Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic Nations: With a Sketch of Their Popular PoetryTalvj
History
Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic Nations: With a Sketch of Their Popular Poetry
Talvj
Folk songs, Slavic; Slavic languages -- History; Slavic literature -- History and criticism
The patriotic zeal which in our days has instigated the Slavic
scholars to follow out the traces of their language and history into
the remotest past, in order to clear up more satisfactorily the origin
and primitive connection between the different members of the great
Slavic family, and their relative position to the Germans, has nowhere
been exhibited in a more energetic and disinterested way than in
Bohemia. The idea of Panslavism was here first worked out
systematically.[49] If we are not entirely mistaken, it was the same
Kollar, the Czekho-Slovakian poet, who first conceived, or at least
expressed, that idea. In a Slavic periodical, published in Hungary,
entitled _Hronka_, he came out with an address to his Slavic brethren,
which he himself translated into German. He urged the Slavi to drop
their numerous intellectual family feuds; to consider themselves as
_one_ great nation; their mutual languages essentially as _one_; their
respective interests as one. He prophesied power and predominance to
the Slavi _united_ as a whole. The idea was seized with eagerness;
especially by the Bohemian scholars, in whom a certain irritation
against the Germans, the oppressors of their nation for centuries, was
far from being unnatural. At the head of this movement, so far as it
respects philological investigations, was P.J. Schaffarik; in respect
to historical researches, Fr. Palacky; the first a Slovak, the second
a Moravian by birth; and both of them highly esteemed as scholars of
great learning, uncommon acuteness, and indefatigable research; but
both also, from a very laudable national partiality, inclined to
favour those results of their researches, which should serve to
support their own patriotic or Panslavic views. It will therefore not
be found surprising, that they should have met with a strong, nay
passionate opposition.
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