František Ladislav Čelakovský (March 7, 1799 Strakonice – August 5, 1852 Prague) was a Czech writer, philologist, and folklorist, a significant representative of the Czech national emancipatory movement.
Čelakovský was born in Strakonice in the family of a carpenter, after his studies at grammar schools in Písek and České Budějovice, he studied philosophy in Prague and then in České Budějovice and Linec. During this period, he started deepening his philological self-education and this was also when his folklorist interest in the culture of Slavic nations began. He did not finish university studies and worked as a private tutor while at the same time publishing his first poetry books, folklorist works, and translations. In Prague, he grew close with figures of the national revival and actively participated in this movement. From the 30s on, he worked as the editor for Pražské noviny and its fiction supplement, Česká včela, starting in 1835, he taught at the Prague´s German university as a substitute professor of Czech language and literature. He was called off this position because of his criticism of the Russian tsar absolutism. He moved to Vratislav in 1842 and became a professor of Slavonic studies, then occupied the same position at the Prague university since 1849. [1]
If one of the significant areas of Čelakovský’s poetry legacy i.e. echo poetry is based on the principle of imitation and stylization of folk poetry, the thoughts of the German pre-romantic philosopher Herder [2] influenced his scientific effect as well: he dealt with the research of the folklore of the Slavic nations or nations that were considered Slavic at the time. [3] His folkloristic interests are connected to his philological research as well.
The inception of Čelakovský’s serious interest in philology dates to the period of his studies in Prague, České Budějovice, and Linec. Čelakovský was self-educated in several languages and studied their literature and lettering as well. In his philosophical routing, he favored more and more the method of comparative linguistics and scholastically, he also deals with dead languages. The peak of his philological efforts is defined by the generous project of the dictionary of all Slavic languages, out of which he only managed to process the languages of the Wends. [4]
Čelakovský is, among others, considered to be one of the founders of the Czech Baltistics. He bought the translation of the Rez’s collection of Lithuanian dainos (folk songs) which he published under the title Lithuanian national songs in 1827. The folklorist interest in the baltistic culture was then complemented by a linguistic interest. Already in the preface to the edition of the Lithuanian folk songs, Čelakovský mentioned the congeniality of the Lithuanian language with the Slavic languages. He repeated his thesis about the congeniality of these languages in his later work Čtení o počátcích dějin vzdělanosti a literatury národův slovanských (Reading of beginnings of the education and literature of slavic nations) from 1852 where he brought attention to the potential of the studies of the Baltistic languages for the sake of knowing the Slavic languages. He proved his thesis by the supposedly Baltistically sounding toponymy of some of the Czech rivers and towns. [5] Among the works attributed to Čelakovský is the Lithuanian dictionary created probably in the 1920s. The author of the dictionary focuses on the balto-slavic lexical matches, which he uses to prove the historical lexical congeniality of Baltic and Slavic languages. Apart from the mention in the letter from J.V. Kamarýt, Čelakovský’s authorship is also suggested by the compliance of the method in the dictionary with Čelakovský’s philological opinions and methods. [6]
A National Revival is a term used for the formation of culture in some of the modern European nations at the end of the 18 th and 19 th century. According to the historian Theodor Schieder, there were three ways in which the formation of national states happened: the first manner was the establishment of the nation by way of an in-state revolution, the second was a unification of smaller state units that were connected by language and culture, and the third was the separation of a nation from bigger, supranational state units. [1] It were terms such as ‘revival’ or ‘awakening’ that are most commonly used in association with the nations that were trying to become independent from bigger, multi-ethnical units during the 19 th century. These emancipatory efforts of small nations were then realized above all in an effort to free the national cultures, the mediator and bearer of which were undoubtedly the national language – which was then because of the demands of its intellectualization and the ability of academic and literary dialogue subdued to scholarly research and finally codification. [2] The awakened interest in the art of lettering, mythology and folklore of these nations is then a natural result of the aforementioned tendencies.
Among the specific nations that had a national revival are, besides the Czech nation, also other small Slavic nations and Baltic nations. [3] The Czech National Revival is a term often primarily associated with a certain period of history of the Czech literature. Despite this, it is undeniable that the nationally emancipatory process here and elsewhere took place not only on a literary and artistic scale, but also on a journalist, philological, literary-historical, historiographic, scientific, and later political scale. [4] The national emancipator movement here was not covert but in a lively contact with other nation-formative processes. Thus grew the idea of Slavs and the Slavonic studies in our area (the most significant Slavonics of the period here were Josef Dobrovský, Antonín Jaroslav Puchmajer, Pavel Josef Šafařík etc.), and the formation of the Czech Baltistic Studies is connected to this as well (P. J. Šafařík, František Ladislav Čelakovský).
The inception of the Czech National Revival is dated to the 70s and 80s decades of the 18 th century in connection with the Enlightenment reformations. If we follow the traditional periodization of the national revival in the Czech literary science, this is the time when its first phase begins, defined by the scientific interest in the national history and language and its main representative is Josef Dobrovský. The second phase lasts approximately from 1806 until 1830, it is carried by absolutistic reformations and the Napoleonic wars, it is aesthetically defined by the approach of pre-romantism and specific manifestations of the revival are moving from a purely scientific interest to the literary field, the field of formation of new literary genres. Besides, the second phase is defined by the activation of the Czech national movement, and thus by the effort to spread national thoughts outside of the intellectual circles by agitation. The third phase, romantic from the aesthetic point of view, lasts approximately from 1830 until the revolutionary year 1848 and the fourth phase follows further into the 1960s. From a historical perspective, it is a period of the Bach absolutism, from the perspective of the national movement, the Czech language is more widely gaining the position of the official language and servitude is repealed, and thus a large part of the population is economically emancipated. In this final phase, there is the acquisition of a conscious civil society, profiling of the Czech inhabitants and significant development and final establishment of the national culture. [5]
National revival is a phenomenon prone to very contracting interpretations depending on the ruling scientific-political paradigm and the manner of grasping this phenomenon is still the subject of academic disputes.