Suppressing the Memory of Slovak Panslavism: The Historiographical Misrepresentation of Kollár and Štúr

Abstract

In the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectuals from northern Hungary usually believed in a single Slavic nation speaking a single language. They imagined Slovaks not as a nation but as a “tribe” of the Slavic nation, and Slovak as a “dialect” or even a “subdialect” of the Slavic language. Modern historians and linguists, however, are so extraordinarily unwilling to acknowledge nineteenth-century Panslavism that many falsify primary source quotations, particularly as concerns the language/dialect dichotomy which features prominently in Panslav linguistic thought: where historical actors refer to a “dialect”, modern scholars substitute the term “language”. The end result is to transform Panslavs into particularist Slovak nationalists. This paper documents the Panslavism of Jan Kollár and Ľudovít Štúr, documents the misrepresentation of their ideas in recent historiography, and speculates why so many scholars refuse to acknowledge past Panslavism.

Keywords

• panslavism
• slovak history
• slavic languages
• linguistic classification