ŠEVČENKOVO SLAVIANOFILSTVO: PÔVOD A CONTEXT

The author of the article comes to the conclusion that Ukrainian Slavophilism was formed on the basis of Herder’s theory about Slavs as the pigeon-like, softy people, of J. Kollár’s and P. J. Šafárik’s works about Slavic cultural and linguistic revivals. Also it was formed in the context of classical Russian Slavophilism of the 1840s and as a distinct alternative to it. Ukrainian Slavophilism was a Slavophilism of non-historical people for its political rebirth. Ukrainian Slavophilism like the Polish one proved, that Russian Slavophiles from the very beginning accented on special Russian Soul and distinction from the West in the 1870s turned into Pan-Slavism. M. Pogodin’s letters to S. Uvarov, the Minister of National Education of that time, prove that M. Pogodin was a main agent of Russian influence in Czech. The paper investigates what Shevchenko knew about P. J. Šafárik, whose papers he read in Russian translation. The Ukrainian poet did not know that P. J. Šafárik was Slovak, referred to him in the poem Heretic as to Czech-Slav. One of the Ukrainian Slavophiles M. Rigelman corresponded with Ľudovít Štúr, so Shevchenko in theory might have heard about the Slovak question from him. However, even the works of Šafárik himself did not testify to his Slavocentrism. The paper uses method of comparative study. The goal of the paper is to show the differences between Ukrainian and Russian Slavophilism of the 1840s and the reason why the Slavic people in the 19th century accepted Ukrainians and Poles looking for support in Russa.