BY LEO WIENER, PROFESSOR OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES AT
HARVARD UNIVERSITY[28]
Bohemia is the westernmost Slavic country and its fortunate
geographical position between the West and the East of Europe and
half-way between the Slavs of the Balkans and those of the North has
in past ages determined its cultural mission, which has been that of
mediating between the Latin civilization and the Poles on the one
hand and the Byzantine culture and the Russians on the other. Bohemia
is the keystone in the Slavic arch. Without it the proto-history
of the Eastern nations in Europe has no meaning and no coherency.
Unfortunately even the most profound scholars have as yet overlooked
the important rôle which Bohemia has played in forwarding that
Carolingian civilization which the Visigoths, expelled by the Arabs
from Spain and settled by Charlemagne in southern and central France,
caused to radiate to the whole Germanic world and, through Bavaria,
grafted on the neighboring Čechs.
It is well known that the first Christian activity in Bohemia proceeded
from German missionaries, but it is only a recent discovery on the
origin of the so-called Gothic Bible which has revealed to me the
extraordinary extent of the Visigothic literary and cultural influences
upon the Bavarians and the Čechs. In the light of this discovery, which
I am now subjecting to a close scrutiny, it appears that a tremendous
proportion of the Slavic vocabularies, from Russia to Dalmatia, from
Poland to Bulgaria, has been borrowed from the religious works of the
Bohemians, of the early period, now entirely lost to science. Bohemia
was the intellectual mistress of what may be called the proto-Slavic
world. Without Bohemia, the greater part of the Slavic vocabularies
remains irreducible as regards origins and distribution, while with the
proper appreciation of this country’s geographical factor it appears
at once that far from standing aloof from the Roman civilization of
the early Middle Ages, the Slavs have been equal participants with the
Teutons in the benefits of the Visigothic culture, which shows hardly
any traces of Teutonism, but a curious mixture of Western Roman,
Southern French, and Arabic elements. The linguistically strongest of
these is the Arabic, for my discovery goes to show that the so-called
Gothic Bible was written only about the year 800 and in Southern France.
It was only in 813 that Charlemagne introduced the Germanic languages
to the knowledge of the educated, by ordering that homilies should be
written in the native dialects. There does not exist the slightest
evidence that, with the possible exception of some Gothic tracts, which
Bishop Ulphilas is said to have written in the fourth century, the
Germans used their native dialects for any literary purposes. There is
nothing which we possess in the way of literary documents that dates
back of the ninth century, and there is precious little that can with
certainty be ascribed to a period previous to the tenth century. Hence
it appears that the literary Teutonic activity is very little, if at
all, ahead of the distinctively Slavic literary activity, which, so
far as we know, begins, at the end of the ninth century, with the
translation of the Bible by the proto-apostles of the Slavs, Cyril and
Methodius, for the Čechs of Bohemia.
In the present stage of philological science it is impossible to
ascertain the precise dialect in which these Bulgarian monks wrote,
though the reasonable assumption is that it was that of their native
Thessalonica. But the existence of a distinct Slavic alphabet, the
Glagolica, of which Cyril’s alphabet is but a simplification, and
the existence of the Freisingen fragments which, although not older
than from the eleventh century, are written in a variant dialect
and obviously are based on documents preceding the activity of the
proto-apostles, make it certain that Cyril and Methodius drew on an
older literary stock or composed in a language which was already
permeated by the Christian conceptions which were the common possession
of the Čechs in Carolingian times. This is proved by the precious
Kiev fragments, of the eleventh century, which contain the most
primitive form of the Old-Slavic language and, at the same time,
use distinctively Čech words of the Roman Catholic liturgy. It is,
therefore, plausible that whatever dialect was later chosen by Cyril
and Methodius in their religious activity in Moravia and Bohemia, it
was based on the vocabulary which was already familiar to the Čechs
from their previous relations with the German missionaries.
