A Few Comments on Alexander Maxwell’s paper Suppressing the Memory of Slovak Panslavism: The Historiographical Misrepresentation of Kollár and Štúr

Abstract

This article has been written in response to Alexander Maxwell’s paper published in this issue of the Historický časopis. Based on an in-depth reading of Ludevít Štúr’s Nárečja slovenskuo alebo potreba písaňja v tomto nárečí, it is here demonstrated that the author of the mentioned paper creates an erroneous interpretation of Štúr’s term nárečja, when equating it with the modern term dialect or nárečie. What present-day linguists call dialect was by Štúr unambiguously denoted as rozličnorečja. Moreover, it is evident from Štúr’s Nárečja slovenskuo that Štúr cannot be regarded exlusively as a Pan-Slav (in the sense of an advocate of the All-Slav idea), since at the same time he was not only a Slovak patriot, but also a Pan-Humanist.

Keywords

• ludevít štúr
• nárečja
• rozličnorečja
• pan-slavism
• slovak patriotism