Juraj Križanić

From Slavic.info

One of the first of the champions of the conception of Pan-Slavism was Yurii or Juraj or Georg Križanič (Krizhanich) (1617-circa 1680), a Serbocroat, who wrote in a Pan-Slavic language of his own creation. He was of noble but impoverished family. In 1617 he appealed to the Russian Tzar Michael (the first Romanov, 1613-1645) to come to the rescue of the Slavs of the Danube and the Balkans, making a strong plea for Slav solidarity. (On the fall of the South Slavic monarchies in the fourteenth century, the scholars of the South like Krizhanich began to migrate to Russia.) About 1650, Krizhanich comes to Moscow and exclaims to the Tzar:

The Western Slavs are in terrible slavery; only Russia has its Slavic ruler. Therefore, you, Great Tzar, ought to watch over the Slavic peoples, and, as a good father, you ought to care for your scattered children. Have mercy upon those who have made a mistake, and like the father in the Bible, make them reasonable. Many of them seem to be drunken with a magic beverage. In their blindness they do not even feel the injuries which they suffer from their enemies. They do not see their shame, they are, on the contrary, proud of it. Only thou, Tzar, art given from God to help the South Slavs, Poles, and Czechs, and to show them what kind of a yoke they carry: only thou canst teach them to revenge their people and to overthrow the German yoke under which they labor.

Krizhanich was invited to Russia to assist in the revision of copies of the Scriptures. He settled in Moscow in 1645, under Tzar Alexis (1645-1676). Krizhanich was a reformer, a Roman Catholic priest, who studied at Zagreb (Agram, Croatia, his birthplace), at Vienna, Bologna, and at Rome (1640), where he was trained for the work of converting the orthodox Slavs to Catholicism, and with great ideal for reuniting the two churches of the Slavs—Greek Orthodox Church and Roman Catholic Church. This was apparently the germ of the idea of an ecclesiastic, political, and literary union of the Slavs. He hoped by means of grammar and lexicon to unite the Slavic tribes, with Russian as the elder brother. (He was also one of the earliest students of Slavic philology.) Russia seemed to him a promising field for this scheme, but his plan was not well received in that country, and he was sent to Siberia. In 1660, from some unexplained cause, he was exiled to the depths of Siberia, at Tobolsk, notwithstanding that he was the teacher of Peter the Great. We do not know what caused this disgrace, which lasted till 1676. It is thought he was exiled because of his vigorous attacks on the Russian (Greek, Eastern Orthodox) Church. He returned from Siberia in 1676, and died fighting the Turks in the Battle of Vienna.

In this distant exile the unhappy Krizhanich composed all his works, especially his Pan-Slavic grammar, Gramatichno Iskazaniye (1666), in which work the Pan-Slavic language is a jargon manufactured by the author largely from Russian, with admixture of the Serbo-Croatian dialect, but the author shows no small scientific insight in his ability to see cognates, his critical Serbian grammar (with comparison of the Russian, Polish, Kroatian and White Russian, which was edited from the manuscript by Bodiansky in 1848), and a book on Politics which is even more important among his works and the history of Pan-Slavism, a book which was published, in 1860, by Besonov, under the title, The Russian Empire in the Middle of the Seventeenth Century. Here Krizhanich criticizes contemporary conditions in Russia, and proposes remedies. In a scries of dialogues he gives here a complete plan of political and social reorganization on Western lines, and a picture of a reformed Slavic State.]]