladomirovske reminiscencie. Z dějin ruskej pravoslavnej misie v Ladomirovej 1923-1944. Prešov, 2000. 128 s. Lubica Harbulová. Ruska emigracia a Slovensko (Posobenie ruskej pooktobrovej emigracie na Slovensku...

Author(s): Julija Jannarkova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2007

Review of: Lubica Harbulová 1. "Ladomir reminiscences. From the history of the Russian Orthodox Mission in Ladomir 1923-1944." Prešov, 2000. 128 pp.; 2. Russia Emigration and Slovakia (The Immigration of Russian Post-Election Emigration in Slovakia in 1919-1939). Faculty of Philosophy, University of Prešov. Prešov, 2001. 236 p. by: Julija Jannarkova

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«После смерти...» А.П. Ладинского

Author(s): Anastasija Gorobec / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2012

Антонин Петрович Ладинский (1895-1961) принадлежит к ≪младшему≫ литературному поколению первой волны русской эмиграции. В литературу Ладинский вошел как поэт, получив достаточно большую для молодого автора известность в эмигрантских кругах. Он печатался во всех ведущих периодических изданиях первой эмиграционной волны, различных географией своих появлений, был корреспондентом парижских ≪Последних новостей≫ П. Милюкова, публиковал путевые заметки, рассказы, рецензии на театральные постановки и кинофильмы. В 1937 г. в Таллинне был опубликован его первый исторический роман ≪XVлегион≫ из истории падения Римской империи, получивший затем в советском издании название ≪В дни Каракаллы≫ (1960). За ним последовал роман ≪Голубь над Понтом≫ (1938) из истории Византии, переработанный затем в Советском Союзе под новым названием ≪Когда пал Херсонес≫ (1959) и открывший трилогию из истории становления Российского государства. Вторая часть трилогии ≪Анна Ярославна - королева Франции≫ была опубликована в 1961 г., а завершающий трилогию роман ≪Последний путь Владимира Мономаха≫ - после смерти А.П. Ладинского в 1966 г. в издательстве ≪Советский писатель≫. О публикации этих романов в Советском Союзе и пойдёт речь в письмах А.П. Ладинского поэтессе Вере Моисеевне Инбер (1890-1972), приведённых в этой статье, как и о его последнем посмертном, до сих пор нигде не опубликованном и раннее неизвестном стихотворении ≪После смерти≫, присланном Вере Инбер литературоведом Полиной Львовной Вайншенкер через год после смерти А.П. Ладинского. Стихотворение датировано 16 мая 1961 г. и было написано за день до инфаркта, после которого А.П. Ладинский больше не смог оправиться. Он умер 4 июня того же года. Предваряя тексты писем и комментарии к ним, приведунекоторые, необходимые на мой взгляд, биографические данные Антонина Петровича Ладинского.

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Hitlerův "Mein Kampf" 2016

Author(s): Milan Hauner / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2016

Christian Hartmann, Thomas Vordermeyer, Othmar Plöckinger, and Roman Töppel (eds.). Hitler, Mein Kampf: Eine kritische Edition. Munich and Berlin: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 2016, vols 1–2, 947 + 1019 pp., ISBN 978-3-9814052-3-1. With Edith Raim, Pascal Trees, Angelika Reizle, and Martina Seewald-Mooser. Includes illustrations, maps, a list of all known translations of Mein Kampf before 1945, a list of abbreviations, a detailed bibliography in three parts (before 1932, 1933–45, after 1945), and four indexes (a biographical index and indexes of persons, places, and subjects). In the form of an essay, the author comments here on the 2016 critical edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925–26), edited by a team of historians from the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, with additional assistance from others. He contemplates the nature and importance of this book and discusses its author and his meaning in the history of twentieth-century central Europe. He then discusses some of the ideas of Mein Kampf, and clarifies the historical context of the work, returning to the circumstances that led to its being written and published. He also discusses some of Hitler’s fellow travellers in the Nazi movement, who were of importance for this key work. The author brings up episodes in Hitler’s life, and pays particular attention to his still unclear transformation from an apolitical soldier into a zealous antisemite and political agitator of exceptional rhetorical skill, who was able to bewitch the German people and become their Führer. The author also discusses the difficulties that the editors of this critical edition had to struggle with, and he praises their work as utterly solid and astonishingly thorough, particularly the commentaries in the huge critical apparatus. The author concludes by discussing reactions both to the first edition of Mein Kampf and to this critical edition, and he discusses various attempts to publish a Czech edition.

