Search results for ""Karolinum,Nakladatelstvi Univerzity Karlovy,Czech Republic""

An examination of the cultural and artistic consequences of post-WWI nationalism in Europe. World War I was a seismic event in Europe whose most concrete ramifications were the sweeping changes made to maps of the continent after 1918. A number of new, independent states were established in the wake of the Armistice, and these tectonic developments found varied expression in the arts, transforming the image of the continent both cartographically and artistically. This new edited collection focuses primarily on how modernism and the avant-garde responded to these geographic changes in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, and Scandinavia. The contributors explore the clashes between the national, the transnational, and the cosmopolitan as they played out in diverse artistic genres. In many countries across Europe, the struggle for national independence—which in many cases began in the nineteenth century and culminated only after World War I—had important cultural and artistic consequences, which are only beginning to be understood. This book—copublished with Artefactum—provides a crucial new lens to rethink the methodological tools used to understand the complexity and the multiplicity of avant-garde forms in twentieth-century Europe, encouraging scholars to reconstruct global cultural history without tired nationalistic approaches.

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Following their engaging study Homelessness among Young People in Prague, the authors of this book turn their attention to an older population facing the same issue, a very different situation since these older adults grew up under a communist regime where an obligation to work was enshrined in law and living on the street could result in a prison sentence. Based on three years of research, this book provides a slew of data-based statistical insights, analyzing the efficacy of relief provided by both the state and nonprofit organizations, detailing how the clients of such organizations rate their services, to what extent they accept assistance, and whether they believe it has helped them. More importantly, it features extensive interviews with real people, making it the first Czech book on this issue to present homelessness from the perspective of those who live with it every day.

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It is known that a society in transformation undergoes significant changes on many levels, but structural and cultural changes are arguably two of the most significant. How do such monumental changes affect the lives of individuals and small communities? Teachers on the Waves of Transformation aims to answer this question through the lens of education. With careful exploratory research at two schools in a small town in central Bohemia, anthropologist Dana Moree follows the fates of two generations of teachers at the schools. Through interviews with teachers, school administrators, and the students’ parents, Moree focuses on the relationships, values, shared stories, and symbolic and ritual worlds that create the culture of the schools. Teachers on the Waves of Transformation offers a unique perspective of cultural flux as witnessed in the classroom.

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Much of what we now consider the canon of twentieth-century Czech literature-the work of authors like Bohumil Hrabal, Ludvik Vaculik, and Jachym Topol, among many others-has, in fact, just recently become widely available to readers. Long published only in censored form or in secret among political dissidents, this body of underground literature is collectively known as samizdat. Samizdat Past and Present provides an expert introduction to these writings and their history, offering insight into both the current wave of literary rediscovery and translation and contemporary debates over censorship. In a diverse array of chapters, Tomas Glanc gathers together texts from representative figures of Czech samizdat and underground culture of the 1960s to '80s and provides a useful comparison of Czech, Polish, and Russian samizdat. From literary historians to former samizdat publishers and writers with firsthand experience of communist censorship, secret police, fake trials, and imprisonment, t

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Thought necessarily reflects the times. Following the tragedy of the Holocaust, this fact became ever more clear. And it may be the reason postwar philosophical texts are so difficult to understand, since they confront incomprehensibly traumatic experiences. In this first English-language translation of any of his books, Miroslav Petr cek--one of the most influential and erudite Czech philosophers, and a student of Jan Patocka--argues that to exist in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, Western philosophy has had to rewrite its tradition and its discourse, radically transforming itself. Should philosophy be capable of bearing witness to the time, Petr cek contends, this metamorphosis in philosophy is necessary. Offering an original Central European perspective on postwar philosophical discourse that reflects upon the historical underpinnings of pop culture phenomena and complex philosophical schools--including Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Derrida, Husserl, Kracauer, and many others--Philosophy en noir is a record of this transformation.

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In Fragmented Lives, Gulag survivor Jacques Rossi opens a window onto everyday life inside the notorious Soviet prison camp through a series of portraits of inmates and camp personnel across all walks of life--from workers to peasants, soldiers, civil servants, and party apparatchiks. Featuring Rossi's original illustrations and written in a tone as sharp and dry as that of Russian writer Varlam Shalamov, Rossi's vignettes are also filled with surprising humor. A former agent in the Spanish Civil War and a lifelong Communist, Rossi never considered himself a victim. Instead, in the manner of Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn, and Margaret Buber-Neumann, he sought to share and transmute his experience within the living hell of the Gulag. In so doing, he gives voice to the inmates whose lives were shattered by one of the most corrupt and repressive regimes of the twentieth century. An impassioned reminder to always question one's beliefs, to have the courage to give up one's illusions at the risk of one's life, Fragments of Life lays bare, with acute observations and biting wit, the falsity of the Soviet utopia that transformed Rossi's home into a "huge Potemkin village, a farcical sham dissimulating oceans of mud and blood."

