Page - 77 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 2 ♦  77 Slavonic or Old Church Slavic. Compared with research on particular lan- guage formations and vernaculars, writing on Old Church Slavonic as the basis from which the Slavic languages evolved brought the common ele- ments shared by these languages into the foreground. Unsurprisingly, Thun, unofficially, even requested that scholars nominated for chairs in national philologies know this language and entrusted the new professor of Slavic philology in Vienna, Franc Miklošič, with making the final decisions on this issue.142 While Old Church Slavic was regarded as the antithesis of national particularism,143 several projects launched in the 1850s in Vienna pointed toward a rejection of the vernacular nature of Slavic languages. Both the series Legal and Political Terminology for the Slavic Languages of Austria (Juridisch-politische Terminologie für die slawischen Sprachen Österreichs) and two Slavic journals, edited in Vienna and supported by Thun and Helfert, Slovenské noviny (Slovak news) and Vídeňský denník (Viennese journal), proposed approaches that softened the differences among languages instead of encouraging their divergence.144 Similarly, the Ruthenian conservative journal Věstnyk’ (Вѣстникъ, or Herald) was published in Vienna, although it remains unclear to what extent it received the support of the Ministry of Education.145 Thun-Hohenstein also backed two Prague scholars, Jan Pravoslav Koubek and Jan Erazim Vocel, antagonists of Palacký in the re- form of the Czech alphabet in 1848; they preferred an alphabet that would minimize the disparities between the Slavic languages.146 Clearly, the scholars working on these Vienna-based projects were mainly university professors appointed in and after 1848. They included Šafárik, who was pulling the strings in language-based subjects and who took scholars’ academic qualities as much as their linguistic-political align- ment into account. While most chairs for Slavic languages and literatures had been nominated before Thun-Hohenstein was appointed, his own decisions in these matters were quite controversial. In Prague, when František Ladislav Čelakovský died in 1852, the ministry found nobody suitable to take his place. Martin Hattala, an associate professor and the author of textbooks and grammars of Slovak, won a full professorship only after Thun-Hohenstein resigned.147 In L’viv, despite countless pleas from the university, Thun-Hohenstein refrained from raising Jakiv Holovac’kyj’s salary, leaving it at the 1848 level, which was below the normal salary for full professors.148 The chairs of Polish language and literature in Galicia, a traditionally difficult issue, remained unoccupied until 1856, in Cracow