STUDIE | STUDIES

PEŠEK Jiří
Jan Křen. Sedm desetiletí na cestách soudobých dějin … S. 271
(Jan Křen. Seven Decades on the Paths of Contemporary History)

Mapping the development of the research of contemporary history in the Czech Republic is not possible without analyses of the opinion and research development of key personalities. Jan Křen (1930–2020), a prolific historian who established a new field, an active political intellectual and influential academic teacher, was one of the most important Czech historians from the 1960s to the second decade of the 21st century. Křen’s development of his ideas, transformations of the thematization of the levels and aspects of the modern history of the Czech lands and every more distinctly also Central or all of Europe demonstrates the gradual general expansion of his research optics. The history of the Communist Party stood at the beginning, and from the 1960s they were replaced by Křen’s books on the Czechoslovak western exile representation of 1938–1940 and his fundamental role in large syntheses about the resistance against the Nazis. In the 1970s and 1980s, when Křen was forced to work as a field worker for his political involvement in the Prague Spring, he wrote a fundamental work on the problems of Czech-German coexistence. After the 1989 revolution, in addition to a number of cultural and political activities, Křen founded and led the interdisciplinary Institute of International Studies. At the same time, he devoted his research and literary capacity to the synthesis of Central European history from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 21st centuries.
Keywords: Jan Křen – 20th century – History of Czech Historiography – Contemporary History – Prague Spring – Political Intellectual

RESUMÉ
Using the example of one of the crucial Czech historiographical personalities, the study shows the essential phases of the development of the field of contemporary, or modern, history in post-war Czechoslovakia. In the biography of Jan Křen (1930–2020), one of the most distinguished and extremely prolific historians who repeatedly determined the path of the field, three levels or perhaps three separate stories come together:
Křen’s story is primarily an exemplary biography of a Czech intellectual coming from an artisanal, but education-appreciating background, marked by fundamental breaks in the development of the republic. As a child, he experienced the second decade of interwar Czechoslovakia with the Munich trauma of 1938 and the shock of the occupation, dramatically and tragically ended by the May Uprising of 1945. The reaction of the post-war high school student was an enthusiastic inclination towards communism. From the mid-1950s onwards, the short-lived uncritical fascination was replaced by the gradual transformation of the communist intellectual into the still politically engaged critical revisionist of the 1960s, fully committed to the humanization of socialism. The shock of the Soviet occupation of 1968 followed, and, in 1970, the intellectual Křen was deprived of the possibility of scientific work and publishing and driven by the normalization regime into a police-maintained ghetto of dissidents in blue-collar professions. Then, we follow a Chartist and an extraordinarily creative, prolific underground author emerging from the crumbling forced isolation. After the revolution of 1989, he quickly turned into an internationally recognised, still historically and politically highly active figure in the European debate on Central European history, an engaged figure who determined the direction of discourse especially in the Czech-German dialogue.
