Karel Havlíček Borovský (Borová 1821 – Prague 1856), Czech writer and journalist, studied philosophy at the University of Prague and then entered the city’s theological seminary; he was expelled in 1841 and became a staunch anti-clericalist. He travelled to Moscow armed with a recommendation from Pavol Josef Šafárik and Mihail Petrovič Pogodin, and there worked as a private tutor for the family of Pogodin’s friend, the Slavophile Stepan Petrovič Ševyrëv in 1843 and 1844. In this period he studied Russian literature, translated Gogol’ and wrote a number of epigrams, some of which were published in five thematic collections.
Although he developed a Slavophile orientation in these years, he was also inspired by Young Germans and similar movements, and was dismissive of national enthusiasm where it obscured social realities. He expressed his disappointment at the Russian social situation in a series of articles (Obrazy z Rusi, “Pictures from Russia”, 1843-46, published in book form in 1886). This disenchantment made him doubtful as to the viability of Pan-Slavism as proposed in Kollár’s Wechselseitigkeit programme. Returning to Prague in 1844, he began a journalistic career with the help of František Palacký, editing Pražské noviny (“Prague newspaper”) and Česká Včela (“The Czech bee”). In 1848 he renamed the former Národní noviny (“National newspaper”), which became a critical and self-confident voice for Czech liberal nationalism.
Havlíček established his reputation by criticizing the old-fashioned writings Josef Kajetán Tyl, anchored in older social orders and poplar among more conservative readers. In the second half of the 1840s, Havlíček moved from literary themes to political ones and became one of the main, popular voices of the liberal-reformist current (Slovan a Čech, “Czech and Slav“, Co jest obec, “What is a community“); lingering traces of ethnocentrism in the Czech national programme appear, however, in his critique of Siegfried Kapper's Jewish-themed Czech-language poems).
Havlíček participated actively in the Prague Slavic Congress of 1848, canvassing for participation among Poles and Croats, and in the same year he sat both in the short-lived Imperial Diet in Vienna and in the assembly of Kroměříž (the first elected parliament in the Austrian Empire, dissolved in 1849). When his national newspaper was forbidden in 1850, Havlíček founded a new periodical, Slovan (“The Slav”), in which he subtly printed anti-absolutist texts, such as a Czech translation of Jakob Venedey’s panegyric sketch of Daniel O’Connell – a leader admired in the Catholic monarchies for his Catholic activism, but admired among democrats for his capacity to organize grassroots mass mobilization.
Slovan, too, was banned and Havlíček arrested in 1851. Although a sympathetic Czech court refused to convict him, he was forced into exile in Brixen/Bressanone, where he wrote his satirical poems Tyrolské elegie (“Tirolean laments”), Křest svatého Vladimíra (“The baptism of St Vladimir”) and Král Lávra (“King Lavra”), all published posthumously in the 1870s. In 1855 he returned in ill health to Prague, where he died in 1856 at age 35. At the massively-attended funeral, Božena Němcová placed a laurel wreath in his coffin, which has entered popular memory as a crown of thorns.
