Abstract

The April 1991 Prague conference on “Intellectuals and Power,” organized by the journal Prostor, might have set the tone for the Czech intelligentsia of the next decade. While it is unfair to generalize about the Czech intelligentsia solely on the basis of a single conference attended by a few dozen academics, the Prostor conference did prefigure those tensions that emerged afterwards. At that time the participants assumed that nationalist temptations were an exclusively Slovak predilection and beyond the purview of sophisticated Prague intellectuals. Most of the latter did not even bother to argue about such matters. The likely conclusion seemed to be that to “let the poor devils from Bratislava go as they please” was a reasonable course of action.