The second parallel story belongs to the field of contemporary history, which Jan Křen helped to establish and continuously modernize for decades. Contemporary history was constituted in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Czechoslovakia essentially as a legitimizing canon of the Communist Party, devised without deeper research. In the 1960s, the young and, in terms of research, somewhat privileged generation of communist historians suddenly had the possibility of working with first-class archival material made available to them. Historiography entered a period of research purposefully supported by the party bodies with the aim of re-conceiving the story of contemporary history. This time, the leading role of the Communist Party, shaken by internal struggles and economic failures, was to be legitimized by a thorough elaboration of the history of the anti-Nazi resistance as a primarily communist accomplishment. However, the confrontation of the ideological clichés with the contradicting source evidence as well as the intensive methodological and interpretational debate in the “reform generation” of historians led Křen and a large group of his colleagues in the mid-1960s to shift away from the party’s historical mythology. A similar turn took place in the Czech historiography of earlier periods, where the concept of a rigid alternation of crises and revolutions also differed from the testimony of the comprehensively researched sources. A component of the process of the “liberation of historiography” was also the public appearance of their key representatives, who applied their expert findings to the current political situation in the sense of supporting the liberalisation and humanization of politics. This is doubly true for Jan Křen: as an advisor to A. Dubček and J. Smrkovský, he was literally at the epicentre of events.
The Soviet liquidation of the Prague Spring and the subsequent “forced displacement” of most scholars in the field of contemporary history from scientific work to menial jobs led them, after a certain intermission in the 1970s caused by severe repression, to create samizdat “alternative discussion” platforms (Historické studie, i.e., Historical Studies) and to address new topics. This includes the opening of polemics about the Czech-German relationship in the 19th and 20th centuries. The period after 1989 then made it possible not only to begin research on topics hitherto tabooed or minimised by the regime, but also to fully and in international cooperation explore the Central European and Europe-wide anchoring of the “Czech”, resp. “Bohemian”, or Czech-German historical narrative. At that moment, Jan Křen used his life experience to establish an institute for research and teaching of historically connoted “area studies”.
Finally, the third parallel story focuses directly on the exceptional personality of Jan Křen and his ability to define and actively “occupy” important topics of contemporary history, through intensive research and authorial work to arrive at new opinions and concepts that did not fit the ruling canon or his own previous views and ideas. This is evidenced by his fundamental works on the Czechoslovak anti-Nazi resistance in Western exile from 1963 and 1969. Parallel to his intensive professional activities, Křen was able to develop civic-political actions and overcome crisis situations that would have led people of weaker natures to resignation. During the period when he was forced to work as a water pump labourer, i.e., from the end of the 1960s to the revolution of 1989, he irreversibly lost essentially three extensive books. None of this broke Jan Křen; he shifted the focus of his authorial attention to new topics (Konfliktní společenství: Češi a Němci 1780–1918 [The Troubled Community: Czechs and Germans 1780–1918], samizdat 1987, Toronto 1989), and after the revolution, with enviable energy and productivity, he produced works that became recognised standards (Dvě století střední Evropy [Two Centuries of Central Europe], 2005; Čtvrt století střední Evropy: visegrádské země v globálním příběhu let 1992–2017 [A Quarter of a Century in Central Europe: The Visegrád countries in the global story of the years 1992–2017], 2019). In addition, from 1988 (first at the underground university, from 1990 as a professor at Charles University), he taught and organised. He was an affable, explosive, but kind and amiable man, moreover a teacher loved by his students. His three parallel stories intertwine into the single biography of a pioneer in the field of contemporary history, a prolific author, teacher and political intellectual.

