Pavel Jozef Safarik

Pavel Jozef Šafrik (Safry / Schaffry/ Schafary/ Saf(f)arik / Šafark/ Szafarzik, Czech Pavel Josef Šafařk, modern Slovak Pavol Jozef Šafrik, German Paul Joseph Schaffarik, Latin Paulus Josephus Schaffarik, Hungarian Pl Jzsef Saf(f)arik) (13 May 1795 in Kobeliarovo, Slovakia (at that time part of the Kingdom of Hungary) - 26 June 1861 in Prague, Czech Republic (at that time part of the Austrian Monarchy)) was a Slovak philologist, poet, one of the first scientific Slavists; literary historian, historian and ethnographer. He wrote most of his texts in Czech or in German.

Family

His father Pavel Šafrik (1761 - 1831) was a Protestant clergyman in Kobeliarovo and before that teacher in Šttnik, where he was also born. His mother, Katarna Kresov (1764 - 1812) was born in a poor lower gentry family in Hankov and had several jobs in order to help the family in the poor region of Kobeliarovo. P. J. Šafrik had two elder brothers and one elder sister. One brother, called Pavel Jozef as well, died before Šafrik was born. In 1813, after Katarna's death, Šafrik's father married the widow Rozlia Drbov, although Šafrik and his brothers and sister were against this marriage. The local teacher provided Šafrik with Czech books. On 17 June 1822, when he was in Serbia (see below), P. J. Šafrik married the 19 years old Jlia Ambrziov (1803-1876), a highly intelligent member of Slovak lower gentry born in 1803 in present-day Hungary. She spoke Slovak, Czech, Serbian and Russian, and supported Šafrik in his scientific work. In Serbia, they also had three daughters (Ľudmila, Milena, Božena) and two sons (Mladen Svatopluk, Vojtech), but the first two daughters and the first son died shortly after their birth. Upon Šafrik's arrival in Prague, they had 6 further children, out of which one died shortly after its birth. His eldest son Vojtech (1831-1902) became an important chemist, Jaroslav (1833-1862) became a military doctor and later the supreme assistant at the Joseph Academy in Vienna, Vladislav (1841 - ?) became a professional soldier, and Božena (1831-?) married Josef Jireček (1825-1888), a Czech literary historian and politician and earlier a tutor in Šafark's family. Vojtech wrote an interesting biography of his father - Co vyprvěl P. J. Šafařk (What Šafrik said) - and the son of Božena and Jireček the study Šafařk mezi Jihoslovany (Šafrik among the Southern Slavs).

Life

Slovakia (1795 - 1815)

His spent his childhood in the region of Kobeliarovo (situated in northern Gemer) characterized by attractive nature and rich Slovak culture. He gained his basic education from his father. As P. J. Šafrik's son Vojtech put it later in his book (see Family): When, at the age of 7, his father showed him only one alphabet, he by himself hands down learned to read, and from then on he was always sitting on the stove and was reading. By the age of eight, he had read the whole Bible twice and one of his favorite activities was preaching to his brothers and sister, and to local people. In 1805-1808 Šafrik studied at a "lower gymnasium" (in some sources described as Protestant school which was just changed into a middle Latin school) in Rožnava, where he learned Latin, German and Hungarian. Since he did not have enough money to finance his studies, he continued his studies in Dobšin for two years, because he could live there with his sister. At that time, it was absolutely necessary for anyone, who wanted to become a successful scientist in the Kingdom of Hungary to have a good command of the four languages Latin, German, Hungarian and Slovak. Since the school in Rožňava specialized in Hungarian and the school in Dobšin in German, and Šafrik was an excellent student and both schools had a good reputation, all prerequisites for a successful career were fulfilled as early as at the age of 15. In 1810 - 1814 he studied at the "lyceum" of Kežmarok, where he got to know many Polish, Serbian and Ukrainian students and his most important friend Jn Blahoslav Benedikti, with whom they together read texts of Slovak and Czech national revivalists, especially those of Josef Jungmann. He also got to know there Classical literature and German esthetics (also thanks to the excellent library of the lyceum), and started to show interest in Serbian culture. He graduated from the following branches of study: philosophy (including logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, "economia ruralis", Latin style, comparative philosophy and history of the Kingdom of Hungary), politics and law (including jus naturae, jus privatum civile et criminale, scienciae politicae), and theology (including dogmatic and moral theology, hermeneutics, Greek language, Hebrew language, physics, medicine, natural law, state law and international law). The studies at this school were very important for his life, as he pointed out later himself, and since this was a largely German school, he was able to get a (partial) scholarship for a university in Germany. Parallelly, he worked as a private tutor in the family of Dvid Goldberger in Kežmarok 1812 - 1814, which he also did one year after the end of his studies in Kežmarok. His mother died in late 1812 and his father married again 6 months later. His first bigger production was a volume of poems entitled The Muse of Tatra with a Slavonic Lyre published in 1814 (see Works). The poems were written in Czech with many elements from the Slovak and some from the Polish language.

