Notable personalities of the Institute of Slavonic Studies

PhDr. Jiří Bečka, CSc. (2. 2. 1930 – 4. 4. 2014)

He was a specialist in Czech-Polish literary relations in the second half of the 19th century and later in the history of the Institute of Slavonic Studies until 1948. In addition to these activities, he devoted himself systematically to bibliographical work in the field of Slavonic literature. His name will always be associated with the extensive three-volume book Slavica in the Czech language, which contains an extensive bibliography of Czech translations of literary texts from the literatures of the Slavic nations from the earliest times to 1918.

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Jiří Bečka

Mgr. Ljubov Běloševská (27. 8. 1946 – 11. 11. 2013)

She was instrumental in initiating comprehensive research on Russian emigration in interwar Czechoslovakia, which is unique in the Czech context. She authored or edited a number of publications on the subject.

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Ljubov Běloševská

PhDr. Emilie Bláhová, CSc. (13. 6. 1931 – 9. 10. 2016)

Emilie Bláhová was one of the leading figures in Czech Paleo-Slavonic studies. Various aspects of Old Slavonic, with Old Slavonic homilies at the centre of her research, were her main areas of interest. However, the focus of Emilie Bláhová’s work was Old Slavonic lexicography; she contributed to the compilation of the Dictionary of the Old Slavonic Language, co-authored the Old Slavonic Dictionary based on manuscripts from the 10th and 11th centuries, and as the chief editor, she published the entire first volume of the Greek-Old Slavonic Index. In 2004 – 2010, she was also the editor-in-chief of the journal Slavia.

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Emilie Bláhová

PhDr. Milada Černá, CSc. (22. 6. 1930 – 23. 4. 2024)

Milada Černá, a distinguished scholar in the field of Serbo-Croatian Studies, dealt for a long time mainly with topics related to the Czech reception of Serbian and Croatian literature, or with South Slavic interpretations of the works of Czech authors. Her doctoral dissertation focused on Prokop Chocholoušek’s work. Her professional interests spanned a very impressive range of time periods in the history of Serbian and Croatian literature, including modernism, interwar avant-garde, pre-Romanticism, and contemporary literature. Throughout the totalitarian period, Milada Černá was virtually the only one who consistently commented on the development of thinking about Serbian and Croatian literary history, devoting herself to criticism alongside more general methodological thoughts on the concept of literary history. She was also active as a translator of the works of Croatian and Serbian prose writers (I. Andrić, B. Ćopić, V. Desnica, A. Diklić, A. Isaković, V. Kaleb, M. Kapor, M. Krleža, I. Kušan, R. Marinković).

Milada Černá

doc. PhDr. Zoe Hauptová, CSc. (9. 2. 1929 – 23. 1. 2012)

A distinguished Czech paleoslovenist, long-time editor of the Dictionary of the Old Slavonic Language, and university lecturer.

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Zoe Hauptová

Jasna Hloušková (12. 6. 1946 – 1. 12. 2002)

The last student of Karel Krejčí, a member of the department of Slavonic Literatures of the Institute of Slavonic Studies and a secretary of the journal Slavia. She focused mainly on Polish literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially on Stanislaw Przybyszewski, whose memoirs and correspondence she translated into Czech.

Jasna Hloušková

PhDr. Danuše Hronková (6. 2. 1930 – 12. 1. 2022)

Prominent scholar in the field of Bulgarian Studies, literary historian, translator, and journalist. Upon graduating in Bulgarian and Czech philology from the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in 1953, she became a member of the lexicographic department at the Institute of Slavonic Studies of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, where, under the guidance of Karel Hora, the extensive Bulgarian-Czech dictionary was created (1959). She worked in the institutes of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (Institute of Languages and Literatures, Institute for Czech and World Literature) until her retirement in 1988. Her professional interest focused on more recent Bulgarian literature and its reception in the Czech cultural environment, on Czech-Bulgarian literary relations, on the assessment of the quality of Czech translations from Bulgarian, on modern Bulgarian poetry of the 20th century, and on some contemporary literary phenomena. She contributed entries on Bulgarian literature to Czech and foreign encyclopaedias and dictionaries. 

