Pan-Slavism was sparked off by a cultural transfer from German Romantic Nationalism. Slavic cultural communities were dispersed over different multi-ethnic empires; even the common liturgical language was current only among Orthodox and Uniate Slavs, rather than among Catholics or Protestants. Some foundational texts were (re-)entering cultural circulation: Dobrovský’s Über die ältesten Sitze de Slawen in Europa und ihre Verbreitung seit dem sechsten Jahrhundert (1788), announcing his later philological work; Musin-Puškin’s edition of the Lay of Prince Igor (1800);  Schlözer’s edition of the Nestor Chronicle (1802-09), culminating in Dobrovský’s and Jernej Kopitar’s grammar of Old Church Slavonic, Institutiones linguae slavicae dialecti veteris, quae quum apud Russos, Serbos aliosque ritus graeci, tum apud Dalmatas Glagolitas ritus latini Slavos in libris sacris obtinet (1822). The most important inspiration, however, was Herder’s evocative chapter on the Slavs and their ethnic temperament, and historical destiny in the fourth (1791) volume of his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Herder’s ethnogenetic articulation of the Slavs as an ethnically distinct and unified nationality, with its own character, temperament and historical destiny, follows the author’s own moral outlook: cultural relativism and Sentimentalism. The Slavic nations are characterized as “the meek, who shall inherit the earth”. This ethnotype, as well as the themes of wide geographical dispersal, a peaceful and long-suffering temperament, and an eventual future redemption from long oppression, became formative for all Slavic cultural practitioners in the following centuries.

Pan-Slavism was initially conceived among Austro-Hungarian intellectuals in the generation following Dobrovský and Kopitar (who as early as 1810 had published his “Patriotische Phantasien eines Slaven” in the Vaterländische Blätter). Their work on the 9th-century liturgical origins of Old Church Slavonic and the Cyrillic alphabet in the mission of the “Slavic Apostles”, Cyril and Methodius, led to an interest in the medieval principality of Greater Moravia and the idea of a common cultural and historical basis for Europe’s Slavic populations.

This Church-historical and  philological interest merged with Herder’s völkergeschichtlich approach, and with the Romantic interest in popular-oral poetry, notably demonstrated by František Ladislav Čelakovský (1799–1852) in his Slowanské narodny pjenie (“Slavic folk songs”, 3 vols, 1822-27), which included 12 Slovenian songs and some Bulgarian songs after Karadžić. These combined cultural currents inspired two Slovak Lutheran students who were enrolled in the University of Jena between 1815 and 1819, just as that university, with its Urburschenschaft, was in a ferment of national-democratic enthusiasm. Pavol Josef Šafárik and Ján Kollár undertook the cultivation of Slavic culture – the antiquity, languages, history, folklore, and literary potential of the Slavic nations – in a series of activities throughout the 1820s and ’30s, one working from a teaching post in Novi Sad, then Prague, the other from his pastoral position in Budapest. Both were active in collecting oral literature; Šafárik worked on the common antiquity of the Slavic nations, Kollár on their contemporary position and their need for mutual exchange (“reciprocity”); Kollár’s poetic sonnet cycle Slávy Dcera (“Sláva’s daughter”, 1824, repeated reprints and many translations) also formulated, highly influentially, a common-Slavic outlook on the cultural and political map of Europe.

Many cultural practitioners in their respective communities (Polish, Czech, Slovenian, Ukrainian/Russian) henceforth undertook their activities in the awareness that they formed part of a larger whole; a common Slavic consciousness thus formed a cultural echo-chamber reinforcing the cultivation of culture in these separate parts of Europe. The echoing spread of the anthem phrase “not yet is our nation lost” marks the progress of this “reciprocity”: originally conceived in the Polish context, it was adapted by Ljudevit Gaj for his Croatian/Illyrian activism (1833) and in Ukraine by Pavlo Čubyns’kyj (1863). Later in the century, associations such as athletics societies (sokol) and publishing cooperatives (matica) would likewise testify to the intensity with which the separate national movements in various Slavic cultural communities took inspiration from their “brother Slavs”. (The mutual address as “brothers” came into fashion, indeed, as part of the Pan-Slavic cultural repertoire.)

Pan-Slavism (the word circulated from the 1840s on, often used in an apprehensive sense by the German and Hungarian authorities of the Habsburg Empire) was mistrusted and discountenanced also by the autocratic Russian government, partly because all civic associations were mistrusted, partly also because even in the 1830s an ethnic division of the Empire between the “Great-Russian” ethnicity and other Slavic cultural communities (“Little-Russian” or Ukrainian; “White-Russian” or Belarusian/Ruthenian) was considered ill-advised. Polish involvement was relatively low-key since here the trauma of the ancient kingdom’s partitions and failed rebellions dominated the ideological landscape; in addition, Polish aristocrats in Habsburg Galicia resented their loss of privilege and felt closer to their Hungarian fellow-aristocrats than to their “brother Slavs”. In the Ottoman Empire, Serbians, for all that Karadžić worked under the patronage of the Vienna-based Slovene Jernej Kopitar, took a weary view of Gaj’s Illyrian movement and pursued a territorial, anti-Ottoman policy of their own. Bulgarians, for their part, were only beginning to articulate an ethno-national self-consciousness, inspired, it is true, by Pan-Slavic activists from neighbouring lands, but largely in ecclesiastical opposition to the Greek Church hierarchy within the Ottoman Christian millet.

