EAST EUROPEN QUARTERLY
young Palacký, their force varying in different spheres and periods. Romanticism, especially, cannot be excluded from Palacký’s early work. The attempts of some authors to do so in recent studies are, I think, unacceptable.
In the same way as Romanticism and the Enlightenment influenced the early formation of Palacký’s personality, the whole of his later work was harmoniously pervaded by his artistic and scholarly methods. However, the scholarly principles proved to be stronger and decisive. Palacký, like the majority of educated Czech patriots of the National Revival, longed to become a poet. Soon, however, he recognized his inadequacy of talent and came to the conclusion that the national culture needed something more than poetry. As an eighteen year old student, he wrote to his friend Pavel Šafařík: “Leaving Pressburg I lost the last spark of my affection for poetry . . . . Look at the whole of our literature. What gaps need to be filled? . . . And we, whose duty is to correct the deficiencies of our literature in accord with our gifts, are, for shame, not worthy of our country! In the end we shall always be only poets and lunatics. Do we not have a legion of Czech poets (relatively)? And where is a geographer? Where is a naturalist? Where is physicist? How many historians do we have? . . . We want to make people love our unworthy literary works in place of loving the better literature of other nations.”3
Palacký’s greatest desire was to serve the Czech nation with his literary work, and feelings of subjective satisfaction were clearly secondary. National needs became the focal point of his interest even during the brief period of his poetic activity. Unlike the multitude of Czech patriots who uncritically and ineffectually championed the Czech language, history, and culture, Palacký had a realistic and concrete program. Not merely passive knowledge but an active understanding of contemporary European science and culture became his primary objective.
Virtually from the beginning, Palacký, influenced by his sojourn in Bratislava and governed by his extraordinary talent, critical thinking, and high criteria, adopted European cultural standards for his nation. He understood very early that it was necessary to emancipate the language, the spirit, and the structure and methods of Czech belles-lettres and scientific and popular literature from German dependence. He wrote to Jan Kollár: “My greatest endeavor is to stress by means of examples our need to think and act in a Slavic way, discarding German spelling-books.”4 Palacký already pursued this intention in his essay, “The Beginnings of Czech Poetry, Particularly of Prosody,” which he wrote in collaboration with Šafařík. This essay exercised its influence primarily by means of its strong sympathetic belief in the national revival.
