Prague Perspectives (II): A New Generation of Czech East European Studies
edited by Lukáš Babka and Petr Roubal
published by The National Library of the Czech Republic - Slavonic Library, Prague 2007
ISBN 978-80-7050-534-2
Foreword
Prague Perspectives II: A New Generation of Czech East European Studies
is a result of a long term collaborative project of The Slavonic Library in Prague and Prague Perspectives, an association for advancement of east European studies in the Czech Republic. It presents a sequel to Russia in Czech Historiography, which surveyed the state of the art in Czech Russian studies and to Prague Perspectives I: The History of East Central Europe and Russia, which had broader scope introducing the Czech historiography of the Eastern Europe as well as commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Jan Slavík, a prominent interwar expert on Soviet Russia. The current volume focuses on the academic production of the youngest generation of the Czech East European studies (none of the authors is older than forty). Though this generation of Czech East European Studies does not constitute any coherent group lacking both institutional framework and common theoretical approach, it shares the experience of the post-communist academic condition. This experience brought on the one hand fragmentation and disintegration of the academic institutions dealing with Eastern Europe (as well as of the object of the research), drastic budget cuts and brain drain, on the other hand it offered the local researches the advantage of a fresh look, a ”Prague perspective”, on the region of Eastern Europe undistorted by dominant political or academic discourses.The current volume consists of two large themes, which represent two main current areas of research that markedly differ from the priorities of the Czech East European Studies of the past decades. The first theme represents the current focus on socio-cultural rather than political issues in the Czech East European Studies. It covers the whole spectrum of cultural studies ranging from a semiotic analysis of archaic Slavic myths, through literary studies of a local Cashubian literature as well as literary experiments of the Stalinist Soviet culture to analyses of corporeal images of the same period. The theme concludes with philosophical discussion of work of Romanian-French scholar Emil Cioran and analysis of the role of ideology in the formation of sociology under communism, which also brings a comprehensive bibliography of the subject. The second part of the book centres on the common theme of mutual contacts, cultural and political transfers among the nations of the Eastern Europe. Two texts deals with the image of the other Slavic nations: one analyses the notion of Slavonic unity and perception of Russia in Renaissance and Baroque Croat literature, the other ”good” Balkanism, that is to say the positive perception of Montenegro in the Czech nationalist discourse. The other texts deal with more tangible contacts between the Slavic nations, for example discussing the still controversial issue of how much the Czechoslovak public knew and could have known about the Stalinist terror, dealing with the attitudes of the Czech politicians to the aspirations for Ukrainian independence or analysing the intricate history of the anti-Tito, pro-Stalinist Yugoslav exile in Prague of the 1950s. In bringing together in these two broad themes the diverse range of texts, the Prague Perspectives II demonstrates the ambitions, variety, scope and limits of the current East European Studies in the Czech Republic.
Lukáš Babka and Petr Roubal