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Following the so-called -Material Turn- of historiography, this book explores the materialization of identity in urban space--specifically in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Urban spaces played an important role in the formation of national identities in post-socialist successor states across the region, while at the same time the articulation of national identities markedly affected the appearance of these post-socialist cities. Beginning with an overview of socialist and post-socialist cities in recent urban history, contributors trace the post-socialist intertwining of space and identities in case studies that include Astana and Almaty in Kazakhstan, Chi?inau and Tiraspol in Moldova, and Skopje in Macedonia, while also linking this phenomenon to socialist urbanism, as in postwar Minsk, Belarus.

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The Sino-Tibetan language family is the second largest in the world, and standard Tibetan is the most widely spoken language in the Tibetic group. A comprehensive introduction to epistemicity in standard spoken Tibetan, this book examines the grammatical expression of a variety of epistemic modalities—rather, the myriad ways in which a speaker indicates their confidence in the knowledge on which their statement is based—through numerous examples of epistemic types. It elucidates the complex system of epistemic verbal endings and epistemic copulas, or connecting words, employed in the spoken language, analyzing them from semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic viewpoints.

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Quantum Anthropology offers a fresh look at humans, cultures, and societies that builds on advances in the fields of quantum mechanics, quantum philosophy, and quantum consciousness. Radek Trnka and Radmila Lorencova have developed an inspiring theoretical framework that transcends the boundaries of individual disciplines, and in this book they draw on philosophy, psychology, sociology, and consciousness studies to redefine contemporary sociocultural anthropological theory. Quantum anthropology, they argue, is a promising new perspective for the study of humanity that takes into account the quantum nature of our reality. This meta-ontology offers novel pathways for exploring the basic categories of our species' being.

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Peter Ackroyd's writing is obsessed with the defining heterogeneity of London its rich diversity of human experience, mood, and emotion, of actions and events, and of the tools through which all of this heterogeneity is represented and reenacted. But for Ackroyd, one of the foremost of the so-called "London writers," this energizing heterogeneity also has a sinister side, largely originating outside social norms and mainstream pathways of cultural production. Touching on everything from occult practices to the plotting of radical groups, crime and fraud, dubious scientific experiments, and popular, dramatic forms of ritual and entertainment, Ackroyd contends that these forces both contest prescribed cultural modes and supply the city with its characteristic dynamism and capacity for spiritual renewal. This idiosyncratic London construct is particularly prominent in Ackroyd's novels, in which his ideas about the city's nature and his connection to English literary sensibilities combine to create a distinct chronotope with its own spatial and temporal properties. A Horror and a Beauty explores this world through six defining aspects of the city as Ackroyd identifies them: the relationship between London's past and present, its uncanny manifestations, its felonious tendencies, its inhabitants' psychogeographic and antiquarian strategies, its theatricality, and its inherently literary character.

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The chronically homeless face a stark reality: lack of access to support systems, adequate shelter, and sustenance, with little hope for something better. For young people, however, life on the street may be merely a temporary stage in their lives. This book tells of homelessness among young people - the causes and their attitudes to the various problems they face. Young homeless people describe a life in which they lose their privacy, the possibility to satisfy their basic needs, and, often, their self-respect in order to survive. The latter half of the book considers what happens when these young people return to society and how they navigate difficulties as they attempt to leave their past behind. Often, the struggle is not solely one of coping with the stigma of their experience; rather, they must face the legacies that linger long after their lives have turned a corner: drug addiction, criminal records, and accumulated debt. Based on interviews with homeless people in Prague, Homelessness as an Alternative Existence of Young People paints an authentic picture of this social group and documents the often unseen social consequences of the transformation to capitalism from communism.

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Czech action art - a medium similar to performance art that does not require an audience - emerged out of the political and social turmoil of the 1960s. This movement has received little critical attention, however, as the Iron Curtain prevented its dissemination to an international audience. Here theorist and art historian Pavlina Morganova gives this art scene its due, chronicling its inception and tracing its evolution through to the present. Morganova explains the various forms of action art, from the "actions" and "happenings" of the 1960s; to the actions of land art that encompass stones, trees, water, or fire; to recent displays of body art; to the actions of the latest generation of artists, who are using the principles of action art in contemporary postconceptual and participative art. Along the way, she introduces the most prominent Czech artists of each specific niche, including Milan Knizak, Zorka Saglova, Ivan Kafka, Petr Stembera, Karel Miler, Jiri Kovanda, and Katerina Seda, and demonstrates not only the changes in the art forms themselves but also the shifting roles of artists and spectators after World War II. With over one hundred illustrations, Czech Action Art introduces this heretofore overlooked but fascinating art form to a global readership.