Danuše Hronková

Prom. fil. Václav Konzal (13. 12. 1931 – 3. 11. 2020)

Václav Konzal was born on 13 December 1931 in Prague. Due to the adversity of the times, he was permitted to work as a scholar only since 1970, when he joined the work on the Dictionary of the Old Slavonic Language. He was active in the current Department of Paleoslavic Studies and Byzantine Studies of the Institute of Slavonic Studies of the Czech Academy of Sciences until his retirement in 2015 and contributed significantly to the preparation of the Supplements to the Dictionary of the Old Slavonic Language, completed in 2016.

In his own research activities, Václav Konzal dealt mainly with the Czech version of Church Slavonic and the question of continuity between Old Slavonic and Czech Church Slavonic literature. His main achievements in this field include a monumental two-volume edition of Gregory the Great’s 40 Homilies on the Gospels (2005, 2006) and a monograph dealing with Old Slavonic prayer against the devil (2015).

Together with other colleagues, Václav Konzal also participated in the translation of selected ancient texts into modern Czech. His major contributions in this area are the translations of the legends of the Wenceslaus-Ludmila cycle (Old Church Slavonic Legends of Czech Origin — the Earliest Chapters in the History of Czech-Russian Cultural Relations, 1976) or the translation of selected Old Russian texts (Russian Literature in the Middle Ages, 1989). In addition to paleoslovenistics, Václav Konzal also worked on liturgical translations. Together with Bonaventura Bouš and Miloslav Máša, he translated most of the Roman Catholic liturgical texts in use today, and for the Vyšehrad publisher, he also translated a number of contemporary liturgical and theological works.

Václav Konzal received several awards for his scholarly work; in 2009 he received the Rudolf Medek Award from the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, and in 2013 he was awarded the Jan Patočka Memorial Medal by the Czech Academy of Sciences. 

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Václav Konzal

PhDr. Vladimír Kříž (20. 7. 1948 – 2. 5. 2019)

He was a distinguished literary scholar, Bulgarianist, university teacher, and, last but not least, the founder of the Euroslavica publishing house. Under his direction, three academic journals – Slavia, Germanoslavica and Byzantinoslavica – and other publications of the Slavic Institute were published for more than a quarter of a century.

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Vladimír Kříž

Prof. PhDr. Oldřich Leška, CSc. (16. 6. 1927 – 9. 8. 1997)

As a Russianist, Ukrainianist, and general linguist, his works covered grammar (especially formal and semantic morphology), lexicography, and the sound aspects of the language. He studied not only the spoken and written language but also the dialects, always taking into account the history of the language and the conditions of its development. He is also credited with re-establishing the Prague Linguistic Circle (disbanded after 1948).

Oldřich Leška

PhDr. Zdenka Ribarova (13. 6. 1945 – 13. 3. 2019)

Zdenka Ribarova dedicated the majority of her academic career to the Institute of Macedonian Language at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. She was primarily engaged in research at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, focusing on the various aspects of the Macedonian recension of Church Slavonic. Her most significant contributions in this field include the editions of Radomir’s Gospel (with R. Ugrinova Skalovska, 1989) and Grigorovich’s Parimeion (with Zoe Hauptová, 1998 and 2014). Following her return to her homeland in 2000, she commenced employment at the Institute of Slavonic Studies of the Czech Academy of Sciences. During this period, her research interests shifted to Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic lexicography. In addition to her contribution to the Greek-Old Slavonic Index, Zdenka Ribarova served as the managing editor of the Dictionary of the Macedonian recension of Church Slavonic (from its inception in 2000), the Dictionary of the Croatian recension of Church Slavonic, and the Dictionary of the Bulgarian recension of Church Slavonic. She has also been instrumental in the development of the Tatian recension of Church Slavonic (since 2011), and under her leadership, the first volume of the Comparative Index to the Dictionaries, compiled by the Commission for Church Slavonic Dictionaries at the MKS, was published in 2015.

