The education he commenced in Ráb blossomed in a way different from what had been expected. For here there occurred a precipitous process of national awakening in the young boy, who now realised that he was first a Slav and a Slovak, and only then a ‘Hungarian,’ that is, a citizen of the Hungarian portion of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. This process took place in Štúr’s consciousness under the influence of the teachings of the local gymnasium professor Leopold Petz — a German teacher of all things, a Slovak of German extraction, who having learned the ‘hearth-speech of the Slovaks’ only as an adult, became in his old age an ardent Slavophile in the spirit of… German ideas, that is, concepts chiefly derived from the German writer Johann Gottfried Herder, who idealised the Slavs. It is cer
