Pan-Slavic Ideal

From Slavic.info

Pan-Slavism or All-Slavdom is the term applied to a movement with the aim of drawing closer together all the various Slavic nations to the original Slavic unity, for the political and especially cultural union of all people of Slavic descent.

Accordingly the Pan-Slavic or All-Slavic Ideal is union of Slavic peoples, an opposition to all foreign domination, and the attainment of a higher intellectual, religious-moral, and social-political condition in the general march of humanity, or a conviction that there are the natural germs of a distinctively Slavic civilization in the past, and that the instinct of Slavic traditions must not be overwhelmed by the imposition of all kinds of ideas taken from abroad.

As the Pan-Slavism is not understood by many foreign authors it is a crying need at present to point out more in detail the real issues and claims of that movement, which is still only a politico-ethnological theory, a cult, an aspiration.

Pan-Slavism rose to a special branch of Slavic literature, and its principal writers were Jan Kollar, M. Grabowsky (1805-1825) and Count Adam Gurowsky.

One of the first of the champions of the conception of Pan-Slavism was Yurii or Juraj or Georg Krizhanich (1617-circa 1680), a Serbocroat, who wrote in his own Pan-Slavic language. 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.