Ján Kollár (ps. Čechobratr Protištúrsky; Mošovce 1793 – Vienna 1852), poet, ethnographer, Lutheran minister and university professor at the Department of Slavic Antiquities in Vienna, was born into a family of rural craftsmen and was schooled in Kremnica (1806-09), the Lutheran school in Banská Bystrica (1810-12) and the Lutheran Lyceum in Bratislava (1812-15). After passing the entrance tests for pastoral practice in 1816, he obtained funds to study theology and philosophy at the traditional place of study for Slovak Lutherans, the University of Jena. Kollár’s study and stay in Germany (1817-19) were of formative importance. Shortly after arriving, he attended the Wartburg Feast, and witnessed at close quarters the emergence of the German student Burschenschaft movement, which combined social conviviality with demands for political liberalization and national unification. Among the lectures he attended (besides the theological ones) were those of the naturalist Lorenz Oken (1779–1851), whose encyclopedic, nature-philosophical periodical Isis (1816) became a forum for liberal-nationalist opinion and freedom of the press, leading eventually to Oken’s dismissal from Jena in 1819. Kollár was also introduced to Goethe, for whom he procured transcripts of several Slovak folk songs. Field work with P.J. Šafárik resulted in two volumes of Písně světských lidu slovanského v Uhřích (“Profane songs of the Slovak people in the Kingdom of Hungary”, 1823-27). Later collecting activity, and his creation of a large circle of collectors from all the regions of Slovakia, resulted in the extensive two-volume edition of Národnie spievanky (“National songs”, 1834-35).

His travels in those parts of Saxony where Slavic (Sorbian) populations had been Germanized inspired deepening fears about the future of Slavic culture. In Lobeda, near Jena, he met Friderika Wilhelmina (“Mina”) Schmidt, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, and he proposed to her. Due to opposition from her family, it was only eighteen years later, upon the death of her mother, that the pair could get married. Mina became a poetic muse in his artistic creation, mythically elevated into the daughter of the goddess Sláva (“Fame”) as an icon of all his unfulfilled yearnings, both private and national. One of the first signs of a Romantic turn in Slovak/Czech poetry, the sonnet cycle Slávy Dcera (“Slava’s daughter”, 1824, with expanded re-editions in 1832, 1845 and 1852) surveys the Slavic cultural communities across Central and Eastern Europe and sombrely contemplates their plight; it became a runaway success among Slavic-language readers and one of the foundational texts of early cultural Pan-Slavism. The original edition consisted of 150 sonnets divided into three sections; the 1832 edition had 615 sonnets in five sections with extensive notes under the title Výklad čili přímětky a vysvětlivky ku Slávy dceře (“Interpretation: Epithets and explanations to Sláva’s daughter”). The last version contained 645 sonnets.

Following his Jena studies, Kollár took up the post of Lutheran pastor in Pest. He remained in this trilingual Slovak-German-Hungarian environment for 30 years (1819-49) and was thus directly confronted with the nationalization of Hungarian society. Conflicts arose mainly due to the introduction of Hungarian in public life at the expense of Latin and other provincial languages, and its coercive enforcement in the previously autonomous educational and religious institutions. He established close contacts with Czech nationalists (Dobrovský, Jungmann, Hanka, Čelakovský, F.C. Kampelík) and gradually expanded his network of correspondents to include nationally committed Polish (W.A. Maciejowski, J.S. Bandtkie), Sorbian and South-Slavic scholars (Gaj, Karadžić, Kopitar).

As these names indicate, Kollár was one of the main ideologists of Pan-Slavism in the pre-1848 period, especially for the Slav national movements in the Austrian Empire. He followed up on the preceding generation of Herderians (B. Tablic, J. Palkovič, J. Ribay, J. Hrdlička) as well as the tradition of Baroque Slavism in Hungary. The essay O literárnej vzájomnosti medzi rozličnými kmeňmi a nárečiami slovanského národa (“On literary reciprocity between different tribes and dialects of Slavs”, 1836) and its German translation (Über die slawische Wechselseitigkeit zwischen den verschiedenen Stämmen und Mundarten der slawischen Nation, 1837) outlined (under the moniker “Slavic reciprocity”) a comprehensive programme of linguistic and cultural Pan-Slavism. Cultural communication between Slavic communities was to be intensified by intellectual and literary exchanges, libraries, educational associations, coordinated language activism and policies, and newspapers in various Slavic languages. The reticulation of Slavic communities into one cultural unity and communicative ensemble was, according to Kollár, the only way to create a barrier against Germanization and Magyarization. In the 1830s and 1840s, his views were welcomed by several Slavic scholars, inspired the creation of Slavic libraries and student associations and led to the intensification of cultural transfers, the (unsuccessful) attempt to establish a common Slavic grammar and the production of lexicographical works capturing contemporary Slavic dialects.

Throughout his life, Kollár also stood up for the concept of Czechoslovak linguistic and ethnic unity. According to Kollár, the Slavs formed one nation divided into four ethnic “tribes” (the word was analogous to the Stämme which together were considered to form the German nation: Saxons, Hessians, etc.), each with their own literary language. For this reason, he disapproved of the creation of new literary languages, calling them a manifestation of “tribal egoism” and an exacerbation of Slavic disunity. He considered Bernolák Slovak to be an uncultivated language without a future and spoke out strongly against the other attempt to establish a literary Slovak language, the Štúr codification. Kollár responded to the Štúr codification with a polemical collection of articles entitled Hlasové o potřebě jednoty spisovného jazyka pro Čechy, Moravany a Slováky (“Voices on the need for a uniform standard language for the Czechs, Moravians and Slovaks”, 1846).

From his position as a Lutheran minister, he was actively involved in Church conventions in efforts to preserve the status of Czech as the language of the liturgy, Church administration and school education. He compiled the school textbooks Čítanka (“Reader”, 1825) and Šlabikár (“Primer”, 1826). In response to the law of 1840 establishing the Hungarian Church in civil registers and administration, he initiated a petition on behalf of the Lutheran Church. This resulted in the Prestolný prosbopis (“Petition to the Throne”); its tone was strictly confined to language requirements and avoided political contentiousness. In 1842, he submitted it to the Vienna government.

A significant part of his sermons (two volumes of which were published in 1831 and 1844) was devoted to national desiderata. His early sermon Dobré vlastnosti národu slovanského (“Good qualities of the Slavic people”, 1822) reflects Herder’s ethnotype of the Slavs’ national character.

Kollár’s philological and historical works are Romantic rather than academic. Even contemporary scholars reproached him for his mythologization, fabulation, naivety and poetic exaggeration. His passion for the Slavs and their history blurred the lines between hypothesis and factual assertion, between knowledge production, speculation and imagination. For lack of other sources, he frequently sought evidence of the far-flung Slavic past in language and etymology, as evinced in his Jmenoslov čili slovník osobných jmen rozličných kmenů a nářečí národu slavenského (“Jmenoslov: Dictionary of personal names of different tribes and dialects in the Slav nation”, 1828), Sláva bohyně (“Sláva the goddess”, 1839) and the posthumously published Staroitalia slavjanská (“Old-Slavic Italy”, 1853), based on his 1841 and 1844 travels.

Under the pressure of revolutionary events of 1848, and concerned for the safety of his family, Kollár left Pest and in 1849 moved to Vienna, where he was given the post of professor of Slavic antiquities and made government advisor on Slovak-related educational issues, and where he died in 1852.