Oldal 419 [419]
OCR
CZECHOSLOVAK ACADEMIC STUDY OF BUDDHISM IN THE 1950s AND 1960s: FIELD RESEARCH IN ASIA it. Or to put their heads together and at least come up with the result that the museum director could do what he can to extend our stay. Again back to the embassy, a hellish situation on both sides, and for a change here no one knows anything. Who and when the entire matter will be resolved — only God knows.” And so it is no surprise that the insufficiently prepared and planned official trip ended in something that appears too much like a failure. It is possible, though, that a not insignificant role was played by the tense political situation in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic — the first anniversary of the Soviet invasion in 21* August 1968 was approaching. In 1969, it was still possible to refer to the Warsaw Pact troops as an occupying force in the state media, yet the situation was rapidly shifting in favor of “normalisation” — the rise of anti-reform conservative Communists to power. This, however, was something that Lumir Jisl never lived to see: at the premature age of forty-eight, he died on 22™ November 1969 from the effects of long-standing cancer. He left behind a rich legacy of scholarly research, which is only now gradually being examined. Lumir Jisl was an archaeologist and Buddhologist. He was equally interested in both fields of study and was internationally renowned in both; he is better known as an archaeologist, less as a Buddhologist. At the beginning of the 1950s, he created his own taxonomy of “Lamaist art”, which has been maintained in the form of a card file, he published several works about “Tibetan art” and most importantly, he published a monograph entitled Mongolian Journey in the London publishing house Batchworth Press in cooperation with Prague Artia in 1960. The book was also published in German under the title Mongolei. Kunst und Tradition. The Czech version, Uméni starého Mongolska, was published in 1961 and it was substantially rewritten by the author; it was not a mere translation of the earlier book. This was something non-standard: Czechoslovak academics, mainly those in social sciences, did not usually publish their works in the West. In Jisl’s case it was not the first publication of this type. Two years earlier he published a book which captured attention of those interested in Tibet and Buddhism and which was prepared in cooperation with Czech photographers and filmmakers Vladimir Sis and Josef Vanis. Lumir Jisl wrote a commentary about Tibetan Buddhist art to accompany the rare pictures from Tibet taken in years 1953 to 1955; the book was published in Czech, German, English and French. Half a century later, the same photographs, digitally restored, were published by the Czech publishers Prah in cooperation with the Norwegian Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture, Oslo. The accompanying text is not Jisl’s this time; it was written by outstanding European Tibetanists Josef Kolmaë and Per Kvaerne.?’ 7 See Vanië, Josef — Sis, Vladimir — Kolmaë, Josef - Kvaerne, Per: Vzpominka na Tibet/ Recalling Tibet. Praha — Oslo, Prah — The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture 1997. 417
