Václav Chaloupecký

The aim of this book is to deal with the historiographical legacy of Czech historian Václav Chaloupecký (1882–1951), the pupil of Josef Pekař and Jaroslav Goll. During the First Czechoslovak Republic Chaloupecký kept the professorship of Czechoslovak history at the newly established Comenius University in Bratislava. His historiographical work has its basis in mediaevistic studies yet it also deals with the questions of contemporary history. The roots of his creativity, however, lie in poetry. Chaloupecký's work is often marked as „czechoslovakist“ and „positivist“ and due to this fact it is usually viewed as methodologically and ideologically obsolete. Thus the aim of this book is not to create a common biography, rather to rethink Chaloupecký's historiographical legacy from the non-nationalistic and ideologically open minded point of view. The core of this critical approach is to show the stereotypes bound with Chaloupecký's name and last but not least to reveal the specific ideological background of Chaloupecký's work, its roots based in his individual experience with the Czech and Slovak cultural horizon and mainly in the marriage with the Slovak modernist poet Ľudmila Groeblová. The result should show a picture of life and work of a historian which was interrupted due to three breaks – The Great War, Second World War and the Communist Coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. If besides that the author (not unintentionally) fullfilled the attempt to cover some of the cultural essence of the mentioned period, the more the better.