Lecture content:

In the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectualsfrom 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 historiansand linguists, however, are so extraordinarily unwilling to acknowledge nineteenth-century Panslavism that many falsify primary source quotations. The problem isparticular serious as concerns the language/dialectdichotomy which features prominently in Panslavlinguistic thought: where historical actors refer to a “dialect,” modern scholars substitute the term “language.” The end result is to transform Panslavs intoparticularist Slovak nationalists. 

This paper documentsthe Panslavism of Jan Kollár and Ľudovít Štúr, documents the misrepresentation of their ideas in recenthistoriography, and speculates why so many scholarsrefuse to acknowledge past Panslavism.

Lecturer:

Alexander Maxwell studied in Davis, Göttingen, Brno, Bloomington, and Budapest before completing a Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He heldshort-term positions in Erfurt, Swansea, Reno, and Bucharestbefore settling in New Zealand. He is now associate professorof history at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author of Choosing Slovakia, Patriots Against Fashion, and Everyday Nationalism in Hungary. He has guest editedthemed issues of Nationalities Papers, Nationalism and EthnicPolitics, German Studies Review, the New Zealand Slavonic Journal, and the Journal of Nationalism, Memory, and Language Politics. He is currently researching HabsburgPanslavism and the language/dialect dichotomy.