Slavdom

Chapter 9

…dawn of the long yearned-for, long demanded age of humanity [… where] in place of the old congresses there shall be congresses of the nations, determining international affairs

as he puts it in ‘The Russians,’ but — the Blitzkrieg and the Gulag and the Black Site; the g******e of nations in Auschwitz, in the broad picture, and armed violence among neighbours who suddenly see one another as viscerally different, in the small. Is it imaginable that this basically decent man, a Lutheran pastor, with a heart big enough to think the best of the Magyar oppressors of his Slovak nation, trusting that one day ‘they will shake off [their] bias and seek enlightenment and liberty not only for [themselves], but for others, especially the Slavs’ (‘Pan-Slavism and our Country’), would speak of the ‘filthy clutches of the Jews’ (‘Slavdom and the World of the Future’) if he knew what was awaiting them less than a century after he wrote that essay?

Blitzkrieg GulagBlack Site We have a broader perspective than Ľudovít Štúr, having recently marked the eightieth anniversary of the hell of World War II — something he surely could never have imagined happening in that bright future toward which humanity, he felt, was progressing. Now, if you’re not going to say it, Sunshine, permit me to: there will be no justice, or peace, on this earth, ever. The closest we can get to optimism is that famous phrase that Štúr, if anyone, should know by rote: inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te; ‘our heart is restless, until it rest in Thee.’1 Let’s keep these things in mind, then, as we proceed to a consideration of the writings of Ľudovít Štúr, especially when we hear him say things like, ‘First, the Magyar must be destroyed, and then, let the Danube unite our regions’ (‘Address to the Slavic Congress’) or ‘The Russian character is very attractive to all of our tribes who have not become alienated from their nature’ (‘Slavdom and the World of the Future’). Ľudovít Štúr must be read in the context of his times and his reality, times different from our own, the only reality he knew.

inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te; ľudovít štúr, hungarian

ľudovít štúr, hungarianThe land into which Ľudovít Štúr (1815 – 1856) was born on 29 October of the year in which ‘that colossus of a man’ Napoléon2 returned in triumph to France, only to arrive, at last, at Waterloo, was the multinational Kingdom of Hungary. Francis of Habsburg, the last of the Austrian Emperors to bear the title Holy Roman Emperor, was on the throne of what was later to become the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. When Štúr was thirty-three years old, in the tumultuous year of 1848, he was to witness the abdication of the beloved, ostensibly feeble-minded Ferdinand in favour of Franz Josef. This last-named, equally beloved of many, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, was to reign until his death in 1916 amid the catastrophe that would bring an end to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the establishment of the first Republic of Czechoslovakia — a fraternal unification of two closely-related Slavic ‘tribes’ such as Štúr longed for, and struggled for, all throughout his life.3

Like Austria itself, Hungary was home to many nationalities. The dominant ethnicity, the Magyars (the name of whom we conflate with ‘Hungarian’ today)4 constituted some 50% of the population of the kingdom, which also contained sizeable numbers of Romanians, Germans, and of course Slavs — Slovaks, mainly in the mountainous north, bordering Polish, Moravian, and Austrian regions, and Croats to the south-west, along the Adriatic, with a good number of Serbs as well. It is for this reason that Štúr defines himself, interchangeably, as ‘Slovak’ and ‘Hungarian Slav’, using both terms, for example in his 1839 letter to the Polish-language Tygodnik literacki [Literary Weekly] in Poznań.5 During Štúr’s lifetime, the Magyars, a Finno-Ugric people who migrated into the Danube region in the late IX c., initiated a programme of successively greater linguistic and cultural repression of the ethnic minorities living in Hungary, replacing, for example, the lingua franca of Latin with Magyar as sole administrative language of the Kingdom, in 1840. This put an end to the idyllic period — if there ever was one — when in that ‘one, Hungarian homeland, ‘Magyar and Slovak lived proudly, […] both being faithfully devoted to that common mother. […] And they found it good to reside here, for the land waxed in prosperity and brotherhood.’6

Tygodnik literacki It sounds so simplistic, but great matters sometimes are. Had the nations that made up Hungary respected each other’s cultural autonomy, holding to Latin as the official, administrative tongue of all, while encouraging, or at least tolerating, the development of regional languages as far as literature and basic education were concerned, a lot of blood and tears might not have been shed, families not riven by disputes in which surface appearance (language) becomes more important than inner essence (humanity).7 After all, Štúr, who gives as good as he gets in the rough polemical warfare between Magyar and Slav, was still able to write, in his ‘Pan-Slavism and our Country:’

In the end, our firm belief is that when the Magyars progress further in education and culture; when, as a consequence, they become more thoughtful and just, when they reflect more closely upon their state, their situation, and understand it better, more than one of them will shake off his bias and seek enlightenment and liberty not only for himself, but for others, especially the Slavs. What is more, not only will they wish it for the Slavs, they will actively engage in aiding them to its acquisition, […] from good will, true conviction, and, let us still add — from prudence. We firmly believe that this will come to pass, we say, and, further, we believe also that we shall see the days when each oppression, indeed every incitement to oppression of the Slavs, will meet with round rejection and condemnation, while the more sublime amongst the Magyars will aid the Slavs to greater development and liberty, working toward these goals and publicly encouraging them.