CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN T. G. MASARYK AND J. S. MACHAR

The Masaryk Institute and Archives, Czech Academy of Sciences, is to publish T.G. Masaryk – Josef Svatopluk Machar: Correspondence; it is Petr Kotyk, a literary historian and the Museum of Czech Literature Literary Archive Department’s curator who was its co-editor. In September 2013, he managed to gain for the Museum Literary Archive a valuable acquisition of about 500 letters from 1893-1932 addressed to J.S. Machar, and minor correspondence from Machar’s family relatives, his wife Hedvika and his daughters Sylva and Jiřina. The convolute’s importance mainly lies in the valuable addition to 300 letters from J.S. Machar of 1893 – 1913 stored in the T.G. Masaryk Fond, which now forms the whole that does not compare with any correspondence from T.G. Masaryk that has been publish until now. The publication comes out as another volume of the edition T.G. Masaryk’s Correspondence. It makes access to correspondence between T.G. Masaryk and J.S. Machar from 1893-1895; that means from the establishment of co-operation with the magazine Naše doba initiated by T.G. Masaryk up to the times of heated debate triggered by the published declaration ‘Czech Modernism’. It comprises 183 edited documents with extensive note apparatus, and a monograph study by Vratislav Doubek and Lucie Merhautová Scepticism and Hope. The Formation of Reformatory Modernism Grounds’, which explains their mutual correspondence in a broader scope. The book has been co- prepared with the Museum of Czech Literature within the Czech Grant Agency project: ‘Modernism – Machar – Masaryk: Thought, Creation, Manners’.