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Bachelor work consists of an introduction, 3 chapters, conclusion and bibliography. Each chapter begins with a brief description, and is divided into subchapters. The sub-chapters contain basic fashion information: history, traditions, features, behaviors and ways of dressing. The work is written in Russian language.

In 2018 the National Museum Prague (NMP) is celebrating its 200th anniversary. Today the Museum is facing its most valuable development: brand new permanent exhibitions. Our monumental historic building was constructed in 1891 in the heart of Prague. After more than one hundred years we had to close the building and remove all exhibitions which were older than 40 years. The building has about 8,000m2 and is divided into two parts. One belongs to our Natural History Museum (NHM) collections with Zoology, Palaeontology, Mineralogy, Botany and Mycology exhibitions. Our new natural history galleries will open in autumn 2019. Housed all on one floor, the galleries will be full of animals like invertebrates, fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals. The second floor will focus on palaeontology spanning more than 500 million years of evolution covering the geographical area of the modern Czech Republic. At the beginning we had to ask ourselves a few simple questions. How do we develop permanent exhibitions that will last for decades? Is excluding modern technology the right thing to do? Should we focus on a more informative/education style or should the interpretation be more populist? And what about the display cases? Should we use old repaired ones or modern cases? It would be great to have answers to all these questions but we still have to deal with the vision and constraints of our curators, collections, budget, legislation, technology and construction of the building. The project has no similar equivalent in the history of the Czech Republic so it was an extraordinary challenge to create our own process of developments with ongoing improvements. Through these developments we have formed new cooperation with technological partners and the creative industries. We are defining a new modern approach to the development and preparation of exhibitions in the Czech Republic. Now that we have reached the half way point towards our vision, it is a good time to report on progress.

This chapter examines a difference in visual representations of the first Czechoslovak President, T. G. Masaryk, in seven history textbooks published during communist and post- communist eras in the Czech Republic and identifies the ideological purposes behind this difference. It interprets why pictures of Masaryk have been eliminated from the communist textbooks and in contrast, why they have become part of a heroic narrative built around the President in the post-communist ones. The author discusses the chosen history textbooks from a perspective of media of memory with an emphasis on the specifics of visual media and visual communication. A mixed method approach is used that combines visual content analysis and semiotic and social semiotic analysis, and anchors the research in the theory of social constructivism. Two ideological filters, the communist and the post-communist one, are used to explain the found difference, the ways they communicate a different concept of history to school students, and how they relate to four iconographic tropes based on which Masaryk has been represented in communist and post-communist times. The research emphasizes the importance of a critical examination of visuals used in educational materials and provides an example, how the methods of visual analysis can be employed. It demonstrates the significance of visual communication and the necessity to understand its principles in order to become critical interpreters of the past and the present, fully equipped researchers and professional teachers.

The significance of the Prague Spring of 1968 is best assessed in relation to the other ‘magic eights' in Czech history. The nineteenth-century Czech national ‘revival’ culminated in the revolution...

The present text deals with content analysis of Czech teaching texts with regard to presence of iconic text. The subject of the analysis is the image of Poland after World War II in Czech textbooks of history for the second stage of elementary education in the latter half of the past and the beginning of this century. Following summarisation, analysis and interpretation of the found visual material the author of this contribution concludes that the textbook authors still apply the stereotype of selective choice scheme and little activating teaching potential of the selected images.

The dispute over the meaning of Czech history has been going on, in spite of interruptions, for the last hundred years, ever since the controversy over the Manuscript Forgeries. It has not been resolved in favour of any of the opposing camps of interpreters, although it has involved a great number of prominent historians. The long duel between Masaryk and Pekar may be considered its climax.