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The Master of the Trebon Altarpiece was a painter active in Prague in the fourteenth century and one of the most important gothic artists of the international style. He is named for his most famous work, a triptych depicting the death and resurrection of Christ, from an altar in a church in Trebon, a medieval town in the southern Czech Republic. Today, the masterpiece is in the collection of the National Gallery in Prague. Because little is known about this artist, scholars have ascribed to the Master various pieces of art, speculating about their dates of origin, their chronology, and their artistic and ideological points of departure. Art historian Jan Royt's extensive scientific research into the Master of the Trebon Altarpiece attempts to definitively identify and contextualize this unknown artist's oeuvre. Royt begins by outlining historical events in Bohemia during the last third of the fourteenth century, including the development of painting and religious atmosphere of the time. He then offers an artistic and iconographic analysis of works of the Master of the Trebon Altarpiece and his workshop and circle. The book closes with a detailed critical overview of art historians' views of the work of this medieval artist. With more than eighty color reproductions and illustrations depicting the results of a restoration survey of the panel paintings by the Master of the Trebon Altarpiece, this book will be warmly received by scholars of art history as well as European art aficionados.

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Jaroslav Hasek is a Czech writer most famous for his wickedly funny, widely read yet incomplete novel "The Good Soldier Svejk", a series of absurdist vignettes about a recalcitrant soldier in World War I. Hasek - in spite of a life of bufoonery and debauchery - was remarkably prolific. He wrote hundreds of short stories that all display both his extraordinary gift for satire and his profound distrust of authority. Here, in a new English translation, is a series of short stories based on Hasek's experiences as a Red Commissar in the Russian Civil War and his return to Czechoslovakia. First published in the "Prague Tribune", these nine stories are considered to be some of his best, and they provide delightful entertainment as well as important background and insight into "The Good Soldier Svejk". This collection, by a writer some refer to as a Bolshevik Mark Twain, is much more than a tool for understanding Hasek's better-known novel; it is a significant work in its own right. "Behind the Lines" focuses on the Russian town of Bugulma and takes aim, with mordant wit, at the absurdities of a revolution. A hidden gem remarkable for its modern, ribald sense of humor, "Behind the Lines" is an enjoyable, fast-paced collection of great literary and historical value.

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These new editions of the first universal textbooks for studying Czech as a foreign language employ a strictly communication-based format that requires no mediating language and thus is ideal for users of all mother tongues. Fresh and modern in their approach, these books systematically develop all language skills—reading, speaking, listening, and writing—using engaging illustrations and texts that emphasize the natural dialogical character of the language as used in everyday speech. Jitka Cvejnová’s extensive experience teaching intensive, immersive classes and introducing foreign learners to the Czech world through language also enables her to enrich the books with valuable sociocultural context. Consequently the only Czech language textbooks based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages levels, they are ideal for use in both short-term and long-term courses. The introductory (European Certificate CCE level A1.1) volume Česky, prosím Start includes a writing exercise book and a CD with listening exercises and is intended as supplementary material for the beginning stages of language instruction. Also suitable for students who are experiencing problems learning Czech, it focuses on practicing the sounds and written components of the language at a slower pace.

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A close read of the rich collections of texts left behind by Václav Havel, one of the most important Czech thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century. No one in Czech politics or culture could match the international stature of Václav Havel at the time of his death in 2011. In the years since his passing, his legacy has only grown, as developments in the Czech Republic and elsewhere around the world continue to show the importance of his work and writing against a range of political and social ills, from autocratic brutality to messianic populism. This book looks squarely at the heart of Havel’s legacy: the rich corpus of texts he left behind. It analyzes the meanings of key concepts in Havel’s core vocabulary: truth, power, civilsociety, home, appeal, indifference, hotspot, theatre, prison, and responsibility. Where do these concepts appear in Havel’s oeuvre? What part do they play in his larger intellectual project? How might we understand Havel’s focus on these concepts as a centerpiece of his contribution to contemporary thought? How does Havel’s particular perspective on the meaning of these concepts speak to us in the here and now? The ten contributors use a variety of methodological tools to examine the meaning of these concepts, drawing on a diversity of disciplines: political science and political philosophy, historical and cultural analysis, discourse/textual analysis, and linguistic-corpus analysis.

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An inclusive collection of modern Czech short fiction that features overlooked women writers. Bringing together Czech fiction published by women between 1890 and 1910, Beyond the World of Men presents works that confront pivotal issues of the time, including the “woman question” and women’s rights, class conflict, lesbian love, and the relationship between the aristocracy and the Czech peasantry (as in two stories originally written in German by the aristocrat Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach). The collection contains stories that are of literary merit, but also hold historical value. In these works, the authors offer trenchant social commentary while injecting both comic and sentimental elements into their writing, employing humanity and subtlety. As a whole, the collection suggests a revision of the critical understanding of Czech literary modernism; these writers represent voices that were not usually heard in the male writing of the period. They also demand evaluation in their differing (but constant) reactions to earlier women’s writing in Czech and in other European languages, but particularly that of the central figure of Božena Nemcová, to whose canonic novel Babicka they constantly return.

