Breaking through History. Genius and Literature among Slavs without a State in the 19th Century

Abstract

Hans Rothe
Breaking through History. Genius and Literature among Slavs without a State in the 19th Century

Within a broad comparative framework, the Author analyzes some of the main patterns of the development of national self-consciousness and identity among the peoples of Eastern Europe between the 1830s and 1850s. He discusses the general assumption that the French Revolution played a major role in the awakening of national consciousness in the Slavic (and the Hungarian) cultures, and that an important part of the longing for self-determination was connected with the idea that Slavs where understood as a united family of peoples or even as one nation. The Author then addresses three main topics. It is generally accepted that in some countries it was primarily poetic geniuses who brought about a dramatic breakthrough in national consciousness thanks to the fact that their works were written in their own language (examples include Mickiewicz, Puškin, Ševčenko, Prešeren and others). Nonetheless, the importance of learning, academic training, gathering historical knowledge and folk tradition as primary sources of national consciousness should not be underestimated. These elements, the Author maintains, are connected rather with traditional ideas and mentality (and with Herder’s way of thinking), than with ‘revolutionary’ innovation. Unlike the French model of development that followed the 1789 revolution and largely identified nation with revolution, Slav peoples were confronted with their belonging to multiethnic and plurilingual political structures: they were either dominant powers (such as Russia, which dominated many other peoples) or were dominated by ‘others’. From several points of view, Herder’s idea of Slav unity was often more of a hindrance than a way out for the definition of national unity. This was true for the dominated peoples, but for Russians too, although, politically speaking, they were effectively the only real state and a ‘dominant’ people. Later the Author discusses the many different ways in which a feeling of national identity grew up among the numerous peoples living in Eastern Europe as a whole, from the Balkans to the Baltic. At the end of his paper he presents the troublesome and puzzling issue of national poets using not only the language of their own people, but several other languages too – including the language of the dominant empire – when writing some of their more important works, beginning with the most intimate expression of thoughts and feelings in diaries and letters.