Czech history defies dominant Western progressive historical narratives and moral evolutionism. Czech free-market democracy was defeated and betrayed three times: in 1938, 1948, and 1968. The Czech Protestants were defeated in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Consequently, Czechs have a different perspective on the traditional questions of speculative philosophy of history: Where are we coming from? Where are we going? What does it mean? They ask further: where and why did history go wrong? Jan Patocka (1907-1977), the leading Czech philosopher and the author of Charter 77 of human rights, traced the repeated historical tragedies of the Czechs to the origins of their national movement in the imperial liberation of the serfs in the eighteenth century, debating the dominant nationalist belief in national historical continuity, leading to linguistic nationalism. Patocka accused his nation of being "petty," of low social origins and interests, unlike their elitist neighbors. Despite his obsession with aristocracies bent on any transcendence, Patocka thought that the Czechs should have fought the Nazis in 1938 for the transcendental ideal of democracy. Linguistic nationalism led the Czechs and their leaders to choose life in slavery in their Hegelian conflict with the German masters. The Czech reception of Patocka's philosophy of Czech history has been mixed. I criticize the philosophical, political, and historical shortcomings of Patocka's discussion. Contemporary Czech attitudes to their history include: forgetfulness; new Czech historicism tracing a continuity from Jan Hus to Vdclav Havel; and a search for a historical truth and philosophical understanding of history that has political implications.

Although the criteria of continuity OT discontinuity in history may not be precise, it is nevertheless possible, and not necessarily with hindsight, to qualify certain events as Nptures in what otherwise could be considered a continuous trend of development, Foreign conquest, revolution or far-reaching reform are recognised as the most obvious causes of such a change. A violent change is bound to produce schisms, contrasting views and evaluations which may be passed from generation to generation. Furthermore, on the one hand a sense of protracted injustice and on the other hand a sense of guilt, coupled with a bitterly divided assessment of major events in the past, may coalesce into a traumatic state of mind in the body social. In the Czech cultural history we may identify three such ruptures with traumatic effects for posterity. Each of these ruptures reflected a particular spirit of the time, a particular issue which was at the forefront of the respective phase of European civilisation. The first was under the aegis of religion, whether Catholic or reformed; the second was under that of nationality, whether sovereign or under tutelage, whether unified or federated; the third which is still with us, concerns the totality of culture, whether liberal and pluralistic on the one hand, or regimental and uniform on the other. In all these instances the process started with an upward swing which resulted in an attempt to build up Czech or Czechoslovak polity and society in the imageof Czechs’ own understanding of the values of the time, an image which always implied a certain kind of pluralism. Yet the surrounding world was not so tolerant as to let a pluralistic society flourish in its midst. The element of distinctness within the realms which lived according to the principle cuius regio eius re&gio had to he eliminated. As this happened by conquest folkwed by imposition of an alien rule and alien social ethos, a gaping rupture occurred in the historical continuity of the nation. Several consecutive ruptures were bound to produce cumulative effects, often with traumatic consequences.

When Josef Pekař entered academic life, the Czechs had attained, for the first time since the fourteenth century, a West European standard.1 Industrial expansion and technological progress as well as progress in sciences were accompanied by no less important achievements in culture. The founding of the Bohemian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1890 and the Great Prague Exposition in 1891, realised without the help of Vienna and without German participation, bore witness to the newly acquired self-confidence of the nation. In this optimistic climate Czech intellectuals were able to find the moral courage to take a more detached view of their history, which they had hitherto approached with uncritical admiration. For the first time since Palacký, Czech historiography was given a firm basis by scholars inspired by Jaroslav Goll (1846–1929) and Antonin Rezek (1853–1909). Czech literary and philological scholarship had taken a new direction under the leadership of Jan Gebauer (1838–1907).

The article analyses the style of two picture series dealing with Czech history. The analysis focuses primarily on the way of mediating historical knowledge as well as forming and establishing cultural memory in the two series which are compared. In connection with this, the use of language, the construction of meanings and the interplay between verbal and visual components are described. The picture series investigated represent opposing approaches to the issue of cultural (historical) memory. The objective of Obrázky z českých dějin a pověstí (Pictures from Czech History and Legends; 1980, revised edition 1996) is to depict a traditional version of Czech history and support its adoption by recipients (children being the main target group). Obrázky include various informal, derogatory and anachronistic elements, but these components are used purposefully to attract the interest of recipients in a didactic presentation of historical events. On the other hand, Opráski sčeskí historje (perhaps: Pictures from Czech History; 2014–2015) submit an alternative, subversive, comical and absurd version of Czech history. Their objective is to destruct the traditional view of such history. In order to achieve this effect, Opráskitake advantage of intentional orthographical mistakes (with great invention), play with the language, polysemy of words, anachronisms and intertextual relations to contemporary popular culture.

