“The Milada Paulová’s Syndrome” – The Life’s Work of the Czech Scholar and its Influence on the Historiography in the Socialist Yugoslavia

The paper deals with the complex circumstances accompanying the writing of the book by a Czech historian Milada Paulová devoted to the history of the Yugoslav Committee during the First World War (Jugoslavenski odbor. Povijest jugoslavenske emigracije za svjetskog rata od 1914.–1918.). The authors also focus on the subsequent reception of the book by the Yugoslavian historiography after 1945. The first section of the paper, based on archival sources and published correspondence, examines the contemporary infl uences and conditions that aff ected the writing of the book. It focuses on personal as well as financial, logistic, and other factors that shaped the final form of the abovementioned publication. The second part deals with an analysis of the specific impact and the overal influence of the book on the narrative and interpretative processes in the Yugoslavian historiography between 1945 and 1991. In this respect, the paper emphasises not only an extraordinary number of references to Paulová’s book appearing in the prominent and often classical historiographic works, but also examines the reasons for so many of the Yugoslavian researches automatically accepting or, on the contrary, openly refuting some of the theses first formulated and published by the first Czech female docent in her postdoctoral dissertation in 1925.