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Tito bez příkras a předpojatosti

Author(s): Jan Pelikán / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2016

Ivo Goldstein and Slavko Goldstein. Tito. Zagreb: Profil, 2015, 911 pp., ISBN 978-953-313-417-8. The reviewer looks in detail at this work by two Croatian authors, father and son, which, published 35 years after his death, is the first biography of Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) to fully meet all scholarly standards. The biography, according to the reviewer, impresses the reader not only by its considerable length, but also by its comprehensiveness, balance, factual precision, convincing judgements, and, last but not least, readability. The reviewer praises the authors’ great knowledge of the topic and their exemplary handling of the sources. Although they did not work in archives, they have paid careful attention to all the important episodes of Tito’s political career, sensitively portraying his private life, and identifying the subtle boundaries between, on the one hand, the life and deeds of the man who held power in Yugoslavia for so many years and, on the other, the post-war history of Yugoslavia, while keeping within the bounds of the biography genre. The authors merit respect, according to the reviewer, for their mostly nonconformist opinions, which are frequently aimed against nationalistically burdened interpretations of the majority in Croatia today, though on some questions they too succumb to them. Although the authors are considerably critical of many of Tito’s actions and decisions (for example, his repression of opponents after the establishment of socialist Yugoslavia and particularly the conflict with Stalin), they present the man and his historical role in an essentially positive light. They attribute to him features of great statesmanship, for example, his extraordinary political intuition, mettle, and ability to unite an ethnically diverse society and make it into a functioning state. The high points of Tito’s career, according to the authors, were the partisan war against the German-Italian occupation and the independent political course for Yugoslavia in the face of pressure from Stalin and the Eastern bloc.

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Rodina kolonizovaná státem?

Author(s): Květa Jechová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2016

Jakub Rákosník and Radka Šustrová. Rodina v zájmu státu: Populační růst a instituce manželství v českých zemích 1918–1989. (Knižnice Dějin a současnosti, vol. 60.) Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2016, 283 pp., ISBN 978-80-7422-378-5. According to the reviewer, the two authors of the book under review (whose title translates as The Family in the Interest of the State: Population Growth and the Institute of Marriage in Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia, 1918–89) convincingly demonstrate the massive growth in state intervention in the private sphere in Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia in the seventy years from the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic to the collapse of the Communist regime in late 1989. She does, however, have some doubts about their periodization, which ignores great political dividing lines in favour of continuities, and she is also disappointed in the authors’ intentionally refusing to pass judgement on the topics they discuss. The reviewer would have liked to have read an assessment of interwar Czechoslovakia, which had sought to be a democratic and socially just state, and she would have welcomed discussion of the Nazis’ intentions to eradicate the Czechs during the German occupation from mid-March 1939 to early May 1945. The reviewer remarks on some aspects of family policy in socialist Czechoslovakia, and concludes that the book under review is useful for the general public as a call for discussion about the social values and traditions and the purpose and operation of the State.

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Hydrokraté a česká vodohospodářská mise ve dvacátém století (1930–1960)

Author(s): Jiří Janáč / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1-2/2017

The article focuses on the unquestionably most important period of construction of hydraulic infrastructures in Czechoslovakia, i.e. the 1950s. The massive construction of multi-purpose hydraulic structures, in particular dams and power plants, but also water mains, which was at that time taking place in the context of socialist industrialization, laid the foundations of the existing national water management system. It was led by a group of water management experts, so-called hydrocrats,which had been forming up since the 1920s. These experts were advocates of ideas of a modernistic water management mission aiming to rationalize and depoliticize water management and seeing full control of surface run off as an essential prerequisite of the future prosperity of the state and its population. According to the author, the era of Stalinism brought ideal conditions for the fulfillment of these visions (nationalization of hydraulic structures and water resources, centralization of administration and investment activities, nature transformation ideas);at the same time, however, the traditional hydrocratic project was compromised by imperatives of productivism, which fact ultimately led to the abandonment of holistic ideas formulated in the 1949–1953 National Water Management Plan and a definite concentration on accumulation of water to satisfy needs of the industry and power engineering. Since 1956, there were pressures reacting to increasing environmental pollution levels and calling for a reassessment of the existing water management policy; as a consequence, the ideas of the water management mission were gradually corroding as well.