Gender is rarely considered in the works on state socialism in Czech history writing. Given the prominence of the equality of the sexes in communist rhetoric and the heated anti- and pro-feminism media and intellectual debates of the 1990s, the omission stands out as a remarkable loss of opportunity in historical research. It also defies logic. For if “emancipation” and “equality” were so strongly present in pre-1989 discourse and women constituted half the population, does it not follow that the plain demographic fact should drive the interest of researchers to inquire where this population was, what it did, and what it had to say? The question has so far attracted primarily sociologists, but how does it fare in historiography? What are the losses of the absence and the gains of the inclusion of a gender perspective on the history and memory-making of state socialism? This article will first consider the status quo of gender blindness in Czech historiography and its possible reasons in the context of the legacy that state socialism left to social sciences and humanities: the legacy of expertise, disciplinary legitimation and epistemological legacy. A discussion of the consequences of the near absence of gender history and analysis from post-1989 interpretations of state socialism in historiography follows: blind spots and loss of knowledge, lack of precision and a gender bias of historical accounts, and perpetuation of false legacy. Finally, the article discusses the gains to Czech historiography, memory-making and international discussion, if scholars do consider gender.

The last two decades have seen a rising interest in the Holocaust and the expulsion of ethnic Germans after World War II in Czech literature. Novels by Hana Androníková, Radka Denemarková, Magdalena Platzová, Kateřina Tučková, and Jáchym Topol share a quest for a new poetics of remembrance. Informed by contemporary discussions about Czech memory politics, these novels are characterised by spectral visions of Germans and Jews alike, a dichotomy of trauma and nostalgia, and an understanding of Czech history as postcatastrophically entangled and thus calling for multidirectional forms of remembrance. In this respect, literary memorial forms compensate for the absence of other memorial forms addressing these topics through a transnational lens. The interaction of different historical points of view is achieved by a time frame extending from the war to the present day and stressing the intercultural dynamics of Czechs, Jews, and Germans retroactively. In order to illustrate this entanglement, authors make use of popular genres, such as romance, and create texts shaped by genre fluidity, memory theory, documentary practices, and concepts of transnationality.

The ethnographic shows of the end of the 19th century responded to an increased hunger for the exotic, especially among the bourgeois classes in Europe and North America, and to the establishment of both physical and cultural anthropology as scientific disciplines with a need for study material. At the same time they served as a manifestation of European superiority in the time of the last phase of colonialist thrust to other continents. “Scientific colonialism” reached also to regions without actual colonial or imperial ambitions, as the story of Labrador Inuit who visited Prague during their tour of Europe in November 1880 will prove. The reactions of local intellectuals and the general public to the performances of the “savages” will be examined in the context of the Czech and German nationalist competition and the atmosphere of colonial complicity. Thanks to the testimony of a member of the group, Abraham Ulrikab, supplemented by newspaper articles and other sources, it is possible to explore the miscommunication arising from the fact that the Inuit were members of the Moravian Church, professing allegiance to old Protestant tradition in the Czech Lands and cultivating a fragmented knowledge of Czech history and culture.

This theme is processed by Catholic theologian because the question of Free Masons is connected in the Catholic world frequently with a false presumption, a superstition, that Regular Free Masons are Satanists. Combating superstition is indeed the task of a theologian. In the first and preparative part of this study, the author presents the most important facts from the history of Regular Free Masons in the world and in Czech history. In the second and scientific contributive part, the author analyses the Masaryk’s texts which are dedicated to the issue of Free Masons in their chronological succession. In the conclusion, the author states, that T. G. Masaryk was never a Free Mason, and clarifies his relationship to this organization as diplomatic respect connected with combat for the liberty of conscience and democracy. The relationship between Catholics and Regular Free Masons should take the form of interreligious or ecumenical dialogues.

