This article deals with the multiple murders of Roma people committed by a number of local citizens in Pobedim, a village in West Slovakia,during the night of October 1-2, 1928, which could be understood as an anti-Roma pogrom. Attention is paid to the interactions between different Czechoslovak state authorities such as gendarmerie, the district office, provincial office, court and municipalities in the region shortly before the outbreak of the
pogrom and in its aftermath. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben´s theory elaborated for the analysis of anti-Gypsy measures by various scholars, e.g. Jennifer Illuzzi, the author argues that the extreme violence resulted from the tensions and conflicts between those historical actors who enforced the contemporary anti-Gypsy measures on the regional level and which led to the creation of
the state of exception for the population labeled as Gypsies. The analysis also reveals the variety of contemporary practices of exclusion towards the population labeled as Gypsies in interwar Czechoslovakia. Despite the fact that the Roma were victims of a brutal assault even the trials attest to the extreme asymmetry of power between the accused portrayed as “decent citizens” and
the bare lives of the Roma. Because the executive state authorities circumvented the judiciary and forged their own solution allegedly more suited to the public interest, the Roma were caught in the state of exception. Furthermore,the article shows how ideas of Gypsies´ internment in various types of forced labor camps as a permanent and spatial embodiment of the state of exception
stemmed from the dynamic of enforcing anti-Gypsy measures. and Obsahuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou
The struggle between Eliška Krásnohorská (1847–1926) and the proponentsof the monthly Lumír, including Josef Václav Sládek (1845–1912) and JaroslavVrchlický (1853–1912), clearly reflects the situation amongst Czech critics and ofKrásnohorská herself in late 1870s and early 1880s. By considering Krásnohorská’sefforts, the article seeks to examine the well-known dispute, which took place inthe periodicals of the times, in associations of artists like the Umělecká beseda, at private meetings, and of course in private correspondence. The bone of contentionwas the nature of criticism, the new aesthetics, and the power of literature.Among other things, this had a suppressed gender aspect, since it had to do witha woman’s right to be a critic, though her position was advantageously supportedby nationalist patriotic interests. Lastly, it is noted that the Lumír proponents’dispute overlapped with the initial difficultly Realism had making its way intoCzech literature.