„The Boleslavinians“. The story of the self-censored poetry collection Feelings of gratitude of young sons of Slovakia“ (1837)

Abstract

The article focuses on the collection Feelings of Gratitude in which the names of future members of the secret society Vzájemnost dominate and proposes for this group of authors an alternative designation „Boleslavinians“. It refers to the initiator and the leader in the background at the time of collection preparation Alexander Boleslavín Vrchovský. The article aims to supplement and accentuate the non-monolithic model of Slovak Romanticism by emphasizing one aspect: the need to more distinctly separate and foreground, within scholarly and educational narratives, the earlier formative phase of the “Boleslavinians” – characterized by republican, democratic, Mazzinian, and Polon-phile orientations – and to link it more explicitly to the broader European democratizing “wave of national romanticism” of 1830.