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The Spirit of Thomas G. Masaryk (1850–1937): An Anthology PDF

288 Pages·1990·27.12 MB·English
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THE SPIRIT OF THOMAS G. MASARYK (1850-1937) Also by George J. Kovtun 1HE CZECHOSLOVAK DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: A History of the Document MASARYK AND AMERICA: Testimony of a Relationship MASARYKtJV TRIUMF Also by Rene Wellek A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM (six volumes) THEORY OF LITERATURE (with Austin Warren) IMMANUEL KANT IN ENGLAND CONCEPTS OF CRITICISM ESSAYS ON CZECH LITERATURE THE MEANING OF CZECH HISTORY (editor) The Spirit of Thomas G. Masaryk (1850-1937) An Anthology Edited by George J. Kovtun Foreword by Rene Wellek Stirling Professor Emeritus Yale University Palgrave Macmillan in association with the UK MASARYK PUBLICATIONS TRUST ISBN 978-1-349-10935-7 ISBN 978-1-349-10933-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10933-3 © Masaryk Publications Trust, 1990 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-49454-7 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1990 ISBN 978-0-312-04017-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Masaryk, T. G. (Toma~ Garrigue), 1850-1937. (Selections. 1990] The spirit of Thomas G. Masaryk (1850-1937): an anthology/ edited by George J. Kovtun: foreword by Rene Wellek. p. em. 'In association with the Masaryk Publications Trust.' Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-312-04017-8 1. Czechoslovakia-Politics and government. 2. Philosophy. 3. Philology. I. Kovtun, George J. II. Title. DB219l.M38A25 1990 943.7'032'092-dc20 89-24053 CIP Contents Foreword by Rene Wellek vii A Note on the Masaryk Publications Trust xvii Chronology of Masaryk's Life and Work xviii 1 Introduction by George J. Kovtun 1 2 Plato and His Advice 11 3 Suicide and Faith in God 14 4 Pascal and His Dilemma 33 5 Language and Human Spirit 39 6 Philosophy and the Sciences 45 7 'We Want Equal Political Rights!' 53 8 Czechs and Their Awakening 61 9 Hus and Czech Destiny 85 10 Havlicek and Czech Politics 96 11 Palacky and Czech History 102 12 Religion and Modern Philosophy 114 13 Marx and His Mistakes 126 14 Schopenhauer and His Anger 145 15 Man and His Ideals 150 16 Democracy and Revolution 157 17 Titanism and Russian Literature 180 18 'Our People Is Free and Independent!' 191 19 New Europe 205 20 Czechoslovakia and the World 218 21 Thought and Life 237 v vi Contents Selected Biographical Glossary 249 Bibliography 261 Further Reading 263 Name Index 264 Foreword Rene Wellek T. G. Masaryk is widely known as the first President of the newly founded Czechoslovak Republic. But far fewer people know that Masaryk was a distinguished philosopher. In his book on Suicide As a Social Mass Phenomenon, published in German in 1881, he very early diagnosed the crisis of Western Civilisation. In 1898, he pub lished in German and Czech a close analysis of Marxism and its philosophical foundations. Masaryk had a profound knowledge of Russia and had studied the history and conflicts of ideas in two large volumes, published in German in 1913, at a time when the Czarist regime was still in power. As a political philosopher he formulated, early and openly during the First World War, the struggle between autocracy and democracy and sketched an ideal of the post-war arrangement of Europe which not only demanded the freeing of his own nation but the freeing of the whole zone of nations between Russia and Germany from Finland to Greece. Like many at that time, Masaryk hoped for a league of nations, an eventual European federation and, in the distant future, a federation of all mankind. It is however a paradox of history that Masaryk's writings were almost totally unknown to the French, Italian, British, and American public. The only people in the West who had some idea of Masaryk's intellectual eminence were the British journalist Henry Wickham Steed, who had written a highly critical book on Austria in 1913 and Robert Seton-Watson, the Scottish historian, who in Racial Problems of Hungary (1908) had sharply attacked the policy of Magyarisation and defended the rights of the suppressed minorities, Slovaks, Rumanians, and Serbs. Masaryk knew them from his meetings in Vienna, where Masaryk visited frequently as a member of the Austrian Parliament (Reichsrat). In the early months of the war, Masaryk managed to establish contacts in France, Italy, Great Britain, and Russia and to bring together the Czech deputies, whatever their differences and disagree ments, in support of propaganda abroad for independence, although prospects of future actions were necessarily vague. They depended on the events on the battlefield and the general course of the war which many thought could not go on for more than a few months. vii viii Foreword The Russians were for a time in possession of Lwow and Przemysl and threatened to invade the Bohemian kingdom. The French only with difficulty averted the German march on Paris, the Italians were still neutral. Masaryk's or rather his followers' memoranda were shelved. Only after