The Slavic liturgy did not survive long in Bohemia. After the death
of Methodius in 885 the Slavic priests were banished and Moravia and
Bohemia became Roman Catholic once more. Only the Abbey of Sázava
continued to use the Slavic liturgy until the year 1096, after which
nothing more is heard of the Slavic Church. Cyril and Methodius, who
had come to Moravia at the request of Prince Rostislav, had in 867
been accused by the German missionaries of heresy, which accusation,
however, Pope Hadrian found to be groundless. But the Slavic activity
could not be maintained against German arrogance, and, as it was Bishop
Wiching who soon after the death of Methodius banished the Slavic
liturgy from Bohemia, so it was in the eleventh century again German
priests who destroyed the last vestige of the incipient Slavic culture.
The Slavic liturgy left the country to become permanently associated
with the Greek Catholic Church in Russia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. What
might have formed a bond between the various Slavic nations had been
senselessly destroyed in Bohemia by the machinations of the German
clergy.
Again it was Bohemia which was the first country, not only among
the Slavs, but in the whole of Europe, to carry high the banner of
religious freedom. The Germans boast of the contribution to freedom
of thought by their Luther, and they constantly forget that a century
before him Hus had prepared the ground for that religious dissent
which was voiced by Luther and his contemporaries. In the fourteenth
century Bohemians were fond of attending foreign universities,
especially those of Paris and Oxford. In the latter place they became
acquainted with Wiclif and, returning home, they translated his works
and laid the foundation for that remarkable activity which is known as
Husitism. Matěj of Janov, who had studied at Paris, had even before
Hus put himself in opposition to Popery, but it was Hus’s particular
desert to have roused the Čech national feeling. Hus was opposed not
only to the corruptions that had crept into the Church, but also to
the anti-nationalistic activities of the Germans, and so headed the
movement which had for its purpose a Čech regeneration. Čech became
the language of intercourse, and a large number of translations of the
Bible into Čech was made between 1400 and 1430, the most remarkable
being that written by a Taborite miller’s wife.
Hus became the first rector of the Čech Prague University, after
the German students had withdrawn to the newly formed University of
Leipsic. Bohemia was rent by disorder, not only from without, but
also within the Husitic movement itself. Husitism stood not only for
religious freedom, but also for democracy, and for a time the Husites
got along without a king. The most advanced of these democratic
protagonists of that time was Chelčický, who dreamed of a millennium,
not unlike the one represented in literature at the present time by
Tolstoy. His chief desert lies in having, by his writings, promoted
the formation of the Church of Bohemian Brethren. The idea of Slavic
nationality was not confined to Bohemia alone. The growth of a similar
national feeling in Poland may be discerned as the result of this Čech
renascence, and the Southern Slavs, too, were directly and indirectly
influenced by the nationalism in the North. Indeed, the golden age of
Polish and Serbian literature is but a century older than the rebirth
of the Slavic idea in Bohemia.
Again it was a Bohemian who, at the end of the eighteenth and in the
beginning of the nineteenth century, became the founder of Slavic
philology and the new Slavic literary movements throughout Europe.
Jagić begins his stupendous “Encyclopedia of Slavic Philology” with a
definition of Slavic philology, after which he says: “Only at the end
of the eighteenth century did the whole volume of Slavic philology, as
an independent science, assume shape. The chief desert in this matter
belongs to Joseph Dobrovský. He laid the foundation for a scientific
grammar of the Slavic languages, centering it on its most ancient
type, the Church-Slavic. He was the first to attempt a determination
of the degree of relationship between the separate Slavic dialects by
means of a scientific classification. It was he who introduced into
the circle of scientific interests the questions from the literary
and cultural history of the Slavs, for example, the question of the
educational activity of Cyril and Methodius, and finally also from
social history, such as archeological and ethnographical questions....
The critical spirit of Dobrovský with his broad views has created
Slavic philology. He is the father of this science.”
In the second half of the eighteenth century it looked as though the
Slavic languages were doomed to perdition. Poland lost its independence
and was parceled out among three nations; Bohemia had become a mere
dependency of the Hapsburg Empire; Serbia and Bulgaria were under the
Turkish yoke and did not even dream of a separate political existence.
Nor did matters stand better in the national literatures. The Polish
and Bohemian literatures led a vegetative existence; the Serbians and
Croatians had forgotten of their literary past; the Bulgarians had
not yet discovered the fact that they spoke an intelligible language
worthy of literary refinement. Russia was still struggling with the
establishment of a linguistic norm out of the ecclesiastic Slavic and
the spoken idiom, while its literature was but a feeble reflex of
French pseudo-classicism. Nowhere was there the slightest conviction
that the homely native dialects had a right to exist by the side of the
more fortunate German, while of the past of the Slavic languages but
the faintest surmises had been uttered by men untutored in historical
and philological lore. But if it was the preponderant influence of
German culture that put the Slavic into the shade, it was also the
result of German philosophy which gave the Slavic national idea a new
lease of life.
German literature had itself been decadent for some time, and was
obliged to yield to the more universal French culture which ruled even
at the Prussian court. The revolt against French pseudo-classicism
and encyclopedism was, however, voiced by a few German writers who
began to look in the native elements of the intellectual life for a
basis for a native poetry and belles lettres in general. Thus arose
the German Romanticism, which believed that in the creations of the
popular mind could be found truer, more natural sentiments for literary
expression than in the artificial productions of a select upper class.
Possibly the chief activity in the direction of a simpler literature
was developed by the brothers Grimm, who, by their collections of fairy
tales and mythological lore, laid the foundation for a nationalistic
movement which was soon to sweep over Europe. Not only did German
literature successfully establish itself against the French fashion,
but all the smaller nations, who had almost forgotten of their
historical existence, began to discover themselves. If the popular
creation was truer and more important than the traditional literatures
of the Græco-Roman type, then Serbia and Bohemia and Russia, which
had preserved an enormous mass of oral literature in out-of-the-way
places, harked back to important pasts and should develop from within.
The nationalistic idea began to grow out of proportion to the folklore
which could conveniently be mustered in proof of native superiority,
and where there was such a disproportion it became necessary, so
unscrupulous nationalists thought, to manufacture such material.
Everybody knows the huge literary forgery of Macpherson, whose Ossianic
poetry none the less had a great influence upon susceptible minds,
even in the East. Another such forgery was that of the Bohemian Hanka,
whose Queen’s Court Manuscript still finds overzealous defenders among
a certain class of unwise nationalists. It is not the forgery of Hanka
which has had most widespread influences upon the dissemination of the
nationalistic idea among the Slavs, but the legitimate and scholarly
activity of the father of Slavic philology, Joseph Dobrovský.
Having studied Eastern languages at the University of Prague, he had
hoped to become a missionary in India, but he soon abandoned this
intention and devoted himself to the study of Slavic antiquity. In 1779
he made his appearance in criticism with a periodical which set itself
the task of telling “the truth, the naked, unvarnished truth” without
regard for persons. He at once attracted attention by his sharp,
critical acumen. His main interest lay in the purification of the Čech
language and the formation of a literary norm. In 1792 his desire to
reconstruct the Slavic past took him on a long journey to the libraries
of Sweden and Russia, and even to the Caucasus, where he had expected
to find some indications of a Čech origin. In the same year appeared
his “History of the Bohemian Language and Literature,” in which he
described the struggles of the Čech language against the German and
Latin from the time of Hus until his day, and showed what relation
it bore to the other Slavic languages. The effect of this work upon
the nationalistic feeling was very great. Especially his grammar of
the Čech language which he published in 1808 formed the basis for all
Slavic grammars written in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Dobrovský was a voluminous writer, and his scientific correspondence,
lately edited by Jagić, contains an immense amount of material which
throws a light upon the history of the Slavic renascence.
Dobrovský soon gained many disciples in the Slavic world. The Russians
Vostokov, Kalaydovich, Stroev, and many others, the Slovenes Kopitar
and Vodník were his followers, and the great Slavists Šafařík and
Miklosich carried on the work of philology after him. He enjoyed the
friendship of German scholars and poets, Goethe, Jacob Grimm, Pertz,
and others. Goethe wrote of him: “Abbé Joseph Dobrovský, the past
master of critical historical science in Bohemia, this rare man who
long before had followed the general study of the Slavic languages
and histories with genial industry and Herodotic travels, rejoiced in
reducing his gains to the study of the Bohemian people and country,
and thus united with the greatest glory in science the rare reputation
of a popular name. The master is visible in whatever he attempts. He
everywhere grasps his subject and deftly unites the fragments into one
whole.”
