A Közép-Európa tanulmányok mesterszak szervezésében vendégelőadást tartott nálunk Alexander Maxwell

EFFACING PANSLAVISM: Alexander Maxwell (Victoria University of Wellington, Új-Zéland) vendégelőadása

In the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectuals from northern Hungary usually believed in a single Slavic nation speaking a single language. They imagined Slovaks not as a nation but as a “tribe” of the Slavic nation, and Slovak as a “dialect” or even a “subdialect” of the Slavic language. Modern historians and linguists, however, are so extraordinarily unwilling to acknowledge nineteenthcentury Panslavism that many falsify primary source quotations. The problem is particularly serious as concerns the language/dialect dichotomy which features prominently in Panslav linguistic thought: where historical actors refer to a “dialect,” modern scholars substitute the term “language.” The end result is to transform Panslavs into particularist Slovak nationalists. This paper documents the Panslavism of Jan Kollár and Ľudovít Štúr, documents the misrepresentation of their ideas in recent historiography, and speculates why so many scholars refuse to acknowledge past Panslavism.

Alexander Maxwell studied in Davis, Göttingen, Brno, Bloomington, and Budapest before completing a Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He held short-term positions in Erfurt, Swansea, Reno, and Bucharest before settling in New Zealand. He is now associate professor of history at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author of Choosing Slovakia, Patriots Against Fashion, and Everyday Nationalism in Hungary. He has guest edited themed issues of Nationalities Papers, Central Europe, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, German Studies Review, the New Zealand Slavonic Journal, and the Journal of Nationalism, Memory, and Language Politics. He is currently researching Habsburg Panslavism and the language/dialect dichotomy.

Szervezők: ELTE BTK Közép-Európa tanulmányok (a Szláv és Balti Filolológiai Intézet és a Történeti Intézet közös szervezésében)
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