Germany (1815 - 1817)

In 1815 he began to study at the University of Jena, where he turned from a poet into a scientist. Jena was a wish of his father, who was also the person who financed Šafrik's studies there. He attended lectures in history, philology, philosophy and natural sciences (lectures held by the professors Fries, Oken, Luden, Eichenstdt), studied books of Herder and Fichte, was observing current literature and studied classical literature. While there he also translated into Czech the Clouds of Aristophanes (issued in the Časopis Českho musea of the Bohemian museum in 1830) and the Maria Stuart of Schiller (issued in 1831). In 1816 he became a member of the Societas latina Jenensis. 17 of Šafrik's poems written at this time (1815-1816) appeared in the Prvotiny pěknch uměn by Hromdka in Vienna and made Šafrik well known in Slovakia and the Czech lands. In Jena, which Šafrik liked very much, he mainly learned to apply scientific methods and found a lot of new friends. One of them was the important Slovak writer Jn Chalpka, and another one, Samuel Ferjenčk, introduced him to Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Although he was an excellent student, Šafrik had to leave the University of Jena in May 1817 for unknown reasons (probably lack of money). In 1817, on his way back home to Slovakia, he visited Leipzig and Prague. In Prague, where he was searching for a tutor job, he spent one month and joined the literary circle, whose members were Dobrovsk, Josef Jungmann and Hanka, whom Šafrik thus got to know in person.

Slovakia (1817 - 1819)

Between summer 1817 and June 1819, he worked as tutor in Bratislava in the well-known family of Gašpar Kubnyi. In Bratislava he also became a good friend of the Czech František Palack, with whom they had already exchanged letters before and who was also a tutor in Bratislava at that time. The town of Bratislava was a social and intellectual center of the Kingdom of Hungary at that time. In the spring of 1819, Šafrik became a friend of the important Slovak writer and politician Jn Kollr. On April 1819, his friend Jn Blahoslav Benedikti helped him to get a doctor's degree, which he needed in order to become head master of a new gymnasium in Novi Sad. It was Benedicti again, together with some well-known Serbs, who "manipulated" the selection procedure, so that Šafrik, as the youngest applicant, was chosen as the new school head. Before he left for Serbia, Šafrik spent some time in Kobeliarovo and with his grand father in Hankov. This was the last time Šafrik has seen his native country.

Serbia (1819 - 1833)

From 1819 to 1833 he was head master and professor at the Serbian Orthodox gymnasium at Novi Sad in the south of the Kingdom of Hungary. All other professors of the gymnasium were Serbs. He himself taught mathematics, physics, logic, rhetoric, poetry, stylistics and Classic literature in Latin, German, and when Magyarisation (Hungarisation) by the authorities intensified also in Hungarian. From 1821 onwards, he also worked as a tutor of the son of the nephew of the Serbian patriarch. In 1824 he had to renounce to the post of head master because the Austrian government prohibited the Serbian Orthodox Church from employing Protestants from the Kingdom of Hungary. This caused Šafrik, who had to finance his newly arisen family (see Family), to lose a substantial source of income. He therefore tried to find a professor job in Slovakia, but for various reasons he did not succeed. In Novi Sad he studied Serbian literature and antiquities, acquired many rare - especially Old Church Slavonic - books and manuscripts, which he used in Prague later. He also published a collection of Slovak folk songs and sayings in collaboration with Jn Kollr and others (see Works). In 1826 his Geschichte der slawischen Sprache und Literatur nach allen Mundarten was published. This book was the first attempt to give anything like a systematic account of the Slavonic languages as a whole.

