Safarik, Pavel Josef

Born May 13, 1795, in Kobeliarovo Slovakia; died June 26, 1861, in Prague. Slovak and Czech Slavicist. Figure in the Czech and Slovak national liberation movements.

Šafařík graduated from the University of Jena in 1817 and taught in a Serbian Gymnasium from 1819 to 1833. In 1841 he became curator of the library of Charles University, and in 1848 he became the library’s director. During the Revolution of 1848, Šafařík adopted a liberal bourgeois stance. He became chairman of the society Lípa Slovanská in April 1848 and headed the Czech and Slovak delegation to the Slavic Congress, held in Prague that June.

Šafařík was the first Slavicist to apply the comparative historical method to the study of the Slavic peoples. His principal works Slavic Antiquities (Russian translation, vols. 1–2, 1837–48) and Slavic Ethnography (Russian translation, 1843) provided historical substantiation for the concept of Slavic unity and demonstrated the role played by the Slavs in world history. Šafařík also wrote on mythology, paleography, Slavic languages, and Czech and Slovak literature and folklore. He and F. Palacký published the treatise Principles of Czech Poetry in 1818. Šafařík History of Slavic Language and Literature in All Its Dialects appeared in 1826. His activity as a poet is represented by the collection of verse A Tatra Muse With a Slavic Lyre (1814). Šafařík’s work influenced the development of Slavic studies in Russia and in other countries.