Presents the debate between Tomas G. Masaryk & Czech politician Josef Kaizl about the problematic relationship between pragmatics & principles in politics. Masaryk's Ceska otazka(The Czech Question [1895]), which seeks reason & a particular sense of Czech national essence, represents one of the first & most influential attempts to structure the various semantic centers around which Czech political culture revolves. Subjecting Masaryk's religious-humanistic analysis of Czech history to a liberal-economic critique, Kaizl rejected Masaryk's reduced, theistic, & anti-Enlightenment interpretation of the national revival, as well as his explicitly antiliberalist grasp of Czech history. Kaizl also denied Masaryk's claim that spiritual life & spiritual independence are more pressing concerns than political life & state independence.

Received 13 May 2020. Accepted 30 June 2020. Published online 9 July 2020. Confirmed by a variety of sociological research, modern Czech society is considered deeply secular, non-believing, rejecting religious institutions and traditional forms of religion. This paper focuses on a field study of religiosity, namely on funeral artifacts in Vyšehrad, the Czech national cemetery in Prague, the Czech Republic’s capital. Based on the findings of ethnographer Wilbur Zelinsky, the paper assumes that gravestones in particular record very private, innermost feelings, messages, tidings, and personal values, which can provide us with important knowledge about (especially) the bereaved persons’ attitudes to human ultimate things including religious issues in the moments of a great loss of a loved one, i.e. in the situation of so-called existential crisis. The aim of the paper is to answer two key questions: firstly, how religion (or non-belief) is presented in the Czech national cemetery and secondly, to what degree is the gravestones’ character influenced by significant historical events of modern Czech history. In other words, how much the image of religion in this nationally important cemetery corresponds with the degree of religiosity researched by standard sociological means. This article has been published as part of the research project “Freethought, Atheism and Secularization in Central and Eastern European Countries in the 20th and 21st Centuries”; supported by Czech Science Foundation (GACR), grant no. 18-11345S.

Most women in the earliest periods of Czech history had access to education only in convents. The Renaissance period saw educated women at the court of Rudolf II, and women with philosophical and scientific interests could be found in the Jewish community in Prague as well. Written documents, including argumentative texts intended to defend the church, prove women’s intellectual interests in the religious reformation movements of the 15th and 16th centuries. Francophonie developed among the Czech nobility in the second half of the 1600s. The preserved manuscripts of women authors of that time were predominantly in French, and their translations were most commonly from French as well. The most educated women in the Czech territory included Maria Eleanora and Anna Katharina von Sporck, who translated religious and philosophical French literature. The philosophical and scientific interests of Czech women are also evident from the lists of books acquired by private chateau libraries, e.g., in Ceský Krumlov, initiated by Marie Ernestine von Eggenberg. A new genre that engaged aristocrats in the 1700s was educational and moral contemplations. This interest was related to the new emphasis on the role of the mother, stemming mainly from the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

This article presents and analyses Opráski sčeskí historje, a Czech webcomic satirizing primarily Czech history, culture, and politics. Opráski sčeskí historje is juxtaposed to the national narrative within the theoretical framework of Benedict Anderson’s and Homi K. Bhabha’s conceptualisation of the nation. It argues that, by virtue of the comic’s aesthetic and linguistic poverty, Opráski sčeskí historje is often semiotically ambiguous and thereby prompts the audience to find more information and form their own interpretations of history beyond the national narrative. Ultimately, this article argues that the comic uses the tactic of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call the “rhizome” in order to expose, critique, and contest national narratives without creating a substituting power-structure.

