The Pan-Slavic Utopian Imaginary

Abstract

Strongly influenced by European Romanticism, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the German unification movement and German idealist philosophers, the Pan-Slavic movement (which took shape between 1830 and 1840) had an idealistic, utopian character from the very beginning. The aim of this paper is to analyse the utopian imaginary of the main Pan-Slavic projects, starting with the precursor of the Slavic idea, Juraj Križanić, then moving on to Herder's image of the archetypal Slav, Ján Kollár's plea for Slavic cultural reciprocity, Mikhail Bakunin's proposal to transform the Slavic cause into a revolutionary, anarchic force, Mikhail Pogodin's active campaign for the realisation of Russia's full potential through union with the Balkan and Austrian Slavs, the Russian Pan-Slavism advocated by the Slovak Ľudovít Štúr, and ending with the pseudo-scientific perspective on Slavism of Nikolay Danilevsky.

Keywords

• pan-slavism
• utopian imaginary
• pan-slavic projects
• slavophilia
• slavic reciprocity
• all-slavic union
• slavdom