Vytautas Merkys is a well-known Lithuanian historian. He wrote several books about the socio-economic development of 19th-century Lithuania, and about the Lithuanian national movement. He graduated from Vilnius University in 1951. (Ignas Jonynas taught him.) He applied to the Lithuanian Institute of History the same year, but because of ‘political unreliability' he did not get the job. Merkys was invited to join the institute in 1953, and made his professional career there. At the end of 1987, he became the director of the institute. In 1990, he became a full member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.

Merkys persuaded the relatives of Jonynas to give the historian's writings to the Manuscript Department of the Wroblewski Library in 1959. He also edited a volume of Jonynas’ writings, which was published in 1984. The volume has a few previously unpublished pieces: Jonynas’ autobiography, and his article ‘Lithuanian historiography'. Several of Jonynas’ letters from the interwar period to various non-Lithuanian historians were published, too. All the documents are from the Jonynas collection.

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Lokacija:
- Vilnius , Lithuania

Mezník, Jaroslav

Jaroslav Mezník was born 31. 12. 1928 in Bratislava in the family of Moravian-Silesian State President Jaroslav Mezník st. Due to his father's post, the family moved to Uzhgorod and then to Brno, where the son Jaroslav Mezník also spent the rest of his life. After graduation in 1948, he studied history and archives at the Faculty of Arts in Brno. In 1967 he presented a habilitation theses at Charles University, and he received his title of professor in Brno twenty-five years later. He found his first job in the State Archive in Janovice, and in the period 1956-1972 he worked at the Institute of History (later Czechoslovak and World History) of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. During the normalisation period, he worked as a manual labourer in a panel factory, later in a lift factory. In January 1990 he became a member of the Federal Assembly for several months, then returned to the Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Arts. In 1994-1995 he became the dean of this faculty. His scholar interest was medieval history and his major works included Praha před husitskou revolucí and Lucemburská Morava 1310–1423.

Problems with the Communist regime had already manifested themselves during Meznik´s military service. Because of his "bourgeois origin", he served at the Auxiliary Technical Battalions. At the time of the Prague Spring, he participated in the transformation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Party into a democratic left party. In January 1971, he was arrested for three years; he also spent two shorter periods between 1977 and 1989 in prison. He was one of the first signatories to Charter 77. In the period of normalisation, he continued his research and published under the names of other authors or in samizdats. Mezník also strongly influenced a debate on the character of Czechoslovak historiography within Charter 77.

Jaroslav Mezník received many awards, including the Gold Medal of Masaryk University in 1995, the Order of T. G. Masaryk in 1998 and the City of Brno Award in 2000.

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Lokacija:
- Brno, Czech Republic

Michalski, Krzysztof

Krzysztof Michalski was a Polish philosopher and the founder and long-term rector of Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Michalski studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw and graduated in 1974 with a dissertation on Heidegger. He was inspired, among others, by Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka, with whom he consulted on his dissertation. He spent 1977-1978 as a Humboldt Fellow in West Germany. From 1981 to 1982 he co-chaired post-graduate courses at the Interuniversity Centre in Dubrovnik and was a Thyssen Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. He was also a Visiting Fellow of the Churchill College at Cambridge University (1982–1983) and a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna (1984–1985). In 1982 he founded Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna and became its first rector. He held this position until his death in 2013. The IWM is an independent institute for advanced study in the humanities and social sciences aiming at promoting intellectual exchange between East and West, between academia and society, and between a variety of disciplines and schools of thought. As a founder and rector of this Institute, Michalski significantly help to disseminate Patočkaʼs philosophical legacy abroad and to bring his thinking to the Western audience. In 1986, Michalski was appointed an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw. In 1990, he became Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, and in 1994 Professor at University of Warsaw. He specialised mainly in Heideggerʼs and Gadamerʼs writing, and later those of Husserl and Nietzsche. He occupied many scientific and social functions – he was, among other things, chairman of the Institute for Public Affairs in Warsaw, and president of the Network of European Institutes for Advanced Study. In the Polish and world intellectual milieu, he was perceived as a respected scientist, who, as pointed out by his colleagues Ira Katznelson and Claus Offe, was “reminding others of the need for the virtues of ʻdecencyʼ and ʻcourageʼ.”

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Lokacija:
- Cambridge, United Kingdom
- Heidelberg, Germany
- Općina Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik, Croatia
- Vienna, Austria
- Warszawa, Warsaw, Poland

Michnik, Adam

Adam Michnik is a Polish journalist, former dissident and political activist. He had been actively engaged in Polish democratic opposition movement from the late 1960s till the early 1990s, when with his co-workers he established Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading daily. In the 1970s, he spent a year in Paris, but apart from that he was very active in forming the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and supporting the "Solidarity" movement, he was also imprisoned during the Martial Law. He took part in the Roundtable Talks in 1989.

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Lokacija:
- Warszawa, Warsaw, Poland

Michálek, Jiří

Jiří Michálek is a Czech philosopher and former pupil of Jan Patočka. In 1964, he graduated with a degree in chemistry from Charles University in Prague. In 1965, he began his doctoral studies at the Department of Philosophy within the Faculty of Science at Charles University, focusing on the philosophical problems of the natural sciences. As this department was dissolved in August 1968, Michálek could not defend his dissertation. In 1975, a special commission that investigated Michálekʼs political views was created. As a result, he was forbidden to teach and was forced to leave the University in 1977. The main reason was his long-term close relationship with Jan Patočka and other Charter 77 signatories. Michálek attended Patočkaʼs underground seminars and also participated in the rescue of Patočkaʼs documents after his death in 1977. After his dismissal from the university, Michálek worked as a labourer in a wrapping shop, and later as a specialist in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the National Health Institute. In 1984, he finished his distance study of Psychopedy at Palacký University in Olomouc. In April 1990 he was admitted to the newly created Department of Philosophy of the Natural Sciences at Charles University. In October 1994, he defended his dissertation in philosophy at Charles University. After the restoration of the Czechoslovak Philosophical Union in 1990, Jiří Michálek became a member of its presidium. He focuses on phenomenology and the thinking of Martin Heidegger after the “turnover” and the question of co-existence and philosophy of education of E. Fink.

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Lokacija:
- Praha, Prague, Czech Republic