Introduction

Abstract

The twelve chapters in this book are revised versions of papers delivered at the conference on Masaryk held at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of the University of London in December 1986. The occasion of the conference was the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of Masaryk’s death which had occurred on 14 September 1937. Masaryk had close connections with the school. His appointment as lecturer in Slavonic Studies at King’s College was the first such appointment in the University of London (cf. Christopher Seton-Watson’s chapter). On 19 October 1915, Masaryk delivered his inaugural lecture ‘The Problem of Small Nations in the European crisis’. The fact that Lord Robert Cecil, Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, acted as chairman in the absence ofthe Prime Minister, Asquith, who was ill, gave the occasion a significance which was as much political as academic. When, on the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the Czechoslovak Republic, Masaryk sent a message to R. W. Seton-Watson, who became the first Masaryk Professor of Ce111:ral European History at London University, he emphasised the academic and political‘function of your School and its organ, The Slavonic Review’ .¹ The close connection was to continue right up to 1948, when the then Masaryk Professor, R. R. Betts, attended the celebrations marking the six hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the University of Prague. Other historians, led by R. W. Seton-Watson, the editor of a book of essays to commemorate the event, boycotted the occasion as a protest against the extinction of the‘Masaryk Republic’ by the Communists in February 1948.²