Mezi demokracií a totalitou : Pražský lingvistický kroužek v dějinách české literárněvědné slavistiky meziválečného období

The paper describes the history and conceptual sources of the Prague Linguistic Circle (such as formalist school; phenomenology; local aesthetic tradition; etc.), which was in existence from 1926 to 1951 as an interdisciplinary grouping of linguists, literary theoreticians, aestheticians, and musicologists (including J. Mukařovský; R. Jakobson; B. Trnka; B. Havránek; R. Wellek; F. Wollman; A. Sychra; etc.). Based on functional-structural methodology, the school embodied the principles of team and programme collaboration in humanities. Until 1930 the grouping worked as a free discussion fello-wship, afterwards, as an officially authorised association with statutory regulations and OPERA SLAVICA, XXI, 2011, 1 25 organisational structure. Moreover, the paper reconstitutes three thematic fields of its pub-lication activities (contemporary polemics not excluding): 1. General linguistics with em-phasis on phonology; 2. Poetics focused on the "literariness" of a poetical text, which resulted in seeing a work of art as an independent aesthetic sign; 3. The issues of language culture, functional styles and theory of literary language. The practical policies of the Prague Linguistic Circle varied between democracy and totality, which was reflected in manifesting a monolithic method and in critical responses to alternative concepts. The year 1930 saw the "voluntary" resignation of the psychologically oriented literary historian J. V. Sedlák, who was followed in 1934 by the Paleo-Slavist M. Weingart. Apart from reprinting the Statutory Regulations of the Circle and the letter to President T. G. Masaryk (1931), the study is based on the author's own research in the archives and oriented towards the methodological transformation of Russian formalism and Czech structuralism.