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The paper, employing the narratological method, examines and systematises self-referential speeches in Cestopis obsahující cestu do Horní Italie ([Travelogue containing a journey to Upper Italy] 1843) by Ján Kollár (1793 – 1852). Drawing on materials included in the kollar.elte.hu database, it maps typical forms of narrator’s self-referential speeches: the name of the author and his family members in the narration; the use and interpretation of the author’s own works in the narrative; the various forms of the author’s taste manifested in the text; the preferred literary, artistic, and architectural works he encounters or quotes; the presentation of the author’s ecclesiastical, philological, pedagogical, and other activities in the travelogue; and the narrative forms of self-referentiality that provide the narrator with the opportunity to express himself on an ideological level. The article also examines the various narrative roles which can be attributed to self-referential speeches and which point to the existence of an ideological system generally characteristic of the Enlightenment and Romantic periods in Central Europe. In this way, it reveals the characteristic features of Slavic national emblematism in the text and a certain broad system of ideas which can understood as religio triplex, which by merging revealed, natural, and national devoutness provides the narrator with a unified narrative framework.

This paper deals with a specific genre in Kollár’s work, namely the travelogue entitled Journey to Northern Italy (1843), which is an integral piece of central European travelogues of the 19th century. The study focuses on the analysis of the first stretch of the writer´s journey to the territory of the Hungarian Kingdom, specifically on the description of the area Zalavár/Mosaburg which belongs to the well-known early medieval settlements of the Cyril and Methodius era. On the one hand, the author’s focus is on the method of the space organization of the mentioned travelogue rooted in the Baroque era (first of all the phenomena as enfilade or central organization of the space). On the other hand, the author pays attention to Kollár’s efforts to create a modern Slavic cultural space from the old one as well as to the writer´s endeavour to set the Slavic cultural space free from the Hungarian captivity

The study deals with one of the central motifs of Ján Kollár’s work Slávy dcera, namely with the history of the figure of Complaining Slavia. Kollár derives the motif from Velius’s epistle entitled Querela Austriae (1527). The motif entered Hungary’s Latin-language literature becoming an important topos in Late Humanist and Baroque writing. With the Querela Hungariae topos other content elements became associated: description of the country’s riches (‘fertilitas Hungariae’) and comparison of the happiness of earlier times with the misery of conditions in Kollár’s own day. The literariness of Kollár was rooted deeply in Hungary’s Latin-language and Slavic-language cultures. His Latin-language didactic poem Deploratio praesentis status Hungariae proves that the author was familiar with the Querela Hungariae topos from his secondary-school years onwards. At the same time, in the Prologue to his Slávy dcera and in many of his sonnets, Kollár reinterpreted the topos according to the ideological requirements of the national movements of his time, changing Complaining Hungary into Complaining Slavia. In his Prologue to Slávy dcera, Kollár retained the metrical form of Latin didactic poetry (elegiac couplets), but at the same time refashioned it in accordance with the aesthetic demands of Classicism and Romanticism. There are in early 19th-century literature some areas that attempt to depict a nation emblematically. Of these, emblematic geography, ethnography, zoography, and phytography are investigated in this study. Through his works, in which famous mountain ranges (the Tatras, the Giant Mountains, the Urals), waters (the Danube, the Elbe, the Baltic Sea), cities (Prague, Moscow), and so forth are invested with surplus meaning, Kollár contributed to the depiction of the Slav (Czech and Slovak) nations. Together with their connotations, these places became parts of modern national mythology. This occurred during a several-decades-long canonisation process, at the end of which a given geographical place-name could lay claim to the status of ‘Slavic holy place’. It was in his 1821 volume entitled Básně (‘Verses’) that Kollár first pointed out geographical locations of importance from the national point of view, although these were at that time still at a rather low level of sacrality. Works published by Kollár in the mid-1820s – Čítanka (‘A Reader’) and the 1824 edition of Slávy dcera – were like maps from the Age of Discovery on which the coastlines of newly discovered continents already featured but where the land within still featured as white space. In the 1832 edition of Slávy dcera and in the Explanations (Vysvětlivky) he wrote for this work, Kollár ‘populated’ the three continents where Slavs lived. With the help of emblematic national topography, he created an imaginary Slavic country which ignored the status quo then prevailing in Europe. Kollár reached his highest degree of sacralisation of the nation with two songs published in his 1832 edition of Slávy dcera. In these, which presented a Slavic Heaven and a Slavic Purgatory, he enriched the emblematic national geography with the dimension of the life to come. In his Cestopis (‘Travelogue’), he launched a linguistic, historical and cultural crusade for the re-conquest of Northern Italy as a Slavic Holy Land.

The motifs of national exodus in Ján Kollár´s works Róbert K i s s S z e m á n, University Lóranda Eötvösa, Budapest, Hungary The study tries to grasp a phenomenon of the early 19th century when the Slovak nation and national literature separated from the Hungarian cultural tradition. However, many of its traditional features continued to exist in modern national literatures. The author focuses on the phenomenon of exodus as one of the defining organizational factors of Kollár´s life. He tries to reconstruct Kollár´s relationship with the world in his childhood and youth from individual chapters of his memoirs Paměti z mladších let života (Momoirs of my life´s younger years), she mentions his priesthood in Pešť, whose most important moment was Slovak church´s independence struggle against the German majority. The parts dealing with Kollár´s Čítanka demonstrate the impact of exodus on his personal life and priest´s and teacher´s careers. The concept of Panslavism in his works is interpreted as an imaginary home, which refers to Old Testament´s paradigm system of Promised land. There is some symbolism in Kollár´s travels around Italy, which played an important role in Slovak national exodus. This phenomenon is naturally associated with many sonnets in Slávy dcéra (Fame´s daughter), which by activating the Old Testament´s symbolism in a creative way also played a major role in establishing new Czech and Slovak ethnographies.