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Written by a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, The Shop on Main Street is the story that inspired the highly successful Academy Award–winning Czechoslovak film of the same title. Looking at the Holocaust through the eyes of a complicit individual, the narrative follows a good-natured carpenter living in a Slovak town in 1942 who unwittingly becomes a participant in a moral crisis involving the abuse and persecution of Jews. Describing the film adaptation of Ladislav Grosman’s novel, the New York Times declared that it is a “human drama that is a moving manifest of the dark dilemma that confronted all people who were caught as witnesses to Hitler's terrible crime.” The review continues: “‘Is one his brother's keeper?’ is the thundering question the situation asks, and then, ‘Are not all men brothers?’ The answer given is a grim acknowledgement. But the unfolding of the drama is simple, done in casual, homely, humorous terms—until the terrible, heartbreaking resolution of the issue at the end.”

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"The devil's neatest trick is to persuade us that he doesn't exist." Giovanni Papini It is a maxim that both rings true in our contemporary world and pervades this tragicomic novel of anxiety and evil set amid the horrors of World War II. As a gay man living in a totalitarian, patriarchal society, noted Czech writer Ladislav Fuks identified with the tragic fate of his Jewish countrymen during the Holocaust. The Cremator arises from that shared experience. Fuks presents a grotesque, dystopian world in which a dutiful father, following the strict logic of his time, liberates the souls of his loved ones by destroying their bodies first the dead, then the living. As we watch this very human character a character who never ceases to believe that he is doing good become possessed by an inhuman ideology, the evil that initially permeates the novel's atmosphere concretizes in this familiar family man. A study of the totalitarian mindset with stunning resonance for today, The Cremator is a disturbing, powerful work of literary horror.

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Bohemian Jewish culture and literature during the underexamined 1820s to 1880s. This book on Jewish culture and literature focuses on the “quiet” decades of the nineteenth century, a scarcely written-about period of time in Bohemian Jewish history. Using a myriad of sources, including travelers’ accounts, poems, essays, short stories, guides, and newspaper articles, the volume explores Jewish expression, Jewish-Czech relations, and the changing attitudes toward Jews between the 1820s and 1880s. It offers close readings of writers like Karel Havlíćek Borovský, Ján Kollár, Siegfried Kapper, and Jan Neruda, as well as lesser-known authors and sources. Combining skillful sustained analysis, judicious argumentation, and elegant writing, the book is a truly enriching reading experience.

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Lasting from around 4800 to 4000 BCE, the Lengyel culture helped usher in the Copper Age in Central Europe with the rise of mining, craft production, and the trading of copper and obsidian, in addition to larger-scale farming. In Health and Disease in the Neolithic Lengyel Culture, the authors investigate the migration of the Lengyel people as they moved west from their place of origin in modern-day Hungary to areas in what is now the Czech Republic and Poland. By drawing on research into the trace elements of strontium, carbon, and nitrogen found in human bone tissue, as well paleopathological analyses of congenital defects, this book proves that the Lengyel migration occurred in waves, providing important details about the changes in the diet, health, and mobility of a people who were crucial to the development of early European civilization

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A famed essay examines the Velvet Revolution from a sociological perspective. Thirty-two years after its initial publication, this respected sociological essay, written in the history-making years of 1989 and 1990, is available for the first time in English. The essay tells the story of a despotic Socialist state expropriating the family (and with it the private sphere of life) only to be colonized by the very thing it expropriated forty years later. The essay plunges the reader into the pivotal time of the Velvet Revolution and provides valid explanations for the grassroots causes of the old regime’s downfall, examining the private aspirations and strategies of highly disparate groups of nameless social actors of the old regime that eventually sapped almost everyone of any interest in keeping the regime afloat.

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From his panoramic views of Prague to his enigmatic still lifes, photographer Josef Sudek (1896–1976) captured the unique spirit of the Czech capital during a wide swath of the twentieth century. Sudek enjoyed worldwide fame during his lifetime, yet a substantial part of his practice--photographing works of art--has remained largely unexplored. This book shines a light on Sudek's most beloved pictorial subject, sculpture, which acted as a bridge between his fine art photography and his commercial work. Sumptuous full-page reproductions of Sud'ks black-and-white photographs illustrate a series of thematic essays, focusing on the scope and legacy of his work, while cameos from the key people and institutions who supported his career reveal Sudek's rich connection to the artistic circles and movements of his day. Together, they uncover the shifting tension between the ability of photographs to bring art closer to the people and their potential as works of art in their own right.

