Kniha Igora Lukeše Československo nad propastí: Selhání amerických diplomatů a tajných služeb v Praze 1945-1948 (Praha, Prostor 2014) přichází podle autora s řadou nových poznatků a postřehů, ocenění zaslouží především zmapování činnosti amerických tajných služeb v poválečném Československu, založené z velké části na nevyužitých pramenech. Diskutabilní je však Lukešova teze, že poválečné Československo bylo pro Američany zkušební laboratoří budoucího evropského vývoje a hrálo v tom smyslu pro ně klíčovou roli. Jestliže to mohlo platit v roce 1945, se zhoršováním mezinárodní situace jejich zájem o Československo rychle klesal a o dva roky později už věnovali prioritní pozornost jiným evropským zemím. Autor se dále věnuje tématu americké veřejné diplomacie a propagandy v poválečném Československu, které administrativa Spojených států přes naléhání velvyslance Laurence A. Steinhradta velmi podcenila a jež Lukeš ve své práci zcela pominul. Nelze tak přiřknout veškerou zodpovědnost za americký přístup právě Steinhardtovi, jak činí Lukeš., Igor Lukeš’s On the Edge of the Cold War: American Diplomats and Spies in Postwar Prague (2012), published in Czech as Československo nad propastí: Selhání amerických diplomatů a tajných služeb v Praze 1945-1948 (Prague: Prostor, 2014), offers, according to the reviewer, a number of fresh observations and new pieces of information, and it merits praise mainly for charting out the activity of the US secret services in post-war Czechoslovakia, which the author has achieved using largely hitherto unused sources. Nevertheless, Lukeš’s claim that for the Americans post-war Czechoslovakia was a laboratory of future European developments, playing a key role for them in that sense, is highly debatable. Though that may have been true in 1945, their interest in Czechoslovakia rapidly waned with the worsening international situation, and two years later their attention was primarily turned to other European countries. The author also considers American public diplomacy and propaganda in post-war Czechoslovakia, which the US Administration, despite the urgings of Ambassador Laurence A. Steinhardt, greatly underestimated, something Lukeš has completely ignored in this work. It is therefore unfair of Lukeš to assign all of the blame for the American approach to Steinhardt., and Jan Koura.
Emotions and passions, especially the negative ones, played a major role in Seneca’s writing: the anger became the object of his philosophical treatise De ira and prevailed also in his tragedies. Seneca was probably the most important model for jesuit playwrigts which implies the question how these authors worked with his conception of anger and rage as destructive emotions, in which measure they took it over or changed it. Jesuit playwrights are represented here by Karel Kolčava whose plays are the only ones published as collected works during his life. In addition, there are (also published) Kolčava’s didactic letters, which gives us the opportunity to compare his theoretical view of anger with the Seneca’s one in the first part of the article. The realization of these conceptions is then observed on a few examples taken from the respective plays of both authors. Finally a special attention is paid to female characters in rage who are so important in Seneca’s tragedies and who can be found in Kolčava’s plays although women were not welcome on the jesuit stage even as characters., Eva Pauerová., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy