Czechoslovak Ruthenia’s 1925 Latinization campaign as the heritage of nineteenth-century Slavism

In 1925, two newspapers, both published in Uzhhorod, advocated using the Latin alphabet in the Czechoslovak province of Ruthenia. Efforts by the Czech Agrarian party to consolidate the Republic played some role, but the plans mostly emerged from a longer tradition of Slavic thought which imagined literacy in more than one alphabet, conforming to more than one literary standardization. We trace the nineteenth-century history of Slavic linguistic ideologies from the original Panslavism of Jan Herkel, the “Slavic Reciprocity” of Jan Kollár and his successors, to the Kollárian Czechoslovakism used to legitimate the first Czechoslovak Republic. We survey Ruthenia’s status within Czechoslovakia and then contrast two 1925 Latinization schemes: a proposal from Czech chauvinist Franti?ek Svoj?e and a proposal from Rusyn journalist Viktor Barany. While Rusyns mostly remained with the Cyrillic alphabet, arguments made for and against Latinization show that nineteenth century Slavic ideals endured far into the twentieth century.     

Effacing Panslavism: linguistic classification and historiographic misrepresentation

In the early nineteenth century, several Slavic intellectuals believed in a single Slavic nation speaking a single language, though positing various taxonomies of the nation’s component “tribes” and the language’s component “dialects.” Nevertheless, recent scholars, both historians and linguists, prove so extraordinarily unwilling to acknowledge the existence of Panslavism that several falsify the historical record so as to make historical figures conform to modern national and linguistic thinking. This paper discusses Jan Kollár, Ljudevit Gaj, and ?udovít ?túr as three sample Panslavs, documents the misrepresentation of their ideas in recent historiography, and explores why so many scholars seek to erase Panslavism from the historical record.