The Prague Linguistic Circle during the Second World War

The study focuses on the difficult situation of the Prague Linguistic Circle(PLC) during the Second World War(WWⅡ). Despite the decrease of publication possibilities and censorship in the first years of WWⅡ the activities of the Circle did not substantially change: meetings and lectures went on and also Slovo a slovesnost( Word and Verbal Art) was published until 1943. Nevertheless,a certain decrease of activities came in 1944.In general,during WWⅡ the Circle was one of fewcenters of Czech scholarly effort and thanks to it several key individual works of Vilém Mathesius,Jan Mukaovsky,Bohuslav Havrnek,Jií Veltrusky,Vladimír Skalicka etc. and collective books such as Torso a tajemství Máchova díla(The Fragment and Mystery of Mácha's Work),tení o jazyce a poesii( Reading on Language and Literature) were published. These works significantly helped to preserve a continuity of an important research tradition of the Czech Structuralism,and influenced a further development of Czech linguistics,as well as Czech literary criticism, aesthetics, and theatre studies. The present study focuses also on Jan Mukaovsky's activities during WWⅡ and on his works published at that time.