LUKIN Pavel V.
Magna contumelia v Benátkách a „novgorodská revoluce“ roku 1136: dvě epizody politického boje a jejich reflexe v pramenech … S. 328
(The Venetian Magna Contumelia and the „Novgorodian Revolution“ of 1136: Two Episodes of Political Struggle in Source Accounts)

The goal of the article is a comparative analysis of rhetorical strategies used by Venetian and Novgorodian chroniclers from the 13th – 15th centuries in accounts of the two conflicts, respectively: power struggle in Venice (1026– 1032) and the „Novgorodian Revolution“ (1136). The author concludes that, while earlier historical accounts from Novgorod and Venice were very much similar, in the later period, due to the differences in the political evolution between the two republics, Novgorod and Venice adopted different rhetorical strategies of history-writing. In what they diverged was mainly a representation of the „political people“, i.e. townspeople enjoying full political rights.
Keywords: Novgorod – Venice – Medieval Republics – Popular Assemblies

RESUMÉ
Despite many differences, the political systems of Novgorod and Venice throughout the Middle Ages shared a range of traits. Among those was the notion of „political people“ comprising those who enjoyed the right to make political decisions: in Venice, they were referred to as populus, in Novgorod as either „all the Novgorodians“ or „the whole Novgorod“ (later „the whole Novgorod the Great“, ves’ gospodin Velikij Novgorod „the whole Lord Novgorod the Great“, even ves’ gospodin gospodar’ Velikij Novgorod „the whole Lord [and] Sovereign Novgorod the Great“). The most vivid and fully-fledged manifestation of the will of the „political nation“ were popular assemblies, called in Novgorod veche and in Venetian sources variously referred to as placitum, contio, arengo. The fate of these political institutions was different in Novgorod and Venice: in the Novgorodian Republic, the veche operated until the very annexation of Novgorod by Moscow in 1478, while the Venetian „popular assembly“ basically ceased to exist in the same century. As a result, the narrative records from Novgorod and Venice differ in their interpretation of key events in which the „political people“ was involved. A good example can be seen in the parallel between the chronicles of Venetian political struggle from 1026–1032 and the accounts of the so-called „Novgorodian Revolution“ of 1136 which is traditionally accepted as the starting point of the Novgorodian independence. In the early Venetian historical narrative (Origo civitatum), the rhetoric strategy of describing internal conflicts was putting greater emphasis on the unity of the populus. This is roughly what we see in Novgorodian chronicles as well. However, from the 14th century the Venetian chronicles are starting to record evidence of split within the „political people“ or criticize its certain actions. Yet in Russia such rhetoric strategies appear only in Muscovite or in pro-Muscovite (and not in Novgorod) chronicles and are clearly aimed at vilification of the Novgorodian Republican political system. In Venice, such rhetoric became possible when the popular assembly started to lose its actual political importance, after the emergence of the commune, the rise of aristocratic councils and the „closure“ (serrata) of the Great Council (Maggior Consiglio).
The implications of these parallels are not only important for interpretation of ideological beliefs of the elites of both republics, but demonstrate that comparative history methods can be highly productive for the study of Medieval chronicles.

SMÍŠEK Rostislav
Leopold I. a Markéta Tereza Španělská v alegorické řeči příležitostné poezie k jejich sňatku roku 1666 … S. 353
(Leopold I and Margaret Theresa of Spain in the Allegorical Speech of the Occasional Poetry on their Marriage in 1666)

The study attempts to uncover individual allegorical components of their individual image and partly also the collective identity of the Habsburgs with the help of emblematic manuals and interpretive dictionaries of sym¬bols using more than a dozen preserved occasional poems compiled on the occasion of Leopold I’s marriage to Margaret Theresa in 1666. In terms of genre, this occasional poetry was mainly a diverse range of printed and manuscript epithalamia, celebratory poems (encomia or laudatia), sonnets, odes, poetic genealogies and emblems. In conceiving them, the authors of the panegyric works sought inspiration in the biblical tradition and, above all, in the ancient heritage of Greek and Roman myths, which they ingeniously placed in the current cultural and political contexts.
Keywords: Early Modern Period – 17th Century – Habsburgs – Leopold I – Margaret Theresa – Self-presentation – Occasional Poetry

RESUMÉ
The study attempts to uncover individual allegorical components of their individual image and partly also the collective identity of the Habsburgs using more than a dozen preserved occasional poems compiled on the occasion of Leopold I’s wedding to Margaret Theresa in 1666. The point of the outlined form was mainly an indication of the exceptional social and political position of the newlyweds. Therefore, the men of letters identified Leopold I and Margaret Theresa with the most powerful and important married, partner and sibling couples of ancient mythology and the Old Testament. The individual panegyrics included the resemblance of the ruler to the Olympian gods, Jupiter and his wife Juno, to the illegitimate children of Jupiter, Apollo and his sister Diana, the king of Israel Solomon and the queen of Sheba, the royal couple of Ithaca Odysseus and Penelope. The comparison of Leopold I to the mythological heroes Hercules and Jason and Margaret Theresa to the goddess of the blush of dawn Aurora and the goddess of the rainbow Iris was not left out of the spotlight either. Of course, there was a wide range of other ancient and biblical metaphors in the analysed celebratory works, such as the allegorical figures of Glory (Gloria), Cupid, Venus, but in a very fragmented way. On the contrary, the comparisons outlined above appeared in the works of several authors. This fact suggests that it was not only a unique view of a particular individual, but at least a certain group of people, in this case men of letters and scholars, on the individual components of the allegorical image of Leopold I and Margaret Theresa and metaphorically also the collective identity of the early modern Habsburgs.