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“Smoke from nearby factories shrouds a countryside as flat as a table, a countryside stretching off to infinity. Covering it are the ashes of millions of dead. Scattered throughout are fine pieces of bone that ovens were not able to burn. When the wind comes, ashes rise to the heavens, bone fragments remain on the ground. And rain falls on the ashes, and rain turns them to good fertile soil, as befits the ashes of martyrs. And who can find the ashes of those from my native land, of whom there were 77,297? I gather some ashes with my hand, for only a hand can touch them, and I pour them into a linen sack, just as those who once left for a foreign country would gather their native soil so as never to forget, so as always to return to it.” ​ So begins Jiří Weil’s unforgettable prose poem, Lamentation for 77, 297 Victims, his literary monument to the Czech Jews killed during the Holocaust. A Czech-Jewish writer who worked at Prague’s Jewish Museum both during and after the Nazi Occupation—he survived the Holocaust by faking his own death and hiding out until the war had ended—Weil wrote Lamentation while he served as the museum’s senior librarian in the 1950s. This remarkable literary experiment presents a number of innovative approaches to writing about a horror many would deem indescribable, combining a narrative account of the Shoah with newspaper-style reportage on a handful of the lives ended by the Holocaust and quotes from the Hebrew Bible to create a specific and powerful portrait of loss and remembrance. Translated by David Lightfoot, Lamentation for 77,297 Victims is a startling and singular introduction to a writer whose works have been acclaimed by Philip Roth, Michiko Kakutani, and Siri Hustvedt.

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In this book, Finnish scholar Kaarle Nordenstreng provides a unique account of the Prague-based International Organization of Journalists, a group that was at one time the world’s largest media association. The IOJ expanded from a postwar fraternity of professional journalists in twenty countries to a truly global organization that had its hand in running journalism schools, a publishing house, a conference service, and a number of commercial enterprises in Czechoslovakia. Though the Cold War kept most Western journalists’ unions isolated from the organization, the IOJ was a major player in Communist Eastern Europe--at its peak in the late 1980s, the IOJ counted 300,000 journalists as members. Nordenstreng--who served as president of the IOJ for fourteen years--illuminates this exciting and little-explored chapter in the history of postwar Europe, from the rise of the Iron Curtain through the post-Soviet 1990s. He enlivens his firsthand account with personal testimonies from former IOJ members and a wealth of previously unpublished internal documents.

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With a focus on Spanish modality, this book presents Bohumil Zavadil’s theoretical approach—the first such presentation in English—to this category and, consequently, analyzes its possible application to Spanish. Concentrating on specific areas of the Spanish modal system where two modal meanings combine, Dana Kratochvílová integrates theoretical analyses with corpus-based studies from the InterCorp corpus on the choice of mood and the contextual interpretation of selected constructions. Her approachs verifies that areas where two modal meanings meet are a natural part of the Spanish modal system and that the combination of modal meanings has consequences on mood selection, thus shedding new light on the use of the subjunctive in Spanish.

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The motto “Národ sobě”—“From the Nation to Itself”—inscribed over the proscenium arch of Prague’s National Theatre symbolizes the great importance theater holds for the Czechs. It also belies an extraordinary history of subversion, repression, and an enduring capacity for reinvention. In Trial by Theatre, Barbara Day sets that story in its political and sociological contexts, painting a vivid portrait of the evolving nature and importance of Czech theater that illuminates the nation’s history more broadly. Drawing on a range of oral and written sources, as well as her unique personal experience of cultural and historical events in Czechoslovakia from the 1960s to the 1980s, Day offers a sweeping view of Czech theater, its colorful personalities, and international connections. Her story details: the days of the National Awakening in the nineteenth century, when theater took the place of politics, becoming an instrument of national identity in the hands of the revivalists; theater as a symbol of independence during the Nazi occupation; its survival of Socialist Realism and Stalinism and subsequent blossoming in the “Golden Sixties”; and theater’s essential role in Prague Spring and beyond, when for two decades theater operated in provisional spaces like gymnasiums, bars, trade union halls, art galleries, and living rooms. Trial by Theatre culminates in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, a year that saw the installation of Václav Havel—a playwright—as the first post-Communist president of Czechoslovakia.

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During World War II, London experienced not just the Blitz and the arrival of continental refugees, but also an influx of displaced foreign governments. Drawing together renowned historians from nine countries--the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, the former Yugoslavia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia--this book explores life in exile as experienced by the governments of Czechoslovakia and other occupied nations who found refuge in the British capital. Through new archival research and fresh historical interpretations, chapters delve into common characteristics and differences in the origin and structure of the individual governments-in-exile in an attempt to explain how they dealt with pressing social and economic problems at home while abroad; how they were able to influence crucial Allied diplomatic negotiations; the relative importance of armies, strategic commodities, and equipment that particular governments-in-exile were able to offer to the allied war effort; important wartime propaganda; and early preparations for addressing postwar minority issues.