The paper analyses the relevance of Doležel’s and Cohn’s theories of fictional worlds with respect to the interpretation of historical fiction and historiographic metafiction. These theories are complemented with Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. The author uses Doležel’s concept of a fictional world as a possible world whose entities have no reference to the actual world. Following Ricoeur’s terminology, however, the author further postulates that literary texts bear a “ productive reference” to the “ lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) of the reader. In the case of historical fiction and historiographic metafiction, this productive reference entails primarily the revelation of the historical nature of human existence as well as cultural memory (or, in Pierre Nora’s terms, “ the realm of memory”). The concept of productive reference is applied further in the paper in the analysis of works of contemporary Czech historical fiction (by Kateřina Tučková and Martin Fibiger) that deal with a traumatic period of Czech history – the forced expulsion of Germanspeaking populations from post-war Czechoslovakia., Narrations entre histoire et fiction. L’article analyse la pertinence des théories de mondes fictifs de Lubomír Doležel et de Dorrit Cohn par rapport à l’interprétation de la fiction historique et de la métafiction historiographique. Ces théories sont complétées par l’herméneutique de Paul Ricoeur. L’auteur de l’article utilise le concept de monde fictif de Lubomír Doležel en tant que monde possible dont les entités n’ont aucune référence au monde réel. Cependant, suivant la terminologie de Paul Ricoeur, l’auteur postule par la suite que le texte littéraire porte une «référence productive » au «monde de la vie » (Lebenswelt) du lecteur. Dans le cas de la fiction historique et de la métafiction historiographique, cette référence productive entraîne la révélation de la nature historique de l’existence humaine autant que de la mémoire culturelle (ou bien, dans les termes de Pierre Nora, «lieux de mémoire » ). Le concept de la référence productive est appliqué dans l’analyse deux fictions contemporaines (livres écrits par Kateřina Tučková et Martin Fibiger) qui traitent de la période traumatique de l’histoire tchèque – celle de l’expulsion forcée des populations germanophones de Tchécoslovaquie d’après-guerre., Narratieven tussen geschiedenis en fictie. Dit artikel onderzoekt de relevantie van de theorieën over fictionele werelden van Doležel en Cohn, in het licht van de interpretatie van historische fictie en historiografische metafictie. Deze theorieën worden gepaard aan de hermeneutiek van Paul Ricoeur. De auteur gebruikt Doležels concept van een fictionele wereld als een mogelijke wereld waarin de entiteiten geen verband hebben met de echte wereld. In de lijn van Ricoeurs terminologie stelt de auteur evenwel dat literaire teksten een ‘ productieve referentie’ in zich dragen aan de leefwereld (Lebenswelt) van de lezer. In het geval van historische fictie en historiografische metafictie behelst deze productieve referentie in de eerste plaats de revelatie van de historische aard van het menselijke bestaan, evenals het culturele geheugen (of, in de woorden van Pierre Nora, «de sfeer van het geheugen » ). Het concept van productieve referentie wordt in het artikel verder toegepast op de analyse van hedendaagse Tsjechische historische fictie (van Kateřina Tučková en Martin Fibiger) die een traumatische periode uit de Tsjechische geschiedenis behandelt -de gedwongen uitdrijving van Duitssprekende bevolkingsgroepen uit het naoorlogse Tsjechoslowakije., Tlustý Jan. Narratives Between History and Fiction. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 95, fasc. 3, 2017. Langues et littératures modernes – Moderne Taal- en Letterkunde. pp. 549-560.

Even though the tramping subculture forms a part of Czech society for nearly a century, it only gained the attention of the museums and other memory institutions, aside from some exceptions, over the last three decades. The paper examines both previous research on the history and on the present status of the tramping movement in the Czech and Slovak Republics, and the general theoretical and methodological problems it raises. These include, among others, assessing the importance of individual tramping groups defined locally, socially and by generation; the fragmentary makeup of sources resulting predominantly from the private nature of the tramping and, finally, choosing the appropriate methods when documenting and archiving findings. It focuses, furthermore, on ethical problems of such a research and assesses the blurred boundaries between tramping and other forms of grouping or staying outdoors. The present paper is based on the experience of documenting the tramping movement in the Ethnographic Department of the National Museum and within the grant project of the Department of Czech History in the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.

