Jan Mervart, Visiting Fellowship 2024/25

Short biography

Jan Mervart focuses on modern Czech and Slovak intellectual and cultural history. His latest book, written together with Jiří Růžička, is devoted to the intellectual history of Czechoslovak post-Stalinist Marxism (“Rehabilitate Marx!” The Czechoslovak party intelligentsia and thinking post-Stalinist modernity, Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburg Press, forthcoming). Together with Adam Hudek and Michal Kopeček he coedited Czechoslovakism (London: Routledge, 2021) and together with Joseph Grim Feinberg and Ivan Landa he coedited Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

Visiting Fellowship June 2025

Motivation

During my stay at INZ, I will finish a paper on the concept of “autonomous Stalinism.” This concept is introduced through an analysis of the political program of the Czech resistance group Předvoj. It focuses primarily on visions of the post-war organization of Czechoslovakia at the social, national, and gender levels and outlines how the set goals were to be achieved. This work is part of a larger project devoted to the genealogy of Czechoslovak Stalinism from the 1920s to the 1950s. Within this project, we analyze the effectiveness and resilience of Czechoslovak Stalinism, which significantly shaped Czechoslovak history in the second half of the 20th century. The project establishes a conceptual framework to capture the complexity and internal dynamics of Czechoslovak Stalinism.

Selected bibliography:

Jan Mervart, Jiří Růžička,“Rehabilitate Marx!” The Czechoslovak Party Intelligentsia and Post-Stalinist Modernity, The University of Pittsburgh Press (Russian and East European Studies), Pittsburgh 2025.

Feinberg, Joseph Grim, Landa, Ivan, Mervart, Jan, Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete. Leiden: Brill (Historical Materialism), 2022.

Hudek, Adam, Kopeček, Michal, Mervart, Jan. Czechoslovakism, Abingdon: Routledge (Routledge Histories of Central and Eastern Europe), 2022.

Jiří Růžička and Jan Mervart, Marxism and existentialism in state socialist Czechoslovakia. Studies in East European Thought, 75, 2023, s. 399–416.

Jan Mervart  and Jiří Růžička, Czechoslovak Post-Stalinism: A Distinct Field of Socialist Visions, East Central Europe, Roč.  48, č. 2/3 (2021), s. 220–249.

Czechoslovak Marxist Humanism and the Revolution, Studies in East European Thought, vol. 69, issue 1, 2017, pp. 111–126.

Karel Kosík as a Public Intellectual of the Reform Years, in: Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, Feinberg, J.; Landa, I.; Mervart, J. (eds.), Leiden: Brill 2022, s. 19–38.

Czechoslovakism and the party theory of the “nationality question”, in: Hudek, Adam, Kopeček, Michal, Mervart, Jan. Czechoslovakism. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022, s. 371-395.

Shaping ‘Real Socialism’: The Normalized Conception of Culture, in: Kevin McDermott and Mattiew Sttibe (eds), Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe in the Era of Normalization, 1969–1989. London: Palgrave 2022, 195–214.

Envisioning Socialist Utopia: The Czechoslovak Program of Self-Governing Socialism. In: Beránková, Jana Ndiaye –  Hauser, Michael –  Nesbitt, Nick (eds.), Revolutions for the Future. May ‘68 and Prague Spring, Lyon 2020, s. 260–279.