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From political novels to surrealist poetry and censored rock and roll, Czech underground culture of the later twentieth century displayed an astonishing, and unheralded, variety. This fascinating exploration of that underground movement the historical, sociological, and psychological background that gave rise to it; the literature, music, and arts that comprised it; and its more recent incorporation into the mainstream draws on the voices of scholars and critics who themselves played an integral role in generating it. Featuring the writings of Czech poet Ivan Martin Jirous, philosopher-poet Egon Bondy, and writer Jachym Topol, as well as Canadian expat and translator Paul Wilson many of which have never before been available in English in addition to an expanded bibliography reflecting advances in scholarship, this second edition of Views from the Inside is both a work of literature and an eye-opening volume of criticism.

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The Theatre Theory Reader provides the first comprehensive and critical anthology of texts reflecting on the development of the theater theory of the Prague School or Prague Linguistic Circle beginning with early twentieth-century composer and aesthetician Otakar Zich. The majority of the thirty-eight texts date from the 1930s and early 1940s, the period when the Prague Linguistic Circle was most active as both a theoretical laboratory and a focal point for scholars, artists, and intellectuals. A substantial afterword places these writings in context, describing the emergence of the Prague School in an effort to promote a deeper understanding of its texts. Organized thematically and structurally rather than chronologically, the Theatre Theory Reader explores issues and themes in the study of the theater as an art form and as artistic practice. Just as the Prague School theorists viewed theory as a toolbox of approaches to theater analysis, this anthology should be considered a toolbox

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This bilingual, English-Czech atlas of Czechoslovakia is one of the first to use statistical data to evaluate spatial aspects of population development over time. Its twelve chapters present various themes relating directly to population from a historical perspective, such as demographic structures and processes, migration, economic structure, cultural structure, social status, crime, and elections. Drawing on census results from 1921 to 2011, including population registers from the postwar years, more than three hundred maps present time series of these basic population statistical indicators from the beginnings of the independent Czechoslovak state up to the present. Uniquely, the atlas shows the development of each indicator over time within a single map sheet through a series of maps with a cohesive legend.

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A favorite work of Czech humor, We Were a Handful depicts the adventures of five boys from a small Czech town through the diary of Petr Bajza, the grocer's son. Written by Karel Polacek at the height of World War II before his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944, this book draws on the happier years of Polacek's own childhood as inspiration. As we look upon the world through Petr's eyes, we, too, marvel at the incomprehensible world of grownups; join in fights between gangs of neighborhood kids; and laugh at the charming language of boys, a major source of the book's humor. This translation at last offers English-language readers the opportunity to share in Petr's (and Polacek's) childhood and reminds us that joy and laughter are possible even in the darkest times.

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Jaroslav Hasek is a Czech writer most famous for his wickedly funny, widely read, yet incomplete novel The Good Soldier Schweik, a series of absurdist vignettes about a recalcitrant WWI soldier. Hasek in spite of a life of buffoonery and debauchery was remarkably prolific. He wrote hundreds of short stories that all display both his extraordinary gift for satire and his profound distrust of authority. Behind the Lines presents a series of nine short stories first published in the Prague Tribune and considered to be some of Hasek's best. Based on his experiences as a Red Commissar in the Russian Civil War and his return to Czechoslovakia, Behind the Lines focuses on the Russian town of Bugulma, taking aim, with mordant wit, at the absurdities of a revolution. Providing important background and insight into The Good Soldier Schweik, this collection by a writer some call the Bolshevik Mark Twain is nevertheless much more than a tool for understanding his better-known novel; it is a significant work in its own right. A hidden gem remarkable for its modern, ribald sense of humor, Behind the Lines is an enjoyable, fast-paced anthology of great literary and historical value.

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What is it about human beings that makes us creative, able to imagine and enact new possibilities for life and new solutions to problems in a way that no other animal can? The authors included in The Genesis of Creativity and the Origin of the Human Mind explore this question in essays and studies from a range of specializations and backgrounds. Experts on culture, art, and evolution come together to describe, analyze, and interpret the origins of artistic creativity and the anatomical and neurological structures that contribute to it. Essays focus on the origins of art in the Upper Palaeolithic as well as on manifestations of artistic creativity in preliterary societies and tribal cultures that have been preserved to the present day. The interdisciplinary approach to the topic accentuates the wide array of possible methodologies and interpretations of artistic manifestations in particular historic and cultural contexts.

