Zdeněk Nejedlý

Zdeněk Nejedlý (1878–1962) was Czechoslovak scholar and public figure, musicologist, historian, and literary critic. Member of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts (1907); founder and president (from 1952) of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1929. Nejedlý graduated from the department of philosophy at Charles University in Prague. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1900. Nejedlý was a professor at Charles University from 1909 to 1939 and 1945 to 1962 and at Moscow University from 1939 to 1945. He was a member of numerous learned institutions abroad, including corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1947). Nejedlý was one of the first scholars in the West to welcome the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia. From 1939 to 1945, during the German fascist occupation of Czechoslovakia, Nejedlý lived in the USSR. In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, he was minister of schools and public education in 1945–46, minister of labor and social security from 1946 to 1948, and minister of schools, sciences, and arts from February 1948 until January 1953. Nejedlý’s scholarly interests were chiefly concerned with the cultural, ancient, medieval, and modern history of Czechoslovakia. He was one of the founders of the Czechoslovak democratic school of musicology. He studied the works of the composer B. Smetana, the history of Czech Hussite songs, opera, and the national theater. Nejedlý wrote works on the history of world music, including Soviet Music (1936), and articles on contemporary Czechoslovak composers. Nejedlý, along with Soviet scholars, trained Slavicists and laid the foundations of Marxist Slavic studies. He was awarded two Orders of Lenin, three Orders of Klement Gottwald, the Order of the Republic, and the Bulgarian Order of Georgii Dimitrov.