In recognition of her contributions to the field of Macedonian linguistics, Zdenka Ribarova was awarded the Blaž Konesky Medal in 2012 by the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts to commemorate the 45th anniversary of its founding. She was further honoured with the Josef Dobrovsky Honorary Medal for Merit in Philological and Philosophical Sciences in 2015. 

Zdenka Ribarova

prom. fil. Marie Sádlíková (28. 2. 1931 – 24. 6. 2020)

She devoted most of her scholar career to Russian Studies-focused translation lexicography. She participated in major lexicographic projects, and under the guidance of leading scholars such as L. V. Kopecký, O. Leška, and N. P. Savický, she contributed to a number of Russian-Czech and Czech-Russian dictionaries. At the beginning of the 21st century, she was instrumental in the publication of the revised and substantially expanded Large Czech-Russian Dictionary, which in both print and electronic versions reflected the social changes that took place in the Czech Republic and Russia after 1989 and which were inevitably reflected in the vocabulary of both languages. She has also been involved in the research of neology and neography as a co-author of the Russian-Czech and Czech-Russian Dictionary of Neologisms or as a member of the team of authors who created the Russian-Czech electronic dictionary database, which is now freely accessible to the public and highly appreciated by experts. 

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Marie Sádlíková

prom. fil. Nikolaj Petrovič Savický, CSc. (16. 3. 1935 – 24. 7. 2018)

His scholarly research focused on theoretical synchronic linguistics and translation lexicography. As a trained Rusianist and Ukrainianist, he has worked extensively on major lexicographic projects, such as the Large Czech-Russian Dictionary, the Ukrainian-Czech and Czech-Ukrainian Dictionary, and the Russian-Czech Electronic Dictionary Database. In the 1990s, he was one of the first scholars in the Czech Republic to systematically study the supply of new words into Czech, Russian, and Ukrainian in his studies and grant projects he led, and thus contributed to the development of neology and neography. He was co-author of the Russian-Czech and Czech-Russian Dictionary of Neologisms and the Ukrainian-Czech Dictionary of Neologisms, author of a number of theoretical linguistic studies, and co-author of the first Czech-language Dictionary of Contemporary Ukrainian.

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Nikolaj Petrovič Savický

PhDr. Vladimír Vavřínek, CSc., Dr.h.c. (5. 8. 1930 – 14. 8. 2024)

He studied history and classical philology at the Faculty of Arts in Prague and continued his postgraduate studies at the Institute of History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. From 1970 to 1992, Vladimír Vavřínek was a researcher at the Cabinet of Greek, Roman and Latin Studies, to which the Byzantology Department of the Institute of Slavonic Studies was transferred after its reorganisation in 1963.

In his professional work, Vladimír Vavřínek focused mainly on Byzantine-Slavic relations, especially the history of Great Moravia and the significance of the Cyril and Methodius mission. Vladimír Vavřínek’s contributions to the journal Byzantinoslavica, of which he was the editor-in-chief from 1990 to 2000, are also significant, although he had been a member of the journal’s editorial staff since 1970.

After 1989, Vladimír Vavřínek became a key figure in the process of restoring the independent Institute of Slavonic Studies, which, thanks largely to his efforts, became a legal entity on 1 January 1998. Vladimír Vavřínek was the director of the institute from 1998 to 2007.

Vladimír Vavřínek has received many national and international awards for his professional activity, including the Josef Dobrovský Medal awarded by the Academic Council of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (2006) and the award of the academic rank of Doctor honoris causa by the University of Shumen for his scientific contribution to Cyril and Methodius studies (2011).

Vladimír Vavřínek

PhDr. Josef Vlášek (18. 5. 1934 – 6. 8. 2014)

In his professional life, he focused mainly on Great Moravian, Polish, and Sorbian literature, and his translations of fiction from these languages are still highly regarded. For many years, he was also the editor-in-chief of the magazine Slavia.

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Josef Vlášek

PhDr. Slavomír Wollman, DrSc. (3. 8. 1925 – 27. 1. 2012)

A prominent Czech literary scholar, Slavist, comparatist, long-time editor-in-chief of Slavia magazine, and member of the Czech and International Committee of Slavists.

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Slavomír Wollman