The main aim of the article is to examine the representation of Bohemia in contemporary Polish literature. The first part of the text focuses on the early stage of its mythologization, in which Czech lands became a point of reference for Polish writers in the times of the emergence of the term “Central Europe” in Polish discourse. The author presents the concepts taken from Milan Kundera’s and Josef Kroutvor’s essays as critical in shaping the perception of Bohemia as a land where, unlike in Polish historical discourse, history does not serve a source of trauma. This Arcadian vision of Czech history is strongly present in Mariusz Szczygiel’s texts, which can be seen as playing the key role in the mythologization of Czech lands in Polish imagination. The second part of the text concentrates on the historical narrative in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Hussite Trilogy and its references to the history of Central Europe. In the trilogy Bohemia and Silesia are consistently presented as bloodlands and a source of trauma, not only in contemporary times but in medieval history as well.

The great Czech historian Jaroslav Goll (1846-1929) had good reason to urge colleagues throughout his career to keep in mind the parallels and connections between Czech history and general European developments.1 The Czechs have always shared intimately in European society; Goll wanted their history to avoid the parochialism so common to writings on small nations. Czech nationalists in the nineteenth century themselves tended to portray all of Czech history as a long and heroic struggle of a united people against alien oppressors, and this outlook has continued to influence professional as well as nonacademic historiography. Historians who followed the inspiration of Frantisek Palacky and, later, Tomas G. Masaryk saw the rise of a Czech national social and political life in the nineteenth century primarily in political, intellectual, and cultural terms, with little regard for economics and social structure. They described how a nationalist intelligentsia used long-standing nationalist, democratic, and anti-German popular traditions to accomplish, first, a linguistic and cultural revival of the nation and then the formation of a mass political movement to demand self-rule. According to this view, national solidarity against Habsburg and German oppressors generally overcame class differences among the Czechs, at least from Austria's inauguration of representative institutions in 1861 until 1914. When these histories discussed economic development at all, they treated it separately from the rise of national public life.2 Conflicting outlooks developed in Czech historiography in the early twentieth century. Historians such as Josef Pekari (1870-1937), Josef Susta (1874-1945), and Kamil Krofta (1876-1945), who partly followed Goll's

With Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, Derek Sayer offers a highly ambitious and deeply problematic sequel to his successful The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, 1998). If in ...

A little‐known aspect of modern Czech history is the Czech attempt to recapture Lusatia, a region between the Elbe and Oder rivers. Populated partly by the Sorbs ,a Slavic people, it formed part of the Czech Lands between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. After its loss by the Czechs during the Thirty Years War, the region passed to Saxony and Prussia. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a small group of Czech scholars campaigned for Lusatia's return to Czech rule, on the basis of Czech dynastic claims and a somewhat contrived idea of Pan‐Slav brotherhood with the Sorbs.

After World War II, state-sponsored deportations amounting to ethnic cleansing occurred and showed that the roots of the Czech-German cultural competition are important. In Bohemia, Czechs and Germans share a long history of contact, both mutually beneficial and antagonistic. Bohemia became one of the most important constituent realms of the Holy Roman Empire, bringing Czechs into close contact with Germans. During the reign of Václav IV, a theologian at the University of Prague named Jan Hus began to cause controversy. Hus began to preach the doctrines outlined by the Englishman John Wycliffe. At the Council of Constance church officials sought to stamp out Wycliffism and as part of that effort summoned Hus, convicted him of heresy and burned him at the stake on July 6, 1415. Bohemia rose in rebellion, in what became the Hussite Wars. Bohemians elected a Hussite king, George of Poděbrady. Shortly after his death, the Thirty Years War began and resulted in the Austrian Habsburgs gaining the throne of Bohemia. The Habsburg dynasty suppressed Protestantism in the Czech lands and ushering in a brutal Counter-Reformation and forced reconversion to Catholicism. By the nineteenth century, a revival of Czech culture and language brought about Czech nationalism. Spurred by the nobility’s desire to regain lost power from the monarchy, a distinct Czech culture began to coalesce. With noble patronage, Czech nationalists established many of the symbols of the Czech nation such as the Bohemian Museum and the National Theater and initiated Czech language instruction at Charles University in Prague and finally a separate Czech university in Prague. The first generation of nationalist Czech leaders, lead by František Palacký, gave way to a newer generation of nationalists, lead eventually by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Masaryk, a professor at the university, successfully lead the efforts during World War I to create an independent Czechoslovakia. Masaryk’s decades-long debate with historian Josef Pekař over the meaning of Czech history illustrates how Czech nationalists distorted historical facts to fit their nationalist ideology. The nationalists succeeded in gaining independence, but faced unsuccessfully forged a new state with a significant, but problematic, German minority.

