Prítomnost
Encyclopedia
Přítomnost is a Czech
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....

 quarterly political-cultural magazine published in Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...

.

History

The Přítomnost newspaper was able to come into existence thanks to T. G. Masaryk
Tomáš Masaryk
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk , sometimes called Thomas Masaryk in English, was an Austro-Hungarian and Czechoslovak politician, sociologist and philosopher, who as an eager advocate of Czechoslovak independence during World War I became the founder and first President of Czechoslovakia, also was...

 (first Czechoslovakia's President), who at the time was financially supporting young journalist Ferdinand Peroutka
Ferdinand Peroutka
Ferdinand Peroutka was a Czech journalist and writer.-Life:Peroutka was born to a Czech-German family in Prague in 1895. In 1913 he began his career as a journalist. After World War I, he became a editor-in-chief of a new newspaper Tribuna...

.
The magazine gained a notable reputation and became one of the most respected political publication of its time. A large number of democratically-minded authors such as Karel Čapek
Karel Capek
Karel Čapek was Czech writer of the 20th century.-Biography:Born in 1890 in the Bohemian mountain village of Malé Svatoňovice to an overbearing, emotional mother and a distant yet adored father, Čapek was the youngest of three siblings...

, Milena Jesenská
Milena Jesenská
Milena Jesenská was a Czech journalist, writer, editor and translator, who refused to abandon her Jewish friends and was deported to and died alongside them in Ravensbrück concentration camp....

, Eduard Bass
Eduard Bass
Eduard Bass, born Eduard Schmidt, was a Czech prose writer, journalist, singer, and actor.From 1910 he worked as a singer, journalist and cabaret director...

, Karel Poláček
Karel Polácek
Karel Poláček was a Czechoslovak writer, humorist and journalist of Jewish descent.-Life:He was born in Rychnov nad Kněžnou into a family of a Jewish trader. He started to attend secondary school there, but due to his bad results he transferred to a secondary school in Prague, from which he...

, Richard Wiener, Václav Černý, Otokar Fischer
Otokar Fischer
Otokar Fischer was a Czech translator, playwright, poet and critic.He was born in Kolín, Czech Republic.He made new translations of Goethe, Shakespeare and Villon...

 contributed to Přítomnost. Politician and publisher Jaroslav Stránský was the magazine's publisher.
After the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia
German occupation of Czechoslovakia
German occupation of Czechoslovakia began with the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia's northern and western border regions, known collectively as the Sudetenland, under terms outlined by the Munich Agreement. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's pretext for this effort was the alleged privations suffered by...

, Peroutka was deported to Concentration camp in Buchenwald. After the War, Přítomnost was renewed as Dnešek, but in February 1948 all came to an end. A number of young Czech intellectuals in exile tried to publish the magazine in its form incarnation and named it Skutečnost. Amongst the contributors to this magazine were Pavel Tigrid
Pavel Tigrid
Pavel Tigrid was a writer, publisher and author of Czech origin. He is considered one of the most important personalities of the exile Czech journalism.-Biography:He left Czechoslovakia as a young man to evade the Nazis...

, Jaroslav Stránský, Meda Mládková and even Ferdinand Peroutka.

In January 1995 Martin Jan Stránský, the grandson of Jaroslav Stránský, carried on the family tradition and began to publish Nová Přítomnost. The first editor in chief of the renewed magazine was the poet Miroslav Holub
Miroslav Holub
Miroslav Holub was a Czech poet and immunologist.Miroslav Holub's work was heavily influenced by his experiences as an Immunologist, writing many poems using his scientific knowledge to poetic effect. His work is almost always unrhymed, so lends itself easily to translation...

. He was followed in this role by Petr Pithart
Petr Pithart
Petr Pithart is a Czech politician, lawyer and political scientist.He served as Prime Minister of the Czech Republic from February 6, 1990 to July 2, 1992...

, Jan Sokol, Tomáš Vrba, and Libuše Koubská. The current editors of the magazine are Ivan Malý and Martin Riegl. In January 2000, Nová Přítomnost went back to the original name of Přítomnost established by Peroutka. The magazine has published articles by some of the leading academics, writers, and journalists of the Czech Republic, including former Czech President Václav Havel
Václav Havel
Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...

. In 1996, Stransky also started publishing an English-language version of the magazine under the title of The New Presence.

External links

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