Bohemia (1833 - 1861)

In 1832 he finally decided to leave Novi Sad and tried to find a teacher or librarian job in Russia, but again without success. In 1833, with the help of Jn Kollr and on invitation of influential friends in Prague who promised to finance him, he went to Prague, where he spent the remainder of his life. During his entire stay in Prague, especially in the 1840s, his very existence depended on the 380 guldens he received annually from his Czech friends under the condition that - as František Palack explicitly said - "from now on, anything you write, you will write it in the Czech language only". Šafrik was an editor of the journal "Světozor" (1834-1835). In 1837 poverty compelled him to accept the uncongenial office of censor of Czech publications, which he abandoned in 1847. Between 1838 and 1842 he was first editor, later conductor, of the journal Časopis Českho musea, since 1841 he was a custodian of the Prague University Library. In Prague, he published most of his works, especially his greatest work Slovansk starožitnosti (see Works) in 1837. He also edited the first volume of the Vybor (selections from old Czech writers), which appeared under the auspices of the Prague literary society in 1845. To this he prefixed a grammar of the Old Czech language - the Počtkov staročesk mluvnice. In the papers collection "Hlasow o potřebě jednoty spisownho jazyka pro Čechy, Morawany a Slowky" on the necessity of a united literal language for the Czechs, Moravians and Slovaks published by Jn Kollr in 1846, Šafrik moderately criticized Ľudovt Štr's introduction of a new Slovak standard language (1843) that replaced the previously used standard which was similar to the Czech language. Although Šafrik - as opposed to most of his Czech colleagues - always considered the Slovaks a separate nation from the Czechs (e. g. explicitly in his "Geschichte der slawischen Sprache . . . " and in "Slovansk nrodopis"), he advocated the use of only a "Slovak style of the Czech language" as the literary language in Slovakia. During the Revolution of 1848 he was mainly collecting material for books on the oldest Slavic history (see Works). In 1848 he was made head of the University Library of Prague and an extraordinary professor of Slavonic philology in the University of Prague, but resigned to the latter in 1849 and remained head of the university library only. The reason for this resignation was that during the Revolution of 1848-49 he participated at the Slavic Congress in Prague (June 1848) and thus became suspicious for Austrian authorities. During the absolutistic period following the defeat of the revolution, he lived a secluded life and studied especially older Czech literature and Old Church Slavonic texts and culture. In 1856/57, as a result of persecution anxieties, overwork, and ill health, he became physically and mentally insane and burned most of his correspondence with important personalities (e. g. with Jn Kollr). In May 1860, his depressions made him to jump into the Vltava river, but he was saved. This event produced considerable sensation among the general public. In early October 1860 he asked for retirement from his post as University Library head. The Austrian emperor himself enabled him this in a letter written by his majesty himself and granted him a pension, which corresponded to Šafarik's previous full pay. Šafrik died in 1861 in Prague.

Works

His most important works are: a) Poetry: b) Scientific Works: c) Collected works:
  • Sebran spisy P. J. Šafařka 1-3 (Prague 1862-1863 + 1865)
d) Collected papers:
  • Spisy Pavla Josefa Šafařka 1 (Bratislava, 1938)
Safarik, Pavel Jozef Safarik, Pavel Jozef Safarik, Pavel Jozef Safarik, Pavel Jozef

 

<< PreviousWord BrowserNext >>
mississippi embayment
bunkai
sunday times university of the year
alexia (disorder)
american association of university professors
tyrrellspass
progreso
bovesia
twining models
mark bell (lfo)
kilbeggan
air bazooka
what do you care what other people think?
sid wyman
rochfordbridge
gary driscoll
humorous interpretation
bousouzoku
figure skating at the 1932 winter olympics
east kent railway (heritage)
original oratory
figure skating at the 1936 winter olympics
thor's hammer (stargate)
das experiment
car club
solid state records
dave perry
timocharis (crater)
sunspot, new mexico
comparison of media players
peter king, 1st baron king
tachistoscope
mdk (game)
cena trimalchionis
giovanni maria nanino
playtest
perekop
diospyros
british rail class 411
hank beenders
delvin
gas lift
richard tomlinson
32 county sovereignty movement
Copyright 2005-2009 OnPedia.com. All Rights Reserved