SOU OBÉ ĚJINY - Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV - Akademie věd ČR

526 Soudobé dějiny XVI / 2–3
Munich, an ‘Attempt’ at Revision Of What
Shadows in Piotr M. Majewski’s Review
Vít Smetana
In this article the author takes issue with Piotr M. Majewski’s review of his book, In
the Shadow of Munich: British Policy towards Czechoslovakia from the Endorsement
to the Renunciation of the Munich Agreement, 1938–1942 (Prague, Karolinum Press,
2008), which appeared in the last issue of our journal (‘Mnichov, Británie a pokus
o revizi českého pohledu’ [The Munich Agreement, Great Britain, and an Attempt
to Revise the Czech View], Soudobé dějiny, vol. 16 [2009] no. 1, pp. 174–76).
The author attributes the reviewer’s reproaches solely to lax reading or ignorance
or both. He rejects the reviewer’s claim that the subject discussed in his book
had already been sufficiently researched by others, and believes that the subject
cannot be considered exhausted, even after the publication of his own monograph.
He argues that his book is hardly at all concerned with the events around the
Munich Conference of autumn 1938, which the reviewer, by contrast, has fixed his
attention on. He rejects the reviewer’s opinion that what was of utmost importance
in forming the attitudes of the British Foreign Office towards the Czechoslovak
Government-in-Exile was the anti-Czech bias of the civil servants employed
there. And he particularly defends himself against the reviewer’s ‘labelling’ and
‘pigeonholing’, which he perceives in the assessment of his work as ‘revisionist’ and
as an attempt to overcome the ‘Czech view’. There is, the author argues, no such
thing as ‘revisionism’ or ‘the Czech view’ in contemporary Czech historiography.
Reviews
Ideological Literature in a Non-ideological Version: Twenty Years After,
the First Modern History of Czech Literature of the Socialist Period
Alessandro Catalano
Janoušek, Pavel et al. Dějiny české literatury 1945–1989. Vol. 1, 1945–1948; Vol. 2:
1948–1958. Prague: Academia, 2007.
This thorough review is mostly concerned with the first two volumes of the fourvolume
Dějiny české literatury 1945–1985 (History of Czech Literature, 1945–85),
which was published in 2007 and 2008. The history is the culmination of a ten-year
project at the Institute of Czech Literature, Prague, in which more than fifty authors
took part, led by the director of the Institute, Pavel Janoušek. As the reviewer notes,
in this collective work of 2,500 pages the ups and downs of Czech literature from
the end of the Second World War to the collapse of Communism are systematically,
comprehensively, and non-ideologically dealt with for the first time. The result is