Abstrakt
Czechoslovak sinologist Jaroslav Průšek (1906-1980) is recognised as the founder of the Prague School of Sinology and one of the great figures of twentieth-century European scholarship on China. He held the first chair for Chinese and Japanese languages and literature established at Charles University in Prague in 1945.
Later he became director of the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, but after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 he was purged and his work was suppressed, while at the same time interest in his pioneering work on modern Chinese literature started to grow internationally. This article will contextualise Průšek's research on Chinese literary modernity within his broader interest in history and the early vernacular story, and in his general approach to Chinese culture.
This will enable us to see Průšek's 1961-1962 polemics with another great scholar of modern Chinese literature, C. T.
Hsia, in broader perspective.