Štúr, Ludovít

Born Oct. 29, 1815, in Uhrovec, central Slovakia; died Jan. 12, 1856, in Modra, near Bratislava. Slovak poet, philologist, and public figure. Ideologist of the national liberation movement in the 1840’s.

Štúr studied philosophy and philology at the Bratislava Lycée from 1829 to 1833 and at the University of Halle from 1838 to 1840. With J. Hurban and M. M. Hodža, he carried out a reform of the literary language that based the language on the Central Slovak dialect; he organized the cultural and educational society Tatrin. From 1845 to 1848, Štúr published Slovenskje narodňje novini, the first Slovak political newspaper, and a literary supplement, Orol tatrański.

In 1847 and 1848, Štúr was a deputy to the Hungarian Diet. At the Slavic Congress in Prague in 1848 he demanded recognition of the Slavic peoples’ rights to free national and cultural development. He took part in the Prague Uprising of 1848, and in the Revolution of 1848–49 he led the struggle of the Slovaks for national liberation.

The refusal of the Hungarian bourgeois revolutionary government to satisfy the national aspirations of the oppressed peoples brought about Štúr’s conversion to Austro-Slavism and the camp of counterrevolution. After 1848 he lived in Modra under police surveillance; he engaged in literary, scholarly, and publicist activities.

Štúr’s socioeconomic, political, and cultural program, which was objectively bourgeois-democratic in nature, became the foundation of the national ideology and of romanticism in Slovak literature. The program called for the abolition of feudalism, the introduction of democratic freedoms, and the creation of conditions for socioeconomic progress and the development of the national culture within the framework of the multinational Kingdom of Hungary.

In the political treatise Slavdom and the World of the Future (published 1867, in Russian), Štúr argued that it was possible for the Slovak people to follow a noncapitalist path of development in the form of the peasant commune. In his lectures on Slavic history, aesthetics, and philosophy, he attempted to apply G. Hegel’s philosophical method to the analysis of the historical development of the Slavic peoples and their prospects for future development.

In his works on literature and aesthetics, such as On the Folk Songs and Stories of the Slavic Tribes (1853), Štúr apotheosized folklore as an expression of the national spirit and the national cultural tradition. In poetry Štúr helped develop the genres of the patriotic lyric and the epic with his collection Lyrics and Songs (1853) and the narrative poems Sviatoboj (1853) and Matúš From Trenčin (1853).