Abstract
The monograph explores the state and quality of Czech textual criticism since 1989-when it became possible to work freely again as a publisher, without ideological supervision. The author stresses the fact that preparing a text for publishing-no matter whether for scholars or laymen-is just as demanding as restoring artworks or digitalizing film.
He points out the public's widespread impression that literary texts exist as if in a vacuum, and he examines the consequences that result from such a lay (un)awareness and from inexpert publishing work. The central axis of its narrative lies in the origins, misadventures, and production of The Collected Works of Josef Škvorecký (1991-2016), and besides text studies themselves and the preparations for publishing a literary text, it also reflects on the special conditions of a freshly post-communist economic environment.
This treatise can simultaneously serve as a guidebook to the individual stages of preparing a book, such as: reflecting on the capacity and aim of the planned publishing act, performing bibliographical research, collecting sources and criticizing sources, setting the series' overall scope, choosing default wordings for individual texts, and their linguistic and editorial treatments, and configuring the annotations and commentary-whose variability the monograph takes pains to emphasize. Its structure as a "timeline tale" of The Collected Works of Josef Škvorecký is interrupted throughout by excursions into selected publishing projects of the last three decades (for Karel Poláček, F.
X. Šalda, Petr Rezek, Bohumil Hrabal, Vítězslav Nezval, T. G.
Masaryk, Jaroslav Seifert, Milan Kundera, and Jiří Němec). The author meanwhile critically engages a variety of publishing approaches, here with a focus on describing the editor's intentions, there dominated by critical analysis.
Theoretical questions are woven into the work's overview sections, and alongside a thorough analysis, solutions for individual problems are included as well; in certain places, the text-studies analysis segues into interpreting a given text or a certain aspect of it. Readers may follow how the author's professional view of text studies is born within these close relationships.