Quo vadis esilio? Promeny: uno spaccato sulla riflessione introspettiva dell’esilio intellettuale ceco post-1948

The paper aims to investigate the Czech (Czechoslovak) exile community’s introspective reflection on its functions and duties toward Czechoslovakia, understood both as a communist regime and as a homeland, and toward the West, specifically the US. The period taken under examination regards the first exile wave started after the Communist coup in 1948 and lasted until the Soviet occupation in 1968. The main research material is the journal Proměny, found- ed in 1964 in New York by Ladislav Radimský as the magazine of the Society for Sciences and Arts (SVU), a non- profit organization of Czech and Slovak intellectuals formed in the Usa in 1958. In the first part of the paper, the SVU and the journal are situated in the intellectual exile context of the time, while the second part offers the analysis of selected articles, and the reactions to them, by focusing on the linguistic and cultural issues. Since they represent con- stitutive features of the journal itself, particular attention is given to Radimský’s editorials.