Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/334

308 Slavists. Hanka entered into close relationship with various Russians, and among them Count Uvarov, whose Orthodox clericalism he flattered with the suggestion that Bohemia received Christianity from Constantinople and in Orthodox form. But these panslavist whimsies could not maintain their ground in face of the political movement which now, under western influence, was beginning in Austria and Bohemia. Kollár and Hanka were replaced by Palacký and Havliček, and panslavism was driven out by democracy and liberalism.

Official Russia was too conservative and too Orthodox to think of panslavism. Šiškov, for example, was infuriated by the very idea of writing Russian in the Latin script, and said that any Russian who did such a thing ought to be beheaded. Magnickii denounced Köppen for his article upon Cyril and Methodius. Köppen's plan to invite the three Czech Slavists, Šafařík, Čelakovský, and Hanka, to Russia was frustrated by the fears and the indifference of the government and the academy of sciences. Nicholas, as legitimist, was the declared enemy of panslavism.

In 1849 Ivan Aksakov was examined by the police, and was compelled to give written answers to various questions, especially as concerned the nature of slavophilism. Tsar Nicholas wrote interesting marginal notes upon these answers, expressing his emphatic disapproval of the panslavist movement, and saying that the union of all the Slavs "would lead to the destruction of Russia." To the tsar, panslavism seemed a revolutionary program, seeing that a union of the Slavs could only be effected by revolts against God-given monarchs. In 1847 Kostomarov's Cyrillo-Methodian Union was prosecuted. A writing issued at this date by the ministry for education and expounding the true Russian program opposes this program to "the purely imaginary Slavdom" imported into Russia from Bohemia.

Most of the Russian Slavists gave expression to these or to similar tendencies. As political representatives of the move-