In Quest of History by Jirí Pribán Karel Hvíždala Stuart Hoskins

Author:Jirí Pribán, Karel Hvíždala, Stuart Hoskins [Jirí Pribán, Karel Hvíždala, Stuart Hoskins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, General
ISBN: 9788024642673
Google: nHK9DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
Published: 2019-10-01T16:06:09+00:00

Cultural Idealism and Political Realism

Let’s return to our national revival. The work of Bohuslav Balbín, a Jesuit who wrote Dissertatio apologetica pro lingua Slavonica, praecipue Bohemica in 1672 and 1673, can be regarded as the very first starting point in the revival of Czech as a language able to stand on its own two feet. How does the Czech national revival and its interpretation differ from similar tendencies in the Europe of that time?

If we are to discuss the Czech national revival, we must bear in mind the general social and cultural dynamics that went into the formation of modern nations and nation states. We must refocus on what is common to the Czech national revival and other national-awakening movements in modern Europe and elsewhere in the world. We cannot simply repeat, parrot-fashion, pedagogical paradigms or, even worse, political science’s rhetoric on Czech history, abounding with searches for a “basic formula for Czech history”, “the historical contribution of Czech politics” and its “historical flashpoints”. Such endlessly rehashed banalities, typically accompanied by allusions to the “European dimension” or “Czech crisis”, only confirm the poverty of Czech political science. Instead, let’s try to understand the Czech national revival as one of many historical streams of modern society’s general penchant for creating a highly standardised and homogeneous culture, in which successful efforts to save and codify Czech as a self-standing language eventually – courtesy of historical and political circumstances – resulted in the emergence of an independent state.

The initial period of the national revival is usually taken to mean the years from 1770 to 1805. This is the time of Kramerius and his periodicals Krameriovy císařsko-královské vlastenecké noviny and Pražské noviny, as well as the emergence of Czech theatre, which started out at the Kotzen Theatre in 1781, with the Estates Theatre subsequently performing in Czech from 1783. How would you characterise this period?

As a situation that is similar in many respects to the Early Renaissance in Elizabethan England, even though that was two centuries prior. Society is a communication system capable of describing itself, and of shaping and developing itself according to that description. This applies as much to the creation of national Czech society as it does to any other society, so the establishment of individual means of communication, such as newspapers, literature and theatre, as well as music and the visual arts, played an absolutely crucial role at that time. Just as the modern English nation could not have come into being without an official translation of the Bible – the King James Version – and Shakespeare’s plays in the first half of the 17th century, as we have already discussed, the same can be said for the genesis and formation of the Czech nation because, were it not for the de facto constitution of its language and high literary culture, the nurturing of a homogeneous national culture and the identity this engendered would not have been possible. Interestingly, speaking of translations of the Bible, the first translation into English was penned by John Wycliffe in the second half of the 14th century.

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