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The National Gallery in Prague has in its collection a unique Japanese illustrated manuscript of ogi no soshi, a genre of waka poems illustrated in fan-shaped pictures, which blossomed from the late Muromachi to the early Edo period. Book of Fans, with 120 poems, is the largest such book extant in the world. This facsimile of an ancient illustrated manuscript of waka poetry reveals hitherto unknown aspects of Japanese traditional culture at the close of the sixteenth century, after the end of a century of destructive civil wars. The illustrated fans contain both classical waka poetry and poetry with close affinity to renga, haikai no renga, and Noh drama. The introductory text, from specialists on three continents, sheds new light on a literature and art that were instrumental in the renewal of the country in the Momoyama period. The literary quality of the translations and the beauty of the illustrations will be welcomed by both academic and general audiences around the world.

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Presents a concise summary of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics for physics students at the university level. This text covers essential topics, from general mathematical formalism to specific applications. It explains the formulation of quantum theory and is supported with illustrations of the general concepts of elementary quantum systems.

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Offers a way to teach young radical students about philosophy. The author explains that one does not start teaching by talking about philosophers and theories specifically, but by aiming to excite students and from there leading them to think philosophically about the important questions that have faced humans for centuries.

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At present, the Sibe language is the only still-active oral variety of Manchu, the language of the indigenous tribe of Manchuria. With some 20,000 to 30,000 speakers it is also the most widely spoken of the Tungusic languages, which are found in both Manchuria and eastern Siberia. This ttile offers a study of this historically important language.

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Assesses the history of painting in Bohemia and Moravia from the emergence of the Czech state in the late ninth century to the end of the rule of Ludwig Jagiello in 1526. This book traces the developments in and preservation of mural and panel painting during this period, as well as illuminations and medieval iconography.

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When Leopold Pospíšil first arrived in New Guinea in 1954 to investigate the legal systems of the local tribes, he was warned about the Kapauku, who reputedly had no laws. Skeptical of the idea that any society could exist without laws, Pospíšil immediately decided to live among and study the Kapauku. Learning the language and living as a participant-observer among them, Pospíšil discovered that the supposedly primitive society possessed laws, rules, and social structures that were as sophisticated as they were logical. Drawing on his research and experiences among the Kapauku—he would stay with them five times between 1954 and 1979—Pospíšil broke new ground in the field of legal anthropology, holding a professorship at Yale, serving as the anthropology curator of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and publishing three books of scholarship on Kapauku law. This memoir of Pospíšil’s experience is filled with charming anecdotes and thrilling stories of trials, travels, and war told with humor and humility and accompanied by a wealth of the author’s personal photos from the time.

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An analysis of metaphor in the legal texts of the Old Testament using the tools of cognitive and cultural linguistics. The Old Testament is rich in metaphor. Metaphorical expressions appear not only in places where you might expect them, like the poetic verses, but also in the legal texts. They appear in the preambles to collections of laws, in their final summaries, in general considerations on compliance with and violation of the law, in texts concerning the meaning of the law, and those dealing with topics now reserved for legal theory and legal philosophy. These metaphorical expressions reveal how the authors of the relevant Torah/Law texts understood their function in society and what the society of the time preferred in the law. ​ Anchored in cognitive and cultural linguistics, The Torah/Law Is a Journey investigates Hebrew metaphorical expressions concerning the key Old Testament concept of Torah/Law. Ivana Procházková identifies Hebrew conceptual metaphors and explicates the metaphorical expressions. She also uses cognitive linguistic analysis to look at modern translations of selected metaphorical expressions into Czech and English. Procházková closes with an analysis of the metaphors used in the Council of Europe publication Compass: Manual for Human Rights Education with Young People to conceptualize human rights.

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Being located between the Black and Caspian seas, Azerbaijan has always been the juncture of Eurasia—with a traditional reputation as a crossroads between the north-south and east-west transport corridors—and the traditional ground for competition between numerous regional and global players, using both soft and hard power. With its vast hydrocarbon energy reserves, Azerbaijan is a country of particular importance in the South Caucasus. The region’s complex geopolitics have immensely influenced Azerbaijan’s foreign policy strategy. With the dissolution of the USSR, Azerbaijan, as a new state with fragile security, found itself in a complicated situation surrounded by regional powers like Iran, Russia, and Turkey. This book focuses on several major foreign policy issues faced by the Republic of Azerbaijan since it regained its independence in 1991. These major issues include the conflict with Armenia and related matters, the relationship with the West, as well as the complexities arising from its relationship with Russia and its ties to Muslim countries, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia.