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Ochuzená biografie zakladatele Církve československé

Author(s): Marek Šmíd / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2017

Chadima, Martin. Dr. Karel Farský: I. patriarcha Církve československé (husitské). Hradec Králové: Královéhradecká diecéze Církve československé husitské, 2017, 204 pp., ISBN 978-80-906490-5-7. The reviewer’s opinion of the first biography of priest, theologian and church reformist Karel Farský (1880–1927), titled Dr. Karel Farský: The first patriarch of the Czechoslovak (Hussite) Church, is rather critical. Since the formation of Czechoslovakia, Farský joined the reformist movement within the Catholic Church and established a new Czechoslovak Church (later renamed Czechoslovak Hussite Church) in 1920. However, the reviewer believes Farský was a more complex and interesting personality than the book actually shows. The author depicts Farský’s life in its entirety, concentrating predominantly on his role in the formation and establishment of the new church, but has not paid enough attention to a number of related issues and, in addition, his biography of Farský is a hagiography rather than a critical portrait. The reviewer also notices a fairly limited list of sources and appreciable factual and text deficiencies.

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Dramatický portrét Edvarda Beneše v podání francouzského historika

Author(s): Milan Hauner / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2017

MARÈS, Antoine. Edvard Beneš: Od slávy k propasti. Drama mezi Hitlerem a Stalinem (Edvard Beneš: From the Glory to the Abyss. A Drama between Hitler and Stalin). Translated from the French original by Helena Beguivinová. Prague: Argo 2016, 372 pp., bibliography, 52 illustrations and a name index, ISBN 978-80-257-1895-7. The biography of the second Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš (1884–1948), a politician, diplomat, statesman, and political publicist, is a translation of the original title "Edvard Beneš: De la gloire à l’abîme: Un drame entre Hitler et Staline" (Paris: Perrin 2015). According to the reviewer, Antoine Marès, Professor of History of Central and Eastern Europe at the Sorbonne in Paris, whose published works deal mainly with Czechoslovak and Czech history, wrote his book in the best tradition of French historical biographies. He proceeded chronologically and described dramatic moments of the modern Czech history and difficult personal dilemmas of Beneš related thereto in a matter-of-fact way, with an understanding for a broader context, without any burden of negative or positive emotions which the Czech historiography often cannot get rid of. In doing so, he paid special attention to the development of the inter-war French foreign policy. The reviewer provides a detailed account of the author’s findings and comments on some episodes from his own point of view. In the end, he argues against Marès’s opinion to the effect that the Czech and Czechoslovak policy has always avoided forcible solutions.

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Gestapo mýtů zbavené?

Author(s): Karel Černý / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2017

McDONOUGH, Frank. Gestapo: Mýtus a realita Hitlerovy tajné policie. Translated from English by Jindřich Manďák. Prague: Vyšehrad 2016, 292 pp., ISBN978-80-7429-742-7. The publication is a translation of the original title "The Myth and Reality of Hitler’s Secret Police" (London: Hodder & Stoughton 2015). According to the reviewer, the British historian attempts to present a new, revisionist interpretation of the role of the political police in a totalitarian society. He claims that the Nazi Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei – Gestapo) was not the omnipotent, fearsome, and brutal apparatus it is purported to have been, but rather an undermanned, overworked, and underfinanced police organization staffed mostly by former detectives,reacting mainly to denunciations submitted by citizens, using lengthy and not very effective investigation methods, and sticking to legal procedures. According to the reviewer who provides a fairly detailed account of the author’s interpretations, the above picture is sometimes relatively credible (in relation to churches), but not very convincing in other places (in particular in relation to Jews). Moreover, the author depicts only the situation in the Third Reich, and his generalizing conclusions are thus unfounded.

