Palacký begins the Czech history

JAN 01 1836 · 12:00

František Palacký, historiographer of the Bohemian Estates. Portrait by Jan Vilímek, late 19th c. In 1836 he publishes the first German volume of his Geschichte von Böhmen; the Czech edition follows from 1848 onward and becomes the founding text of the National Revival. Place: Prague (the Bohemian Museum, the Sternberg Palace); the volume is printed in Prague, the German edition first Figures: František Palacký, historiographer of the Bohemian Estates · Pavel Josef Šafařík, philologist and collaborator · Josef Jungmann, lexicographer (whose Czech-German dictionary, completed 1839, supplies the prose vehicle) Palacký is appointed historiographer of the Bohemian Estates in 1831, with a stipend, an archive pass, and a commission to write a complete history of the Czech lands. He works in German, because the Estates are still German-speaking and because there is, in 1831, almost no Czech historical prose vocabulary. The first volume, Geschichte von Böhmen, appears in 1836 and covers the pre-Christian and Přemyslid centuries to 1197. He has read every chronicle from Cosmas onward in the original. He has read the archives at Wittingau (Třeboň) and at Český Krumlov. He is thirty-eight. Five more volumes will follow over the next thirty-one years, taking the story to 1526 (he stops at the Habsburg accession, as if at a moral cliff). From 1848 onward Palacký rewrites the work in Czech as Dějiny národu českého v Čechách a v Moravě. Both editions are read; the Czech edition is read more.