Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU)

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Jedná se o český překlad díla Miloslava Rechcígla ml. vydaného v angličtině s názvem On Behalf of Their Homeland: Fifty Years of SVU.

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On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), the Society has published an extraordinary memoir by one of the Society’s founders and President for many years Dr. Miloslav Rechcigl. The book bears a title On Behalf of Their Homeland: Fifty Years of SVU.

An Eyewitness Account of the History of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) was published by East European Monographs, Boulder, CO and is being distributed by Columbia University Press, New York.

In this monumental monograph of some 700 pages, illustrated with numerous photographs, the Society is depicted …read more

Historical Overview
by Miloslav Rechcigl

The impetus for organizing the Society came from Dr. Jaroslav Nemec of the National Library of Medicine, who became its first secretary-general. The idea began to take shape in the fall of 1956, when a Study Section (“Studijni odbor”) under the chairmanship of Dr. Vaclav Mostecky, was established in the Washington, DC Chapter of the Czechoslovak National Council of America. In the fall of 1957, the Study Section sent a questionnaire to thirty-five leading Czechoslovak scholars in the United States and Western Europe, concerning the possibility of organizing an Academy or Society of Czechoslovak Arts and Sciences. …read more

The Society was officially organized in 1958, at the initiative of Czech and Slovak intellectuals living abroad, at a time when the communist regime in Czechoslovakia had repudiated the country’s historical traditions and suppressed free expression. The SVU wanted to provide a forum for the free development of Czechoslovak culture in exile and make the world aware of the Czech and Slovak cultural traditions, which date back more than a millennium.

Its activities, as outlined in the original bylaws, consisted of supporting and coordinating the educational, scholarly, literary and artistic endeavors of the Czechoslovak intelligentsia abroad. However, the Society was subsequently broadened into an organization open to all individuals, regardless of ethnic origin, interested in fostering Czech and/or Slovak culture.

Following the end of the communist regime in 1989, the SVU’s functions greatly expanded. Now, in addition to its original mission, the Society has become a bridge between Czech and Slovak professionals and those in other countries. It allows scholars abroad to benefit from contact with their Czech and Slovak colleagues, as well as helping to reintegrate the intellectual life of these two nations into the main stream of world science, arts and letters, from which they were separated for so long by political barriers.