Matija Murko, Jan Jakubec, and the Czech National Revival: A Positivist Concept of Literary History Framed in the Correspondence of Two Literary Historians

Abstract

Grounded in the late nineteenth-century positivism, the scholarly works authored by Matija Murko (1861–1952), the Slovenian student of Slavonic philology, and the Czech literary historian Jan Jakubec (1862–1936) were both focused on methodological development of national linguistic scholarship while applying a comparative approach to literary history. Their voluminous correspondence between 1894 and 1918, archived in the National University Library in Ljubljana, and including seventy-nine bibliographical items (namely, Jakubec’s letters addressed to Murko), proves that the two men were in frequent contact, which is also evidenced by numerous personal visits. Furthermore, they kept a close eye on the other’s professional achievement through writing positive reviews and lent each other moral support for the endeavor to establish a university position. The most valuable items of the collection are letters from the 1890s, reflecting a common interest in Ján Kollár and referring to the publication and subsequent response to Murko’s Deutsche Einflüsse. It is in this work that Murko describes the development of Czech literature in the nineteenth century against the background of the multiple western influence of German civilization. In their literary historical sketches, Jakubec and Murko jointly made a successful attempt at a comparative view on Czech Romanticism “through the eyes of a different nation”.