EAST EUROPEN QUARTERLY
perspective. Even Jungmann’s progressive and realistic postulates and aims, being prevailingly limited to linguistic aspects, proved to be too narrow and too nationalistic. The Czech nationalist movement was fortunate to find a man of Palacký’s type, a scholar with a European outlook and education, capable of understanding the historical situation of a small nation in the given historical epoch. Palacký also possessed the unique ability to envisage cultural, national, linguistic, and other problems as parts of the whole evolutionary process.
By the turn of the twenties and thirties, a period of prevailing political reaction and deathlike calm in Europe, Palacký clearly understood that, politically, the old world was in ruins and that a new period was rising on the horizon. Palacký believed that political freedom and nationalism had become the two dominant concepts in the world and foresaw an even more decisive role for them in the future. The individual as well as social groups would not be willing to remain permanently under feudal subjection, but desired to liberate themselves. Nations would refuse to be merely the subjects of the state’s will and would insist upon being governed “not by a stick like children but by the principles of reason and justice.”7
Palacký considered education, culture, and ethics to be the chief means for the destruction of existing political structures and the establishing of democracy as well as individual and collective freedom. He participated in all of the important cultural and scholarly activities in Bohemia before March, 1848. However, the circle of educated patriots was still small. Practically all of the national demonstrations and other activities of the period had to be organized by the same tiny group of people. Even in 1832 Palacký noted with bitterness that only a few individuals from among the six million Slavs constituting the population of Bohemia, Moravia, and Upper Hungary were taking an active part in Czech literature. The masses of the people were “dead” in their national consciousness.
Since the situation could be changed only by means of systematic educational and cultural efforts, Czech patriots, with Palacký at their head, were anxious to achieve the best results and highest goals in their public activity. Palacký was not satisfied with the mere existence of the Czech literary language. He strove to raise Czech literature and art, formally and spiritually, to the world standard. This was the intrinsic sense of each of the more important actions of the period that are connected with Palacký’s name, e.g., the founding of the National Museum, the editing of its journal, the plans to publish a Czech encyclopedia, the proposals for the improvement of the Czech school system, etc.
Political developments in Bohemia were not always favorable to these endeavors. Palacký himself encountered many obstacles, disagreements,
