The book Lost in History is dedicated to the personality of the now almost forgotten publicist, essayist, and prose writer Jan M. Kolár (1923–1979), who was active as a political journalist and cultural publicist from 1946. The first part of the book consists of partial probes into the key themes and issues of the author's journalism and essays from 1946 to 1965, set against the backdrop of the broader cultural and political events in post-war Czechoslovakia and later in exile. Jan Kolár quickly established himself as one of the sharpest critics of leftist tendencies in politics and the ideologization of art and culture, against which he countered with a renaissance of Christian values that were to be realized in the concept of a united Western Europe. After leaving for exile in the spring of 1948, Kolár published mainly in the exile magazines Skutečnost and Sklizeň, occasionally in others (including Tigrid's Svědectví, with which he had a conceptual disagreement due to its gradualism), and remained a critical commentator on political and cultural events, which he observed from a distance in Cameroon, Africa, where he settled with his wife and was very successful in business. Kolár completely resigned to the possibility of "saving the nation" after the Hungarian events of 1956; he gradually lost faith even in...
