Slavic Renaissance

From Slavic.info

From the outset the national renaissance of the Slav peoples was guided by a moje or less openly declared panslavist program. The similarity of the Slav tongues and of Slav manners and customs, ties of proximity and of political community (in Austria and in Turkey), and the example of the analogous movements known as pangermanism, panromanism, and panscandinavianism, furthered the progress of the idea of Slav union. In the lesser Slav states a consciousness of political and cultural weakness and pettiness made union with the greater Slav states, nations, and civilisations seem desirable. In the program for unification it was natural that a peculiarly important rdle should be assigned to Russia, in view of the increasing political and cultural prestige of Russia in the European world. Apart from Montenegro, Russia was the only independent Slav state ; five Slav nations (or six if the Serbs of Lusatia be included) were under German or Turkish rule, and the territories they inhabited were subdivided into almost five times as many administrative areas.

The formulation of the Slav program of unification was extremely vague, at least in the early days of the Slav renaissance.

The general idea was of a nonpolitical mutuality which was to facilitate the reciprocal study, of the Slav tongues by a sort of cultural exchange. The union was conceived as ideal merely, as confined to the realm of the spirit. Many ingenuous persons went so far as to contemplate the artificial construction of a universal Slav tongue.

The political program of Slav union was geographically defined by extant political frontiers. Its advocates referred especially to Austro-Slavism or to Illyrism. There was little thought of the political union of all the Slavs; but even under absolutism a few persons were bold enough to think of a republican or monarchical federation, and whether republican or monarchical the Russians or else the Poles or the Czechs were to play the leading role.

At first, therefore, and in its subsequent developments, panslavism was purely academic, the creation mainly of learned Slavists and historians. Owing to the lack of cultural and economic associations there was but little practical mutuality between the various Slav nations. The unifying antagonism towards the dominant foreign languages and civilisations was enormously outweighed by the positive fact that the individual Slav peoples were in truth independent nations and not mere tribes, as were the Germans, whose disintegration was purely political, not linguistic or cultural.

The Slav peoples had distinct political and cultural histories, and a strengthening of any one of these peoples could be effected solely by the deliberate cultivation of its own language and its own civilisation. Among the various Slav nations and sections it was necessary that leading minds should consider ways and means of realising this more practical program.