the defection of the Prague regiment at Dukla in April 1915 (which the Russians promptly disbanded) did the then Czarist government begin to see the value of the Czech defectors who had formed a League, called Druf.ina, immediately at the begin ning of the war. The Russian authorities allowed the recruiting of Czech soldiers into regiments and finally into a brigade, always, of course, only as part of the Russian army. Masaryk left Prague for a trip to Italy on 18 December 1914, and, when he was warned about the threat of impending arrest, decided not to return as he had planned. Actually the then most prominent Czech deputy, Karel Kramar, and his colleague, Alois RaSin, were arrested in May 1915, condemned to death in June 1916, but amne stied in a conciliatory gesture of the Austrian government. By that time, Masaryk had succeeded in uniting the emigration, the Czech colonies, and the Czech defectors, and slowly had won official recog nition, even if only reluctant and hesitant, from several allied govern ments. Masaryk's success is almost inexplicable. After all he was the only deputy of a very small party in the Austrian Parliament, who had established his authority over the most diverse Czech groups abroad, but could be suspected of not having any clear mandate of the nation on the spot. In his many pronouncements, the future of what became Czechoslovakia is often extremely vague. It is difficult to take seriously speculations about a Russian grand duke or even a Western prince on the throne of Bohemia. Masaryk himself quite consistently appealed to the historical rights to the Kingdom of Bohemia, which had elected the first Habsburg, Ferdinand, in 1526, only under the menace of the Turkish invasion which necessitated a common defence with Austria after the disastrous battle of Mohacs when the last Jagellon King of Bohemia and Poland, Louis II, was killed. But Masaryk always combined this appeal to the historical rights with an appeal to the nationality principle as a natural right of the Slovaks in Hungary. Very early he negotiated with the Serbs, whose anti-Magyar aspirations he could support, and even speculated about a corridor from Bratislava on the Danube to the northern regions inhabited by the Slovenes. Nothing came of it. Masaryk wisely recognised that the population was overwhelmingly German and that the corridor would be only a source of later conflicts. Foreword IX Masaryk's daughter, Alice, who had remained in Prague with her ill mother, was arrested on 28 October 1915. She spent several months in prison until she was released on 2 July 1916, probably because of well-organised protests in the United States. Masaryk in his war memoirs, The Making of a State, could not and did not boast of his successes. He was a modest man who, however, radiated an air of authority and absolute sincerity and truthfulness which was obviously felt by everybody who came into contact with him. A strict adherence to the view that an unpleasant truth is preferable to a beneficial lie, Masaryk had proved in the controversy about the two old Czech manuscripts called in German Koniginhof and Grunberg, which were supposedly found in 1814 and 1817. Though their genuineness had been doubted before, only Masaryk and his university colleague Jan Gebauer, a specialist in Old Czech, succeeded in the 1890s in convincing all rational scholars and most of the public that they were pious forgeries of the Romantic era that falsified the image of early Czech history even of genuine historians such as Palacky. Palacky, the great historian and politician, had written the standard history of Bohemia. But this was a local issue. Masaryk's name was first generally known through his defence of Leopold Hilsner, a Czech Jew, who was accused of the ritual murder of a girl-a superstition which Masaryk combatted effectively in discussions, in two pamphlets, and in many articles. The Hilsner affair (1899-1900) was widely noticed abroad, particularly by Ameri can Jews. Masaryk himself noted that it redounded to the credit of the Czechoslovak cause during the world war, when he found that the Jews abroad were familiar with his name and very positive towards him. Later, in 1909, Masaryk's defence of Serbian deputies against the accusations of Professor Friedjung, who used forged documents, was also widely noticed in the West. Masaryk went from Italy, still neutral, to Switzerland. On 6 July 1915, in Geneva, he gave an address in the Hall for Reformation on the 400th anniversary of the burning of Jan Hus at the stake, which contained not only a plea for the independence of the Czech nation but an appeal to its Hussite and Protestant past. Masaryk was a peculiar nationalist. He inherited from the Romantic movement the linguistic concept of a nation which was combined with the concept of a nation's special character and mission. In it was implied a recognition of the right of all nations to cultivate their own national ity. Masaryk had written at length on the meaning of Czech history. It was always a programme, an exhortation to a moral life, to dedi-

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