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Až půjdem po Václaváku…

Author(s): Dalibor Vácha / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1+2/2018

The study stems from the author’s long-time interest in the history of the Czechoslovak foreign resistance during the Great War, particularly in Russia. As to its sources, it draws from a collection of published recollections of Czechoslovak legionnaires and their autobiographic novels and other texts of prose. The author attempts to reconstruct the picture of the return of Czechoslovak legions from Russia to their home country; due to the nature of his sources, however, his intention is not to convey an authentic experience of the return in the first days and weeks, but rather to examine the construct created by the legionnaires’ memories and novels. In this respect, he makes use of, in particular, Anglo-Saxon historical literature dealing with similar topics. The key issues include how individuals or whole social groups were coping with the reality of the newborn republic, which was rather different from the visions of the home country they had been dreaming about while away. An important factor affecting their reflections was also the required political nonaffiliation of organizations of legionnaires, as well as the criticism of the situation not just among the veterans, but in the entire society. The extent of the idealization of Russia, which was a fairly frequent phenomenon among them, was directly proportional to the disillusionment after their return, and was a mirror image of their previous idealization of home while they had been in Russia. In the author’s opinion, the topic of the return of Czechoslovak legions home and their life in their home country is far from exhausted; this is why the present study should be just a springboard to further broadly conceived research.

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Studená válka v polovině

Author(s): Markéta Devátá / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1+2/2018

The article is devoted to a US conference and oral history project organized by the University of South Carolina in Columbia in 1969 under the title “Half a Century of Communist Cadre Training”. Its aim was to obtain testimonies of former graduates of different types of education centers of Communist parties and to use the information for a better understanding of the transnational phenomenon of Communist “cadre” training and its importance for the dissemination of the Communist ideology. The authoress introduces individuals involved in or associated with the project – academic experts and ex-Communists/contemporary witnesses – their public actions and literary works. She uses several selected example to attempt to show how the formation of the Communist activists and their subsequent missions were affecting the evolution and development of Communist movements in their respective countries. She thematizes the project’s position in the context of the development of the US Soviet studies and its role from the viewpoint of period socio-political reflections of the Cold War, including predictions of its future development. The article is primarily based on collections of the Hoover Institution Archives in Stanford, California, the core of which consists of unpublished academicand contemporary witnesses’ essays produced under the aegis of the project.

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Poststalinismus jako (ne)stalinský projekt modernity?

Author(s): Jan Růžička / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1+2/2018

The author deals with potential approaches to the conceptualization of post-Stalinism as a specific mental formation gradually born at the turn of the 1950s and 1960sas a result of the crisis of Stalinism. In doing so, he is in opposition to approaches perceiving the period after Stalin’s death as a mere de-Stalinization, or as a transition period between Stalinism and the so-called normalization in Czechoslovakia. He chose the modernity, or modernization, theory concept of German sociologist Peter Wagner and a reinterpretation of the work of Marx (or Marxism as such) by American philosopher Moishe Postone as his methodological starting points, and he introduces both of them in detail in his study. It is through this optics and dissociating himself from the theory of totalitarianism that he interprets Stalinism as a project of accelerated modernization the efficiency of which was ensured bya centralist bureaucratic system, including its authoritarian features, better than a market economy would have done. He also attempts to infer that Stalinism was a specific evolution of thoughts of Marx and Lenin in given historical circumstances. After the 2nd World War, it was paradigmatically applied in other countries with outtaking into account their regional specifics, or the previous history and existinglevel of modernization; during the 1950s, its potential was ultimately spent. In the end, the author tries to view intellectual reform discourses in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s as a distinctive attempt to restart a specific version of socialist modernity. In doing so, he focuses on issues related to the notions of revolution, history, and market, and formulates some hypotheses and topics for discussion.

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Jak se Hitler stal nacistou

Author(s): Milan Hauner / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3+4/2018

Weber, Thomas: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi. New York: Basic Books, 2017, 423 pp., 2 maps, 32 photographs, ISBN 9780465032686; Plöckinger, Othmar: Unter Soldaten und Agitatoren: Hitlers prägende Jahre im deutschen Militär 1918–1920. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2013, 377 pp., 26 illustrations, ISBN 978-3-506-77570-2. In the reviewer’s opinion, the question how Adolf Hitler had become a Nazi, i.e.a full-fledged follower and ideologist of the nationalistic and racial doctrine, which declared Jews and Bolsheviks enemies of the German nation, remained open for a long time. Hitler’s own version to the effect that the transformation had occurred as early as during his apprenticeship years in Vienna, is utterly implausible. It must have happened after the Great War, in the chaos shortly after the defeat of the Bavarian Council Republic in May 1919. The reviewer describes the events taking place at that time, Hitler’s situation and circumstances of his conversion to Nazism, and compares both publications dealing with that period. He admires Weber’s style, vivid in comparison with Plöckinger’s heavy-handed language; on the other hand, Plöckinger precisely documents all his arguments, while Weber does not hesitate to use dubious and obscure sources to confirm his conclusions.

