The Humanities and the Historical and Cultural Context of Central and Eastern Europe in the XXth Century: Academics, Translators and Other Literati Facing Wars, Revolutions, Regimes

The paper deals with the contents of two monographic volumes, published as the current issues of two journals with a comparative and international focus — Slovo a smysl (Charles University) and Romània Orientale (Sapienza University of Rome), in which the first results of the international interdisciplinary research project The Humanities and the historical and cultural context of Central and Eastern Europe in the XXth century are printed. The project focuses on unpublished texts by scholars and translators, as well as writers in the broader sense, concerning topics and problems specific to the cultures of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. This was a century shaped by war, revolution, and the ascent of anti-democratic regimes, all of which had a decisive influence on the scholarly environment in which historians, philologists, and translators carried out their work. With an aim to better understand this often overlooked historical context, the research focuess on scholars who may not have been at liberty to choose their object of study, translators who were not always able to choose which books to translate — that is, on an extra-literary context, political and social, that exerted a pronounced influence on scholarly work broadly speaking, whether through explicit restrictions (ideological censorship, for instance) or through other forms of psychological conditioning.