The history of the Aswan High Dam project and the related salvage campaign in Lower and Upper Nubia simultaneously includes a portrait of political and economic strife and the exceptional effort made by archaeologists. As the Cold War and decolonisation impacted the Egyptian political and cultural concepts, institutions and individuals worked in a network of professional and political allegiances that contradict the applicability of a singular guiding narrative, including that of decolonisation or the Cold War, if studied in isolation. A case study of two Egyptologists of Czechoslovak origin attempts to tie the global setting of an international archaeological operation to more localised national and personal perspectives. and Překlad resumé: Hana Navrátilová a Melvyn Clarke
The article considers the picture of the year 1968 and what is popularly known as the ''Prague Spring'' as it appears in establishment prose fi ction from the ''Normalisation'' period (that is, the return to hard-line Communism with the defeat of the reform wing of the Party and the years of the Soviet occupation, 1970-89). Normalisation fi ction - in accord with the government publication Poučení z krizového vývoje ve straně a společnosti po XIII. sjezdu KSČ [Lessons from the Crisis Development in the Party and Society after the 13th Congress of the CommunistParty of Czechoslovakia] - tried to legitimise the policy of Normalisation as a new stage in the development of Socialism. The author analyses the plans and model solutions, which helped to form an ideologised interpretation of social development in Czechoslovakia from January to the Soviet-led intervention of Warsaw Pact troops in late August 1968. The article also considers how the authors of this fi ction (a total of sixteen novels, the best known of which is Alexej Pludek’s antiSemitic Vabank [Gamble] portray the broader historical context, how they explain the motivation and aims of the leaders of the reform movement and describe the participation of various social strata in the political events. Some of these works are instructive models of the future life of the main characters and their orientation in the new circumstances in the phase called ''real, existing Socialism'' in the 1970s and ‘80s. Apart from that, the article considers how established literary critics accepted attempts in belles-lettres to depict the recent ''crisis years,'' from which the new regime hoped to distance itself as clearly as possible.
This paper reflects upon the literary genre of memoirs, their typological differentiation and their specific source value. It also refers to the unique historical testimony of poetry, which directly reflects the events of the period and the atmosphere which they bring about, as well as presenting a certain "reading of history".