Hermeneutics in the Czech Context (F. X. Šalda, Vaclav Černy, and Dimitrij Tschižewskij [Dmytro Chyzhevsky])
Abstract
There are several reasons that suggest the position of literary critic and literary historian Frantisek Xaver Šalda (1867-1937) as the most important exponent of the hermeneutical method in Czech literary history in the first third of the twentieth century. The romanicist and comparatist Václav Černý (1905-1987), a student of Šalda's and his successor at Prague's Charles University, took Šalda's critical method as a constant endeavour to discover the creative personality "at the moment of creative uplift, the greatest effort of self-realisation".
Václav Černý shared the hermeneutical research interest for the intellectual structures of the Baroque period and Romanticism with Dmitrij Tschižewskij (1894- 1977), slavicist, historian of ideas, and longtime fellow member of the research group Poetics and Hermeneutics.