Obzory literatury | Review articles and reviews

Recenzní článek

BOJDA Martin
Isaak Iselin: Gesammelte Schriften. 2014–2018 … S. 387
(Isaak Iselin: Gesammelte Schriften. 2014–2018)

The review article deals with a new comprehensive edition of the works of the Swiss Enlightenment by Isaak Iselin and his contribution to the formation of Enlightenment historiography in connection with the philosophy of history and mankind. Iselin was one of the pioneers of the thematization of the “history of mankind” (the title of his main work) and its developmental conception as the history of reason, culture, and humanity.
Keywords: Isaak Iselin – History of Mankind – Enlightenment – Philosophy of History

ŠTAIF Jiří
Wácslav Wladiwoj Tomek … S. 394
(Wácslav Wladiwoj Tomek)

The monograph on the historian W. W. Tomek (1818–1905) is an extensive, thorough, thoughtful and ambitious work. The author understands his personality as authoritative for the overall development of Czech historiography in the 19th century. At the same time, he considers his research and interpretation to be a stimulus to rethink the interpretive paradigm of its history, which is to be welcomed. He sees Tomek as a professional initiator of modern historiographic scientism in Czech historiography and underscores its conservative foundation as a characteristic feature of his personality. The overall concept of his monograph is based on sympathies for the personality of this historian, which prevail over the reservations.
Keywords: Biography – Czech Historiography in the 19th century – Reassessment of Historiography

Recenze

Florin CURTA
Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages (500–1300) … S. 405
(Martin Wihoda)

János M. BAK – Pavlína RYCHTEROVÁ
Cosmas of Prague. The Chronicle of the Czechs … S. 408
(Peter Bučko)

Joachim von FIORE
Expositio super Apocalypsim et opuscula adiacentia. Teil 1 … S. 414
(František Šmahel)

František GRAUS
Mor, flagelanti a vraždění Židů. 14. století jako období krize … S. 415
(František Šmahel)

Marek BUDAJ – Luboš POLANSKÝ
Uherské středověké dukáty ze sbírky Národního muzea.
Zlaté ražby od Karla I. Roberta z Anjou po Jana I. Zápolského (1325–1540) … S. 419
(Robert Šimůnek)

Eva CHODĚJOVSKÁ a kol.
Krajina v rukou barokního člověka. Lidé a krajina v 16.–18. století na východě Čech … S. 420
(Michal Vokurka)

Karel STANĚK – Michal WANNER
Císařský orel a vábení Orientu. Zámořská obchodní expanze habsburské monarchie (1715–1789) … S. 424
(Rudolf Manik)

Christopher Alan BAYLY
Zrod moderního světa 1780–1914. Globální spojitosti a srovnání … S. 427
(Miroslav Šedivý)

Marian HOCHEL – Ondřej HANIČÁK – Jiří ŠÍL (ed.) – Romana ROSOVÁ a kol.
1820 – Opavský kongres. Křižovatka evropské diplomacie … S. 431
(Vojtěch Szajkó)

Sebastian RAMISCH-PAUL
Fremde Peripherie – Peripherie der Unsicherheit? Sicherheitsdiskurse über die tschechoslowakische Provinz Podkarpatská Rus (1918–1938) … S. 434
(Jan Rychlík)

Emil VORÁČEK a kol.
V zájmu velmoci. Československo a Sovětský svaz 1918–1948 … S. 439
(Jan Rychlík)

Jaroslava HOFFMANNOVÁ
Jaroslav Werstadt (1888–1970). O minulosti pro přítomnost … S. 444
(Zdeněk Pousta)

Eckart KRÖPLIN
Operntheater in der DDR. Zwischen neuer Ästhetik und politischen Dogmen … S. 448
(Martin Bojda)

Martin NODL – Piotr WĘCOWSKI (edd.)
Marxismus a medievistika: společné osudy? … S. 453
(Vratislav Vaníček)

Zprávy o literatuře … S. 459

Z vědeckého života | Chronicle

HLAVÁČEK Ivan
200 let francouzské École Nationale des Chartes (1821-2021) … S. 485

Nekrolog

Jiří Sláma (23. 11. 1934 – 26. 12. 2020) … S. 495
(Tomáš Klír)

Franz Machilek (9. 1. 1934 – 5. 4. 2021) … S. 498
(Ivan Hlaváček)

Výtahy z českých časopisů a sborníků … S. 504