Thus, the initial power base of Pan-Slavism was firmly situated among cultural communities within the Habsburg Empire: those who began to identify as Slovenes, Croats/Illyrians, Slovaks, and, most saliently, Czechs (whose Bohemian historical institutions and metropolitan centre of Prague provided the natural anchoring point alongside the neutral-imperial capital of Vienna). The role played by Lusatian Sorbs exceeded their numerical importance, given their proximity to Jena and their high degree of literacy and sociability.

Pan-Slavism was therefore initially largely “Austro-Slavic”, the activists seeing the Habsburg Empire as the state uniting the largest number of Slavic communities, with Vienna as the neutral-imperial capital. This tallied with the civic-liberal spirit of many of these cultural practitioners, from Kopitar on, who mistrusted the autocracy of Russia and the Magyar hegemony within Hungary.

Matters came to a head in the run-up to the revolutions of 1848. In the general clamour for liberal reforms, the Slavs called for unification and mutual solidarity against their monarchs as much as the Germans did. František Palacký, as a liberal intellectual from an ancient crownland of the German Empire, Bohemia, was invited to take a seat in the Frankfurt Nationalversammlung, but felt that this German assembly was uncongenial to him as a Slav. Accordingly, a rival assembly for Slavs was conceived and set up in Prague, with Palacký as the figurehead; the networks set up in the previous decades between like-minded Slavic cultural practitioners now allowed for a rapid mobilization and convocation to what was announced as a Slavic Congress in Prague.

The congress opened in the same Romantic-Nationalist fervour as that of Frankfurt, with poets and intellectuals celebrating their united co-presence and their Slavic brotherhood and solidarity. It foundered as the other revolutionary initiatives of that year did. As the complex, interlocking hostilities from Italy to Hungary and on the streets of Vienna engulfed the Habsburg Empire, the Slavic Congress was swept up in street battles and crushed in their violent military suppression. In the aftermath, the participants were under a cloud of suspicion as culpable rebels against their lawful rulers. The following decades were dominated by the repressive neo-absolutism of the Bach government. A limited vestigial afterlife was the Vienna Declaration of 1850, when Croatian and Serbian intellectuals declared the unity of their two languages and its official usage. As an academic discipline, Slavic philology remained in good standing after the text editions of Kopitar (Glagolita Cluzianus, 1836), and the folklore interest of Kollár and the antiquarianism of Šafárik at the universities of Vienna and Prague. With eminent academics like Franc Miklošić and Vatroslav Jagić, Slavic philology continued, even post-1848, to provide a platform for knowledge production at least, while cultural associations like matice and sokol sports clubs had some limited room for activities, except in the Hungarian lands, where the Slovak population was doubly disenfranchised, as it was discountenanced by the Magyar authorities, who themselves were discountenanced by the central Vienna government. (The situation was only marginally better in Hungary’s Croatian lands.)

The Russian Empire, softened up by its defeat in the Crimean War and under the comparatively liberal rule of Alexander II (r. 1855-81), took on a more prominent beacon position in these years. It was a place of emigration and extraterritorial support base for Macedonian and Bulgarian activists, and an ally of Serbia. Its cultural tolerance for non-Russian cultures evaporated after the Polish uprising of 1863 (the backlash against which also affected Lithuania and Ukraine); but Romantic historicism had spread from the mid-1830s after Puškin and Glinka; Slavophilia had become fashionable among Russian intellectuals and met with a corresponding Russophilia from certain Slavic activists, notably Štúr, who turned eastwards because of his frictions with the Prague Czechs. An interest in vernacular culture had led to folk-tale collections and ethnographic surveys involving the likes of Afanas’ev and Kostomarov, and in the context of the state’s millennium (celebrated in 1862, a thousand years after Rurik’s arrival in Novgorod), a tentative Reichspatriotismus developed whereby the tsar was seen as the unifying focus for all the ethnicities in his realm. The self-positioning of Russia as the leading homeland of Orthodoxy was proclaimed in another jubilee, the ninth centenary of the baptism of St Vladimir that had taken place in Kiev in 987. Statues of Cyril and Methodius arose in many places, as did, in the following decades, cathedrals dedicated to the national hero-saint Aleksandr Nevskij (especially in outlying places like Tallinn, Warsaw, Tbilisi, Sofia).

The ethnographic interest in Russia led to a major conference and exhibition (1867, held in Moscow), which in effect became a new Slavic Congress and in turn strengthened the Russophile hold on Pan-Slavism. No Polish delegates participated, but the event did include a Pan-Slavic musical soirée planned by Balakirev and the première of Rimskij-Korsakov’s Fantasia on Serbian themes and Balakirev’s own Overture “In Bohemia”. Two years later, Nikolaj Danilevskij (1822–1885) published his Russophile Rossiia i Evropa (“Russia and Europe”). It reprised Herder’s ethnotypes of the Slavic mentality as opposed to the ruthless pragmatism of Western Europe, but in a much more antagonistic way, Daniliveskij predicted a clash of civilizations and advocated a closure of Russia against pernicious Western influences and a reliance on its native ethnicity.

Following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 and the accession of Alexander III, Russia’s official endorsement of Pan-Slavism diminished, though its own introspective Russophilia continued in force. At the same time, the 1867 Compromise within the Austro-Hungarian Empire had strengthened national movements in the Slovenian lands and in Croatia, and also in Czechia, where activists were provoked by Austria’s concessions to Hungary, which left the Bohemian Crown, so they felt, short-changed. By now, however, Slavic cultural practices took an individually national direction and only indirectly operated in a collective-Slavic frame. Choral and sports exchanges did occur (a Pan-Slavic sokol federation was founded in Prague in 1908), and matice and publishers, when translating foreign works for the domestic reading market, would privilege texts from other Slavic languages as a matter of course.