The Ten Years Leading to the Formation of the CAS

Abstract

In her Inaugural Lecture delivered at Cambridge University in 1950, Professor Elizabeth Hill emphasized that Never before have the Slavs been so prominent in world history, nor our need for Slavonic studies in the English-speaking world greater than it is today. According to Professor Hill, Systematic Studies in European universities, some 150 years old, began in Vienna and in Prague; they were then taken up in the nineteenth century in the other Slav centres, and later in the non-Slav academic centres in Europe/' Interest in Slavonic studies developed rather late in British and Canadian institutions of learning. Half a century ago, Canada was living in a state of splendid isolation, which kept her removed not only from European political affairs, but from Eastern European literary developments as well. Great Slavonic writers were known to the average Canadian intellectual only from the few English translations which were available. In 1957 Professor Watson Kirkconnell correctly observed in his address to the annual convention of the CAS: If Canadian education, as was the case prior to 1942, were to be wholly without an awareness of such literatures, it would lack one of the major stones in the arch of modern civilization.