It cannot be said that the strong nationalistic movement which
developed in Bohemia was entirely beneficial, for it not only led to
unhealthy, ecstatic moods in the Bohemian literature of the first
part of the nineteenth century, but even to a series of literary
falsifications which still form the subject of discussion among laymen.
But it must not be forgotten that the Bohemian nationalism was a
reflex of the nascent German nationalism and was fanned to exaggerated
manifestations by the obscurant absolutism of Emperor Francis I.
Indeed, the Čech nationalism was to a great extent encouraged by
the Austrian Government, as a protective measure against Napoleonic
sympathies. The work begun by Dobrovský was carried into the field of
literature by Jungmann, who was not satisfied with creating a native
literary language for the lower classes only, which seemed sufficient
to Dobrovský, but set about to create a literary norm for the whole of
the Bohemian people. Jungmann was especially successful in translating
from foreign languages, and the Slovaks Šafařík and Kollár, and the
Moravian Palacký, not only imitated the activity of their teacher
Jungmann, but became even more important in the dissemination of the
Slavic idea, both at home and abroad.
In the twenties of the nineteenth century the fame of these ardent
Slavists had spread to all the Slavic countries, and in Russia the
question of founding a chair of Slavic philology, to be occupied by
some Bohemian scholar, was seriously considered. In 1830 the Russian
Government offered a chair of Slavic philology to Šafařík, but nothing
came of it, chiefly through the machinations of the forger Hanka, who
sided with the Russian autocracy, while Šafařík publicly expressed
himself in favor of the Poles in the revolution which had just broken
out in Russia. But Šafařík continued to exert a great influence on
Slavic science in Russia through his friend Pogodin, who never gave up
the hope that Šafařík might be called to a chair in Petrograd. When
this hope could not be materialized, the young Slavists then studying
in Russia, Bodyanski, Sreznevski and others, made it their business to
study for a time in Austria, more especially, to meet Šafařík and learn
something from personal contact with him. Indeed, the main activity of
Bodyanski consisted in translating into Russian the works of Šafařík
and other Bohemian Slavists. Similarly Sreznevski, in his inaugural
lecture at the university, pointed out the fact that there had existed
no interest in Slavic studies in Russia until such had been created by
the Bohemian and Serbian scholars. As Bodyanski stood in relation to
the Russian Slavophiles, it is certain that the Slavophile movement
in Russia received some of its ideas directly or indirectly from the
Bohemian nationalists.
From the humble beginnings in the first part of the nineteenth century
Bohemian literature has developed in a remarkable manner, borrowing
what is best in all literatures, and to a considerable extent falling
under the influence of the great Russian writers. It is eminently
cosmopolitan in compass and subject-matter, but at the same time has
preserved many national characteristics, which would well repay the
interest of an English reading public, if it could be induced to
read translations of this almost unknown literature. Its poetry is
especially attractive and varied, and the poets have reveled in the
discussion of those social problems which elsewhere have been relegated
to the field of prose.
Whatever the interest of the outsider may be in Bohemian literature, it
deserves the highest attention on the part of the Slavs, who owe their
very regeneration to the labors of the Bohemian scholars a century
ago. If, in addition, we consider what Bohemia did for freedom of
religious thought a hundred years before the days of Luther, and still
more, the great obligation under which the Greek Catholic Church is
to Bohemia for its very ecclesiastic language and national alphabets,
the sympathies of the world should particularly be enlisted for this
country in the possible future reconstruction of the Austrian Empire.
Slavs and non-Slavs should unite on this point without discussion, and
even the Germans should look favorably on the restoration of Bohemia to
its former freedom and glory, if they are not blinded by selfishness
and useless conceit. Bohemia has in the Middle Ages been the mediator
between the West and the East, the South and the North, and it will
for a long time remain the mediator between the best German thought
and the growing Slavic civilization, if the Germans do not, as in the
past, rouse the Slavic antipathies. Of all the Slavs, the Bohemians
understood the German ideas best, and Dobrovský and other Bohemian
Slavists promoted the Slavic idea by means of the German language.
That, of course, can never happen again, for the nationalist life
is there permanently established. But there is no reason for racial
antagonism in a country where Germans and Slavs have lived together for
centuries.