Josef Polišenký y los principios de la iberoamericanística checa

• Main Author: Josef Opatrný
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Karolinum Press 2018-05-01
• Series: Ibero-Americana Pragensia
• Subjects: Spain; Central Europe; Latin America; Cuban Revolution; Center for Latin American Studies
• Online Access: http://www.karolinum.cz/doi/10.14712/24647063.2017.6
• ISSN: 0536-2520; 2464-7063

The text maps the course of Josef Polišenský towards the Hispanic and Ibero-American studies and his importance in both these fields. Already in the second half of the 1930s Polišenský as a student came into contact with the Spanish world, when as a left-wing activist got involved in the efforts in favor of the Spanish Republic. Only a while later he became interested in the Thirty Years’ War, in which the politics of the Iberian monarchy played a crucial role. In this field Polišenský could proceed in accordance with his professional conviction that accentuated the importance of the study of archival materials for historian. Thirty Years’ War and Spanish politics in Central Europe remained one of the dominants of Polišenský’s professional interests also in the subsequent decades. And in the 1950s he became interested, due to the political changes in Latin America, also in the history of this continent. The Guatemalan, Bolivian and later Cuban revolution were an impulse for a more general interest that culminated in the founding of the Center for Ibero-American Studies and the yearbook Ibero-Americana Pragensia in 1967. The importance of study of archival sources for Polišenský led him to the study of Central European migration to Latin America. His pupils, especially Bohumil Baďura, he led towards the study of various problems of the history of Cuba whose archives after the year 1959 opened up for Czech researchers.