Effacing Panslavism: Belief in Slavic Unity and Historiographic Misrepresentation

Professor Alexander Maxwell, senior lecturer in history at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, will give a talk entitled ‘Effacing Panslavism: Belief in Slavic Unity and Historiographic Misrepresentation’.

In the early nineteenth century, several Slavic intellectuals believed in a single Slavic nation speaking a single language, though positing various taxonomies of the nation’s component “tribes” and the language’s component “dialects.” Nevertheless, recent scholars, both historians and linguists, prove so extraordinarily unwilling to acknowledge the existence of Panslavism that several falsify the historical record so as to make historical figures conform to modern national and linguistic thinking. This talks discusses Jan Kollár, Ljudevit Gaj, and Ľudovít Štúr as three sample Panslavs, documents the misrepresentation of their ideas in recent historiography, and explores why so many scholars seek to erase Panslavism from the historical record.

This event is sponsored by the UCL SSEES Study of Central Europe Seminar Series.

There will be a drinks reception to follow.

All welcome, no registration required.