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Jan Patočka was a Czech philosopher who not only lived through the turbulent politics of twentieth-century Central Europe, but he shaped his intellectual contributions in response to that tumult. One of the last students of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, he was a philosophical inspiration to Václav Havel and other dissidents who confronted the Soviet regimes before 1989, as well as being actively involved in authoring and enacting Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. He died in 1977 from medical complications resulting from interrogations of the secret police, his political involvement cut short by an untimely death.Confronting Totalitarian Minds examines his legacy along with several contemporary applications of his ideas about dissidence, solidarity, and the human being’s existential confrontation with unjust politics. Aspen Briton puts Patočka’s ideas about dissidence, citizen mobilization, and civic responsibility in conversation with those of notable world historical figures like Mohandas Gandhi, expanding the current possibilities of comparative political theory. In adding a fresh voice to contemporary conversations on transcending injustice, Confronting Totalitarian Minds seeks to educate a wider audience about this philosopher’s continued relevance to political dissidents across the world.

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In this book-length study, Ewa Szary-Matywiecka examines Maria Wirtemberska’s Malvina, or the Heart’s Intuition, an international success upon its publication in 1816 that is now widely considered to be Poland’s first psychological novel. Applying structuralist methods, Szary-Matywiecka situates Wirtemberska among other literary luminaries of her day, including Rousseau and Goethe, and explores how the nineteenth-century salon culture formed the concerns and themes of her novel. Malvina’s obsession with language games recall the vocabulary quizzes and semantic puzzles popular in the European salons frequented by Wirtemberska. Szary-Matywiecka also argues that the novel’s motif of twins and twinned characters emerges from both the theatrical preoccupations of salons, as well as how Wirtemberska seemingly splits her voice between traditional narration and a more intrusive authorial style, helping shape her novel’s innovative narrative method. Malvina, or Spoken Word in the Novel is an insightful deconstruction of a female-penned classic of European literature.

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Sherabad Oasis: Tracing Historical Landscape in Southern Uzbekistan is the second volume of the series examining the Czech-Uzbek archaeological expedition in southern Uzbekistan. While the first book was devoted to the excavations at the central site of the Sherabad Oasis called Jandavlattepa, this volume analyzes the development of the settlement throughout this oasis based on important new data gained in the recent expedition. The methodology used includes extensive and intensive archaeological surveys, revisions of previously published archaeological data, historical maps, and innovative satellite images. Apart from the dynamics of the settlement of the research area, spanning from prehistoric to modern time, the development of the irrigation systems in the lowland steppe is also assessed. Edited by Ladislav Stančo and Petra Tušlová, this volume continues the significant work of Czech researchers in Uzbekistan, a key Central Asian republic at the crossroads of history and culture.

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An outspoken opponent of pro-Russian, authoritarian, and far-right streams in contemporary Czech society, Martin C. Putna received a great deal of media attention when he ironically dedicated the Czech edition of Rus–Ukraine–Russia to Miloš Zeman—the pro-Russian president of the Czech Republic. This sense of irony, combined with an extraordinary breadth of scholarly knowledge, infuses Putna’s book.Examining key points in Russian cultural and spiritual history, Rus–Ukraine–Russia is essential reading for those wishing to understand the current state of Russia and Ukraine—the so-called heir to an “alternative Russia.” Putna uses literary and artistic works to offer a rich analysis of Russia as a cultural and religious phenomenon: tracing its development from the arrival of the Greeks in prehistoric Crimea to its invasion by “little green men” in 2014; explaining the cultural importance in Russ of the Vikings as well as Pussy Riot; exploring central Russian figures from St. Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin.Unique in its postcolonial perspective, this is not merely a history of Russia or of Russian religion. This book presents Russia as a complex mesh of national, religious, and cultural (especially countercultural) traditions—with strong German, Mongol, Jewish, Catholic, Polish, and Lithuanian influences—a force responsible for creating what we identify as Eastern Europe.

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A paranoid thriller of life under surveillance in Soviet Czechoslovakia. A deputy minister in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Ludvík enjoys all the luxuries that success in the party affords him, but he must be careful: he’s under no illusions about the secret police bugging his apartment. Luckily, he and his wife, Anna, know where the bug is and where they can safely converse. However, any comfort they feel disappears the evening they attend an official party, where they learn that Ludvík’s boss has just been arrested after presenting a report written by Ludvík himself. Is Ludvík next? Back home after the party, the couple must get past unresolved marital tensions to get rid of absolutely anything that could incriminate them—all while contending with the strange men outside their apartment and the bug inside. ​ Penned under the oppressive watch of Soviet authorities in 1960s Czechoslovakia—but touching on still-current themes of surveillance and paranoia—this cinematic thriller is as tense and timely as ever. A promising Party member who became persona non grata after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, author Jan Procházka knew firsthand the gnawing terror of life in a surveillance state: after his death in 1971, the new tenants of his apartment discovered twelve hidden listening devices. As Ear makes terrifyingly clear, the most frightening horror stories are the ones closest to everyday reality.

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