František Ladislav Čelakovský (Strakonice 1799 – Prague 1852), prominent Czech poet, who combined in his poetry an imitation of traditional folk songs and (pre-)Romantic subjectivity. Influenced by Herder, he was also active as a collector and publisher of oral literature, which he translated from other, especially Slavic languages; this work made him an authority in the emerging field of Slavic studies.

Čelakovský came from a bourgeois, small-town background. His studies were overshadowed by his literary interests; he was expelled from the lyceum for reading Jan Hus and did not finish his university studies either. In the 1820s and 1830s he alternated between various educational and literary employments in Prague before finally embarking on an academic career, first as substitute professor of Czech in Prague (1835), then as professor of Slavic studies in Breslau/Wrocław (1841-49) and Prague. Even in this career he was hampered by his nonconformism: he was soon dismissed from his first post as a result of his critique of Tsar Nicholas I’s post-1831 absolutist repression of Poland.

Čelakovský's literary work was largely poetic, and influenced by the likes of Herder and Goethe. Among his translations are Herder’s Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (1823) and Scott's The Lady of the Lake (1828). In the discussions on native Czech literature, his stance was close to that of Václav Hanka, with an interest in folklore and other Slavic traditions. He published three collections of Slovanské národní písně (“Slavic national songs”) in 1822, 1825, and 1827. Inspired by Ludwig Rhesa’s Dainos, he translated Lithuanian folk ballads (1827). Finally, in the collection Mudrosloví národa slovanského v příslovích (“The wisdom of the Slavic people in proverbs”, 1852) he attempted a Slavic cultural ethnography.

This work made Čelakovský one of the leading Czech intellectuals to engage in the transnational networks of Romantic Nationalism. From Prague and Wrocław he maintained relations with a large number of Slavic counterparts. His correspondence with John Bowring contributed to the Cheskian Anthology (1832) and brought Czech literature to the notice of the English-speaking world. Although Čelakovský’s work as a Slavic philologist did not reach the scientific level of men like Pavol Jozef Šafárik, he helped to popularize Slavic studies among his students at the University of Wrocław.

As a poet, Čelakovský developed his personal subjectivity, although he also hid his identity at times, e.g. in the Romantic mystification of a fictitious persona, the female author “Žofie Jandová”. Two extensive collections helped to anchor modern Czech poetry in a Slavic sensibility. His Ohlas písní ruských (“Echoes of Russian songs”, 1829) was based on Russian oral-heroic balladry, a form still debated in the Bohemian Lands. His Ohlas písní českých (“Echoes of Czech songs”, 1840) represented in particular the “spirit” of Czech lyrical songs (along with his ballads or historical epic lays on the Hussites). This second collection had been preceded by clashes with the younger Romantic generation around Karel Hynek Mácha in the 1830s, and sparked a debate about the limits of folk imitation. Nonetheless, the mode of “echoes” was revived later on in the ballads of Karel Jaromir Erben. From his own perspective, the culmination of Čelakovský's poetic work was the formally demanding and ideologically syncretic cycle Růže stolistá (“The hundred-petalled rose”, 1840) with a Goethe-derived subtitle (“poetry and truth”).

In Čelakovský’s late work his scholarly and didactic preoccupations became dominant. His ambitious project of a Slavic dictionary was realized only in fragmentary form (a dictionary of Polabian, Vocabularia linguae Polabicae, 1827). He collaborated with Josef Jungmann on a Czech-German dictionary and supplemented it with his own Dodatky (“Supplements”, 1851). He prepared school textbooks and Slavic historical anthologies, which became popular and influential in subsequent decades. His Slavic university lectures were published posthumously.