The motive of Slavic kinship and multilingualism in the memoirs of Russian officers — participants in the Hungarian campaign of 1849

Abstract

In the middle of the nineteenth century, about 40 per cent of the population of the Habsburg monarchy were Slavs. In the revolutionary year of 1848, larger and smaller nationalities that were at different stages of the nation-building process and who differed in their confessional affiliation as well as their social and political claims, were each demanding different degrees of national autonomy within the Monarchy. In 1849, it came to a head when Russian military intervention was requested by Francis Joseph I in order to suppress the Hungarian armed resistance. This coincided with the period of the so-called national awakening among the Slavic-speaking nationalities of the Monarchy, when linguistic kinship was becoming more and more obvious, the doctrine of Slavic reciprocity was born, and a sense of Slavic community appeared. The Russian army travelled to the Hungarian battleground through Moravia and the northern territories, which were mainly inhabited by Slavic peoples. Officers and soldiers of the Russian army easily found a common language with the Moravians, Poles, Ukrainians, Ruthenians, and Slovaks, as well as with Germans (Saxons) and Hungarians who spoke local Slavic dialects. This article examines the idea of linguistic kinship as reflected in the memoirs of officers of the Russian army who fought in the Hungarian Campaign of 1849 and strives to explore what role kindred Slavic languages played in the contacts between soldiers and the local population, and how these officers evaluated the military operation from the point of view of the future of the Slavic peoples living in the Habsburg Monarchy. Particular attention is paid to the problem of the wartime behaviour of ethnic Poles in Russian service.