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První československá pozemková reforma jako faktor zahraniční politiky

Author(s): Václav Horčička,Jan Županič / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2019

The authors analyze the course of the Czechoslovak land reform carried out in the interwar period and affecting farmsteads owned by citizens of the Austrian Republic. Based mainly on documents from Czech and Austrian archives, the study proves that the land reform had, for many reasons, a potential to have an adverse impact on relations between Czechoslovakia and Austria. First and foremost, Austrians, in particular noble families, owned vast land holdings in Czechoslovakia, the total area of which was approximately 200,000 hectares, and the Austrian government was not in a position to ignore potential losses. The owners were facing a substantial reduction of their land holdings and hefty financial losses. The compensation which the Czechoslovak state paid for the expropriated land was below the market price and, at the same time, large farmsteads were suffering from high property duties. Attempts of the Austrian owners to force the government in Vienna to decisively defend their interests were ultimately unsuccessful. As a matter of fact, problems associated with the land reform, their unquestionable gravity notwithstanding, were of minor importance for it. The interest of the governments in Vienna and Prague was focusing mainly on huge economic, trade and financial problems of Austria which had to rely on the assistance of the victorious powers. The Austrian diplomacy was therefore evading any land reform-related conflict with Prague and was attempting to influence its course by peaceful means. However, the authors have presented concrete examples showing that the accommodating attitude of Vienna did not result in any tangible benefits for the landowners; compared to landowners in other countries, including Germany, they received less in financial compensations and tax reliefs in the interwar Czechoslovakia.

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Velká kniha bez vítězů a poražených

Author(s): Milan Ducháček / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2020

The author ponders over, from the perspective of the genre of historical biography, the extensive biography of the Slovak Communist politician Gustáv Husák (1913–1991) who, ups and downs notwithstanding, ultimately became the Secretary General of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1969 and the President of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic six years later. In his opinion, the book titled simply "Gustáv Husák" (Prague: Vyšehrad, 2017) deserves respect as an attempt to provide a comprehensive portrait of one of the key personalities of the Czechoslovak history in the 20th century and to address a broad audience outside the academic community, aswell as because of the huge quantity of information it contains. To the detriment of the matter, however, Michal Macháček encapsulated his narration into a too rigid biographic format. While his declared skepticism toward new methodologies may be acceptable, he suppressed himself as the author in the text of the book. He thus not only fails to disclose the values his book is based on, but also resigns to his own interpretations, as if he believed that the documentation presented in the book spoke for itself and that the evidential value of all sources was identical. This deficiency cannot be compensated by his efforts to present Gustáv Husák in a multitude of historical testimonies. Unfortunately, Macháček does not ask himself questions that he should ask as the author, including what Husák’s “historical greatness”, which he naturally assumes, consists in. His narration also completely left aside the issue of Husák’s attitude to law and of how Husák’s legal education was reflected in his own experience of injustice he had been a victim of in the 1950s and the repressions he was later responsible for as a leading politician.

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"Křičel jsem: – Mrdat, mrdat!"

Author(s): Tomáš Glanc / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3+4/2020