Among the wealth of Shakespeare plays on Czech stages, The Taming of the Shrew has harnessed remarkable popular permanence. As of 2002, Taming1 was the third most performed Shakespeare play since the end of the Second World War, following only A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night, preceding even such usual suspects as Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. Whereas other plays experience intermittent waves of interest and indifference, Taming seems to enjoy steady popularity: since 1945, 78 productions have been evenly spread so that there has not been a time in recent Czech history when a fan of the play, willing to drive one or two hours to visit a regional theatre, could not see at least one, if not two different productions. In the 2000–1 theatre season, there were no less than six Tamings countrywide, three competing in Prague alone, all based on the most recent translation of the play by Martin Hilský. Even in the context of its usual popularity with Czech audiences, such a spike in performance of one of Shakespeare’s works widely categorized in the West as a risky ‘problem’ play2 seems intriguing.

For observers of Czech and Slovak politics between the two world wars, Antonin Svehla (1873–1933) was an enigma. For historians he has retained that distinction. Svehla’s reserved demeanour, his avoidance of the press and his aversion to publicity pushed him into the background, but even a cursory view of modern Czech history reveals the crucial role he played in political life. Svehla led the Czech Agrarian Party in the closing years of the Habsburg monarchy, when it was the strongest Czech party in the Vienna Reichsrat.1 He was one of the ‘men of 28 October’ who engineered the peaceful revolution in Prague in 1918.2 From the birth of the republic until his withdrawal from public life in 1929, Svehla led his party, known as the Republican Party after 1919, in all political coalitions, with the exception of Edvard Benes’ (1884–1948) government of 1921–22, and served three times as prime minister.

According to a common belief, women’s participation in the political life during the Middle Ages was miserable. However, the most ambitious individuals managed to gain prestigious positions in the state and to influence those who were in power. A considerable number of remarkable women appeared as early as the very beginning of Czech history. Even the founding of the state of Bohemia is to some extent attributed to the legendary Lubossa. Also, at the beginning of the 10th century, two women played important roles in the historical events. When Duke Vratislaus died in 921, his mother Ludmila and his wife Drahomira became seriously conflicted with each other. The ambitious women fought for regency on behalf of juvenile Vaclav. They could not agree on how to educate or bring the boy up. Political and religious differences between the two were also of substantial importance and the end turned out to be tragic – Drahomira had her mother-in-law strangled and it was her who eventually got the upper hand. The situation implies that in the struggle for power women can be as ruthless as men and the death of the duchess was the first act of the fight for the throne that took place at the beginning of the 10th century.

Bohuslav Balbin (1621–1688), a Czech historian, was a member of Societas Jesu (SJ) and author of numerous Latin treatises dealing not only with Czech history, but also with Czech culture, language, legends, and hagiography. His posthumously published works were significant at the beginning of the Czech National Revival (in the late 18th century) when they became models of patriotic writing.

