Slovanski miti o Evropi kot oblika dialoga z Zahodom (primer Češke in Slovaške)

Abstract

The study deals with myths which feature in literary communication between Western Europe and the Slavic East. Slavic peoples and the West carried on a continual dialogue – a process of moving closer and further apart – with a special role being occupied by the Slavs living in the Habsburg Empire. The paper highlights the contribution of Krejčí, a prominent Czech scholar in the field of Slavonic studies, who pointed out that Slavic fictions often reflected or in turn became part of historical reality. For example in the Slovak case, an ideology – based on L. Štúr‘s Das Slawenthum und die Welt der Zukunft (1851) – developed, which, though a tendentious myth, influenced the formation of Slovak national identity. In his political testament Štúr made an attempt to define the »goal« of Slovak history against the background of European development. According to Štúr, the future of the Slovak people lay in political union with Russia, in adopting the Cyrillic alphabet and the Orthodox Church, and in the rejection of materialistic Western values. Štúrian tradition, may have, as a myth strengthened national self-confidence, but at the same time it meant cutting ties with Western European culture and civilisation, and as a result led to the rejection of the idea of Europe as cultural unity comprising distinct but mutually influencing regions.