A Czech Historian in Troubled Times: J. V. Polišensky´
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A CZECH HISTORIAN IN TROUBLED TIMES: J. V. POLISˇENSKY´ Josef Polisˇensky´, who died on 11 January 2001 at the age of eighty-five, was one of the most prominent and distinguished Czech historians of the twentieth century. In terms of interna- tional reputation, he may well stand alone, since several eminent compatriots like Pekarˇ and Sˇusta wrote almost exclusively about their own domestic past and attracted correspondingly less foreign attention. Polisˇensky´ had notably strong and long-standing links with Britain and the English-speaking world. Over and above that, he had a special connection with Past and Present, as one of the last survivors of the team of scholars who launched the journal fifty years ago. It therefore seems appropriate to review his career in these pages. By mournful coincidence, two substantial memoirs had been prepared just at the time of Polisˇensky´’s death. One was his own reminiscences, which he began to write in 1979 but completed much later, in the form of tapes because of his gather- ing blindness, now published in an edition by Zdeneˇk Pousta. The other was oral testimony as assembled in conversations with Polisˇensky´ and interpreted by Eva and Hans Henning Hahn. For what follows I am greatly indebted to these two sources, which overlap only in part.1 *** Polisˇensky´ was born an Austrian subject, in Prosteˇjov (German Prossnitz), a substantial town between Olomouc and Brno, in the 1 Josef Polisˇensky´, Historik v meˇnı´cı´msesveˇteˇ [Historian in a Changing World], ed. Zdeneˇk Pousta (Prague, 2001; hereafter Historik). I am unclear about how far Polisˇensky´’s tape-recordings have been edited, and on what basis. I am most grateful to Dr Pousta for a copy of this book. My thanks go likewise to the Hahns, who very kindly supplied me with a pre-publication typescript of their Theatrum mundi a historici v Cˇ echa´ch: Setka´nı´ se vzpomı´nkami Josefa Polisˇenske´ho [The Theatre of the World and Historians in Bohemia: An Encounter with the Memoirs of Josef Polisˇensky´], referred to in what follows simply as ‘Hahn MS’. The memoirs began in unpropitious circumstances: Polisˇensky´ tells us drily how he was asked in 1979 by a zealous official of the secret police if he could pen ‘a few pages to show how he had transmuted from a relatively progressive student into a potential agent of the CIA or (cont. on p. 258) © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2002 258 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 176 dark and war-torn days of late autumn 1915, the son of a forester. His family’s simple circumstances and Moravian environment were alike formative for him. The first implanted in him a strong commitment to social equality; while the historic margravate, which he always recalled with unfeigned fondness, continued to mean much to him, in his studies as much as in his friend- ships. Both influences are illustrated by an early memory of Polisˇensky´’s. As a small child out walking with his mother he encountered victims of the Prosteˇjov riots of 1917, who were shortly, after the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, to be exalted as martyrs for the cause of Czech liberation. Subsequently he published research which showed them to have been simply starving and war-weary workers. Polisˇensky´’s priorities were always archival, prosaic, and very slightly Sˇvejkian. Moreover, in two further ways Moravia gave him a different perspective from that of his Bohemian contemporaries. On the one hand it lay closer to Vienna, and its Czech inhabitants were more receptive to the metropolitan culture of the old Monarchy: a number of Polisˇensky´’s relations had German as their mother tongue. On the other hand it lay closer to Hungary. That meant above all the Slovaks, for whose sensibilities vis-a`-vis domineering neighbours, whether Magyar or Czech, Polisˇensky´ always evinced great respect. The openness extended, however, to Hungarian as to Austrian culture as a whole. While in no way nostalgic for the traditions of the Habsburgs or Austria-Hungary, he stayed a central European in the best sense of the term. Doubtless his easy familiarity from (n. 1 cont.) MI5’ (Historik, 13). For all that, they provide a more intimate, direct, unbuttoned and detailed record than the Hahn MS, but are thinner on some things, including Polisˇensky´’s foreign links in general, and his British ones in particular. Other recent sources I have consulted are Jan Havra´nek, ‘Sedmdesa´tpeˇt let zˇivota a pra´ce Josefa Polisˇenske´ho’ [Josef Polisˇensky´’s Life and Work over Seventy-Five Years], Studie Muzea Kromeˇrˇ´ızˇska (1990); Jan Havra´nek, ‘Josef Polisˇensky´ zemrˇel’ [Josef Polisˇensky´ Has Died], Deˇjiny a Soucˇasnost, xxiii (2001), no. 2; Petr Cˇ ornej, ‘Pameˇti Josefa Polisˇenske´ho’ [The Memoirs of Josef Polisˇensky´], Deˇjiny a Soucˇasnost, xxiii (2001), no. 5; Jan Kumpera, ‘Josef Polisˇensky´ — vyvolenec mu´zy Kleio’ [Josef Polisˇensky´ — One of the Elect of Clio’s Muse], Unie Comenius, xiii (May 