Not until after the political experiences of the reaction that followed 1848 and not until after the creation of Austro-Hungarian dualism did Palacký tend towards panslavism and Russism. He took part in the panslavist congress held at Moscow in 1867.
Towards 1848 certain Slovak philosophico-historical writers modified Kollár's ideal. Overestimating the importance of the sometime Great Moravian realm and of its reputed Orthodox church founded by the Slav apostles, they proposed with the help of Russia and the Orthodox church to incorporate the Slovaks in a kind of panslavist federation.[1]
§ 65.
AMONG the southern Slavs also, the program of national renaissance goes back to Herder and the German philosophy of enlightenment. One of the earliest humanitarian philosophers was the Serb Obradovič (1739–1811), a monk who worked indefatigably at self-culture, one to whom a book was clearer than the sound of monastery or church bells. He was succeeded by the Slavist Vuk Karadšič; and subsequently, in the thirties and forties, by Gai, who under Kollár's influence was the founder of Illyrism. In the year 1848 Illyrism acquired a strong political trend through its antagonism to the Magyars, which was fostered by Vienna, and through the fate of the Serbs under Turkish rule.
The national unification of the Serbo-Croats was long hindered by the religious differences between the Catholic Croats and the Orthodox Serbs. Križanič, indeed, the Croat priest to whom we have previously referred, preached panslavism; but not until quite recently did Croats and Serbs make the first attempt to subordinate their religious differences to the joint national interest, encountering thereupon vigorous nationalist and ecclesiastical opponents in Buda-Pesth and in Vienna (the Serbo-Austrian conflict).
Peculiarly difficult is the position of the smallest Slav nation, the Slovene. Oppressed by two great civilised peoples the Italians and the Germans, and administratively divided
- ↑ Štúr was one of the most notable of this group. His writing, Slavdom and the World of the Future, a Message to the Slavs from the Banks of the Danube, existed in manuscript only till 1867, when Lamanskii translated it into Russian and published it in that tongue.
