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

288 Pages·1990·27.12 MB·English

by  George J. Kovtun (eds.)

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-