The Czech question arose as a result of Masaryk's decision to create dif- ferent politics and affect the thoughts of Czech people. For this purpose, he wanted to establish how the Czech nation lives culturally. He wanted to grasp the meaning of Czech history. It was an attempt to present the Czech nation as a European na- tion, and Masaryk wanted to contribute to the process of identification of the Czech nation with Europeanity. Masaryk's real message resides in realism as both direc- tion and method. Part of it was the concept of a democratic state, and the struggle to realise it, on the basis of the character of the Czech people. With the first Czecho- slovak Republic, the link was constituted between Czech national life, European and world democracy. The borders within the state never divided the Czech nation and other national groups, but did divide democrats and opponents of democracy. A de- termining factor in maintaining democracy and the basis for later efforts for its re- newal was the democratic political culture. Today's expression of realism is Vaclav Havel's establishment of the "time of the eternal search for the truth" in Czech- German relations. At the end of the road is the possibility of identifying both na- tions with the European idea.

Introduction Mikulas Teich 1. Boiohaemum - Cechy Jiri Slama 2. The making of the Czech state: Bohemia and Moravia from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries Jaroslav Meznik and Zdenek Merinsky 3. Politics and culture under Charles IV Frantisek Kavka 4. The Hussite movement: an anomaly of European history? Frantisek Smahel 5. The monarchy of the estates Josef Macek 6. Rudolfine culture Josef Valka 7. The White Mountain as a symbol in modern Czech history Josef Petran and Lydia Petranova 8. The alchemy of happiness: the Enlightenment in the Moravian context Jiri Kroupa 9. Problems and paradoxes of the national revival Vladimir Macura 10. Czech society 1848-1918 Otto Urban 11. The university professors and students in nineteenth-century Bohemia Jan Havranek 12. Science in a bilingual country Irena Seidlerova 13. The rise and fall of a democracy Robert Kvacek 14. The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (1939-45): the economic dimension Alice Teichova 15. Czechoslovakia behind the Iron Curtain (1945-89) Milan Otahal 16. Changes in identity: Germans in Bohemia and Moravia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Jan Kren 17. Czechs and Jews Helena Krejcova 18. Czechs and Slovaks in modern history Dusan Kovac.

In commenting on the papers presented in this session on the Czechs and the Poles, I would like to discuss Professor S. Harrison Thomson's approach to the interpretation of Czech history and Professor Piotr Wandycz's concept of divide et impera. In addition, although the main emphasis of this conference is on the nations within the monarchy, I believe that some remarks about the relationship of the individual to the empire might also prove useful.

In the fall of 1918, when the colossal empire of the Habsburgs collapsed and a new Czechoslovak state took its place among the Successor States, the birth of the new republic tempted scholars to speculate about how this event would influence the future work of Czech and Slovak historians. Yielding to this temptation, Josef Pekař, a leading Czech historian and co-editor of Český časopis historický (Czech Historical Journal), in the preface of the 1918 volume of the journal jubilantly welcomed the new state on behalf of Czech historians, described the role that Czech history and Czech historiography had played in the past, and suggested what role it would play in the future fortunes of Czech people. His words aptly expressed the views of the large majority of Czech historians at that time

This essay stems from the continuing debate on the background to the partitions of Poland and from my own interest in the no-man’s land between the economic and the constitutional development of that commonwealth. My assumptions are very simple. There are, roughly speaking, two extreme attitudes to the ‘question of the partitions’. The one assumes that it is a nonsense to study the whole of the early modern period merely as an introduction to the final fate of the Republic, namely its dissolution in 1795. No Czech scholar would think that a book on Czech history before 1620 should merely be a prolegomenon to the White Mountain. To that the other school of thought on Poland’s history would argue that the difference between the Czech and Polish cases lies in the fact that the White Mountain, not unlike the battle of Mohacs in 1526 for Hungary, was a military contest, whereas the partitions of Poland were the very complex result not only of European international policy but of the country’s longterm social and constitutional development as well. While its neighbours followed the general trend towards the centralisation of power and the establishment of a strong army, the Republic of Poland-Lithuania by contrast pursued decentralisation and exalted the civil liberties of the noble Estate.