Zorian Dolega Chodakowski (1784–1825) and the Unity of Slavonic Culture

Abstract

October 1819 was a key month in the history of relations between the Slavs. Alexander I spent the early part of it in Warsaw, drawing on the contitution of the Congress Kingdom of Poland and putting the finishing touches to his project for a pan-imperial constitutional charter. In Tsarskoe Selo the conservative historian N. M. Karamzin reacted with horror to the tsar's concurrent plan for the revivification of Poland. On 9 October, in the hope of securing official support for his archaeological and ethnographic studies, the Pole Zorian Dolega Chodakowski arrived in St. Petersburg. His first publication in Russian, which appeared later in the month in Moscow, argued that before the coming of Christianity the Slavonic peoples were ‘everywhere and in all respects’ identical. Behind these three events — Alexander's charter, Karamzin's sense of outrage, Chodakowski's arrival — lay three approaches to the bringing-together of the Slavs: the federal, the Russifying, and what I shall call the cultural. In various hands, these approaches were long-lived in pre-revolutionary Russia. Chodakowski's significance lay in the impetus he gave to the third of them.