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gradually turned secular. Instead of wholeness and integration, it championed
differentiation and individuality, eventually resulting in disintegration and
fragmentation (society or self).°
An explicit rejection of these trends formed a key component of the self¬
identifying strategies of emergent Slovak culture. Its representatives strove
to create a type of culture directly opposed to the Western model. They were
driven by a conviction, based on Hegel’s and Herder’s teleological concept
of history, which posited that embracing and submitting to another cultural
model would enable Slovak culture to achieve greater potential and move
to a higher level of historical development. Influenced by ideological trends
prevalent in nineteenth-century Russian philosophy and literature, Slovak
culture embraced the “Eastern” or “Slavonic” paradigm. Slavonic culture was
believed to be diametrically opposed to its Western counterpart and thus
predestined to fulfil a historical mission. Russophilia and the idea of Slavonic
unity began to make inroads into Slovak culture in the mid-nineteenth
century, as a reaction to the failure of the political aspirations of the
revolutionary years 1848-1849. The concept of a Slavonic literary mutuality,
forged by Jan Kollar in the early nineteenth century, was highly influential
in this respect. However, Ludovit Stur’s essay Slavdom and the World of the
Future, composed in German and published in 1867 in a Russian translation,
played a key role in the establishment of this concept. Though not published
in Slovak until 1993, Stür’s essay was widely known in Slovak intellectual
circles and its principal theses influenced key tenets of cultural, national and
political thinking until the turn of the century.
A negative reading of the term “modern” goes back to cultural and aesthetic
ideas, developed in the 1830s partly under the influence of Hegel’s philosophy.
The “modern” and modernity — with its doctrine of novelty, change and progress
— was unambiguously identified with Western culture and its subsequent
rejection became a staple of the dominant ideological and cultural discourse.
The cultural and social phenomena associated with modernity were perceived
as extreme or excessive, posing a threat to the achievement of the ideal of a
national culture, its homogeneity and complexity. The basic starting point
for the initiation efforts of the nineteenth-century Slovak national revivalist
culture can thus be said to be defined in opposition to the modern. We can
say that it was based on the principle of the classic model of culture. What we
see here is a juxtaposition of the principle of the whole and the individual, of
harmony and excess. This opposition was manifested not only in the sphere
of ideology but also affected the arts, literature in particular.
8 See Jiirgen Habermas: Modernity — An Incomplete Project of Modernity, translated by Seyla
Ben-Habib, in Hal Foster (ed.): The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, London:
Bay Press, Port Townsend, Washington, 1983, 3-16.
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