Josef Dobrovsky: Enlightened Hyper-Critic or Pre-Romantic Forger?

Edward L. Keenan, Josef Dobrovský and the Origins of the Igor´ Tale. xxiii + 541 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. ISBN 0916458962. $49.95.

Edward Keenan's Josef Dobrovský and the Origins of the Igor´ Tale provides what will undoubtedly prove to be a highly provocative answer to the disputed authenticity and provenance of this literary monument, so significant in modern Russian culture: that it is in fact a late 18th-century forgery, and that the forger was the greatest Slavic scholar of the time, the Bohemian abbé Josef Dobrovský. Especially to students of Czech history and culture—used to thinking of Dobrovský as the epitome of the critical Enlightened scholar, who devoted his formidable intellectual prowess to exploring the history of Bohemia and of the Czech language and its literature, contributed tremendously to creating a modern Czech literary language, and in the process practically invented the discipline of comparative Slavic linguistics—the latter part of Keenan's conclusion comes as a shock. It would be something like reading an erudite and logically convincing demonstration that Charles Darwin had fabricated the Piltdown Man. Why would the assertion that Dobrovský was the originator of the Igor´ Tale provoke such a reaction? The answer has to do with the role ascribed to Dobrovský in the Czechs' own story of their national renascence (národní obrození).

The Czech historian Miroslav Hroch developed a highly influential typology of the development of modern national movements among Europe's "small nations," including the Czechs. In Hroch's view such national "awakenings" go through three typical stages. In the initial phase, patriotic activity is limited to scholarly research, carried on by a relatively small group of intellectuals who explore the history, language, and literature of their nascent nation. These intellectuals may express strong emotional attachment to the national community, but their interest is primarily in exploring and preserving the past and does not necessarily include a belief in the "revival" of the nation. In phase two, a larger but still numerically limited group of active patriots, having developed a national ideology, carries out agitation in the name of the nation and its preservation and future development. Phase three marks the emergence of a mass-based nationalist movement with political goals.¹ Roughly speaking, in its first phase the Czech renascence was characterized by the Enlightenment and in the second phase by Romanticism; by the time the third phase emerged, the particular Central European fusion of Romanticism and liberalism predominated. The career of Josef Dobrovský (1753–1829) overlaps the temporal boundary between phase one and phase two of the Czech renascence, but his approach and outlook are almost always presented as typical of phase one. In fact, the polemics with younger patriots that marked (or marred) the later years of Dobrovský's life are often credited in part at least to a "generation gap," the difference in outlook of a man of the Enlightenment and the enthusiastic patriots of the Romantic era. As Keenan discusses, the specific case that most clearly illustrates this difference in outlook is provided by Dobrovský's role in the polemics over the authenticity of literary "monuments" dear to the Czech hearts of his contemporaries, especially the Královédvorský and Zelenohorskýmanuscripts (so called after the locations in which they were supposedly discovered in 1817 and 1818 respectively, and collectively referred to as the RKZ [see the discussion in Keenan, 119–24]).

The RKZ are the most famous of a handful of fragments of early Czech lyric and epic poetry "discovered" by Dobrovský's pupil Václav Hanka and others and turned over to the Bohemian National Museum.² These "relics" provided evidence that the Czechs could boast a literary heritage rivaling that of the Germans with their...