2001); Miroslav Hroch’s obituary in Cˇ esky´ Cˇ asopis Historicky´, xcix (2001); and a ‘pre´cis de ma vie’ by Polisˇensky´, communicated by Marco Leeflang, in Interme´diaire des Casanovistes, xviii (2001). I am also very grateful for comments on the present text from Geoffrey Parker and from Nicolette (M.E.H.N.) Mout, whose obituary for the Royal Netherlands Academy, of which Polisˇensky´ was a foreign member, has now appeared in the Levensberichten en herdenkingen 2002, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Amsterdam, 2002). J. V. POLISˇENSKY´ 259 childhood with the large Jewish populations of Prosteˇjov and other Moravian towns contributed to that breadth of vision. Already as a boy, Polisˇensky´ evidently absorbed a surprising amount of Anglo-Saxon influence. Most of it was American, mediated even by the charity foodstuffs supplied as far afield as provincial Moravia after the war, then by films, jazz, and novelists from Poe to Frank Harris. A local Scottish airman apparently gave him his first English lessons, and encouraged him to take up the language seriously at his secondary modern school (rea´lka).2 He continued it at the commercial academy in Prague, where he studied until he could learn enough Latin for entrance to the Charles University. There Polisˇensky´’s linguistic talents flowered, and for all his enviable mastery of the major European vernaculars, English remained his first love, not least because he fell under the spell of the great Anglicist and philologist, Vile´m Mathesius, chief begetter of the Prague Linguistic Circle. It is evident from Polisˇensky´’s memoirs that both the intellectual and the personal qualities of this remarkable scholar exercised a dominant and lifelong influence on him.3 In his old age Polisˇensky´ remembered his historical training with less affection. He is grudging about his teachers among the inter-war academic establishment, notably their doyen, the ailing Josef Pekarˇ, mistrusted both as a conservative and as too wedded to the unitary Czechoslovak ideology.4 He seems somewhat reserved even about his immediate advisers, the medievalist Josef Sˇusta and the early modernist Karel Stloukal. They directed him towards his first historical project, the peace plans of King George Podeˇbrad, a ruler seeking to assert his place in the concert of Europe after the Hussite wars; and he also attended the highly reputed archive school. Yet Polisˇensky´ continued with linguistic work too, and maintained close links with younger members of the Prague Circle, especially the lexicographer Ivan Poldauf. He 2 Hahn MS; Historik, 33. 3 Hahn MS; Historik, 49 ff., passim; J. V. Polisˇensky´, ‘Vile´m Mathesius, Literary Historian and “Cultural Activist” ’, Philologica Pragensia, xxv (1982). On Mathesius: Jindrˇich Toman, The Magic of a Common Language: Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); see also the collection of his own writings, Jazyk, kultura a slovesnost [Language, Culture and Literature], ed. Josef Vachek (Prague, 1982). 4 Hahn MS. For the background, see Frantisˇek Kutnar and Jaroslav Marek, Prˇehledne´ deˇjiny cˇeske´ho a slovenske´ho deˇjepisectvı´ od pocˇa´tku na´rodnı´ kultury azˇ do sklonku trˇica´ty´ch let 20. stoletı´ [Synoptical History of Czech and Slovak Historiography from the Beginning of National Culture to the End of the 1930s] (Prague, 1997). 260 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 176 actually prepared a Habilitationsschrift in the field of linguistics by 1945, when the only manuscript of it disappeared in the first days of liberation. More important for the future was a shorter Mathesius-inspired dissertation which survives, on ‘non- professional historiography as a literary (slovesny´) type in western European literatures (literatury)’, mainly devoted to English writers, and stressing their close relation to their readership through a striving for appropriate forms and criteria of relevance. Polisˇensky´ drew for the most part on such popularizers as Chesterton, Wells and Toynbee, the last of whom he later met and even began to translate, acknowledging his debt to Toynbee for having demonstrated, for example, the idiocy of racism.5 In a different and more unconventional vein he also, as we shall see, encountered the work of A. L. Morton. His voracious English reading, however, already embraced members of the professional mainstream like Pollard, Temperley and — most significantly — the earlier doyen of Stuart studies, S. R. Gardiner. Polisˇensky´’s lack of enthusiasm for his guild masters in Prague had political roots too. They were typically members of the Czech National Democrat and National Socialist parties, whereas Polisˇensky´ as a student became a fervent socialist. He felt little sentiment for T. G. Masaryk, still less for Benesˇ, at the helm of the foundering First Republic. By the time he had the opportunity to attend an American summer school at Geneva under the Spanish liberal exile Salvador de Madariaga in summer 1938, the writing was on the wall for the Czechoslovak state, and its western links were about to be brutally ruptured.