In August 1934, poet and writer Vítězslav Nezval (1900–1958), a leading personality of the Czechoslovak inter-war art avant-garde and also a member of the Communist party, visited Moscow as one of the Western guests invited to the founding congress of the Union of Soviet Writers; one year later, he published a prosaic-essayistic reflection of his visit under the title "The Invisible Moscow" (Neviditelná Moskva. Praha: F. Borový, 1935). The purpose of the present study approached from a semiotic angle is to obtain access to the intentional meaning of this specific testimony concealed behind a factual description of events and environments. The author first outlines a broader socio-political context consisting in an intensive interest of Western left-wing intellectuals in the Soviet Union between the world wars and, on the other hand, in systematic efforts of the Soviet leadership to make use of this potential for their own benefit. Nezval ranked among artists who felt a priori sympathies toward the Soviet social experiment, and they are clearly seen in his text, although he himself declared that his intention was not to provide a testimony about the Soviet “objective reality” which is what media reports or articles do. To understand Nezval’s work, the author believes it must be kept in mind that Nezval, while in the Soviet Union, was looking for, first and foremost, inspiration and connections with poetic and ideological principles he professed. Nezval’s cognitive method is intuition, free of any rational and critical reflections, and his creative principle is imagination, whose incarnation Nezval founds in surrealism. The reality around him serves as a matter for a distillation of experiences occurring in a dream mode. This allows him to overlook or willfully interpret various phenomena related, for example, to the repressive aspect of Stalin’s regime or the onerous everydayness of the Soviet Union’s citizens. The author sees the dominant feature of this dreamlike experience and the line connecting seemingly incompatible segments of reality into all-embracing lyrical intoxication in an erotic principle. Nezval is excited by Moscow as an object of bliss, as a source of sexual arousal. This principle is offered to him as a key enabling an individual to cross the boundary of individualism and blend into the society as a bridge between the eternity of sexual ecstasy and the eternity of the classless Communist society, thus promising the fulfillment of human utopias. The author provides an analysis of the text of "The Invisible Moscow" in support of his conclusions, and links them to some period esthetic and philosophical concepts.

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Sovětským Orientem

Author(s): Kateřina Šimová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3+4/2020

In this introductory study opening the edition of selected reportage and travelogue texts, the authoress outlines circumstances and conditions of travelling to the Soviet Union in the interwar period, particularly to the country’s outlying regions which were, due to their remoteness, poor road and railway infrastructure and sometimes also security situation, difficult to access for visitors from abroad. She also describes the trips of four Czechoslovak authors (Julius Fučík, Egon Erwin Kisch, Franz Carl Weiskopf and Jiří Weil) to the interwar Soviet Orient, sets their reflections into a broader period context, and indicates their typical motifs. The central theme here is a conflict of the exotic, the oldbackward world of traditions and customs of indigenous inhabitants, and modernity. In the perception of the authors, the modernity is a combination of three interconnected segments; the first one is a process of industrialization, converting backward regions into dynamic agrarian-industrial centers through electrification, development of transport infrastructure, and urbanization. The second segment is represented by a new organization of social relations based on social and material equality of citizens and reflected mainly in the emancipation of local nations and ethnics and also of women. The third segment is related to a group of topics which can be summarized under a Foucaultian term biopolitics. It consists mainly of a fight against illiteracy and an emphasis on education, development of a medical care system, or building of leisure and cultural institutions (clubs, cinemas, theaters). The principal tool and prime mover of the modernization process is labour which is, in a country striving to build a Communist system, not just a factor of existence, a source of subsistence, but, first and foremost, an existential factor – the meaning of life and a source of happiness and contentment – and also a medium of socialization and disciplination. It is through labour that the Soviet man or woman steps beyond his or her individual needs and interests and becomes a useful part of the society and a “new man”.

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Poněkud neosobní portrét "věrného vůdcova paladina"

Author(s): Anna Blatecká / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2021

The reviewed book titled “'Domů do říše': Konrád Henlein a Říšská župa Sudety (1939–1945)" (Prague: Argo, 2018), written by German historian Ralf Gebel is a translation of the German original „,Heim ins Reich!' Konrad Henlein und der Reichsgau Sudetenland 1938–1945" (München: R. Oldenbourg, 1999). The author closely links a biography of the German Sudeten politician and Nazi official Konrad Henlein (1898–1945) and the history of the region known as the Reichsgau Sudetenland, which existed from 1939 to 1945 in the territory of Czech borderlands ceded to the German Reich. In the reviewer’s opinion, the concept is good; she appreciates a relatively comprehensive presentation of the region’s history and links to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, something that is not all that common in Czech historiography. On the other hand, she regrets that Henlein’s portrait focuses solely on his public career and utterly ignores his private life, which fact makes the result less plastic than it could be. The author’s use of sources is very meticulous and he does not resort to unfounded statements; his work is, in terms of facts it contains, very reliable.

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