Czech historian Jaroslav Bidlo and his involvement in the neo-slav movement before World War I

The Czech historian Jaroslav Bidlo (1868-1937) was one of the few Austro-Hungarian scholars who possessed vast and critical knowledge in the field of history of Slavic nations. His knowledge was based on his own experience gathered in Polish and Russian academic circles before World War I. As a professor of the Czech Charles-Ferdinand University he was involved in the so-called Neo-Slav movement, which culminated in the “Slavic Congress” in Prague in July 1908, and in the edition of a collective monograph about the Slavic nations (Slovanstvo, Prague 1912). Bidlo used these opportunities to create his own synthetic concept of Slavic history, which he later successfully developed during the interwar period.