author
Ján Kollár
1793–1852
A leading voice of the early Slovak national revival, he wrote passionate, wide-ranging poetry that tied personal feeling to the idea of Slavic cultural kinship. His work helped make him one of the best-known Central European poets of the 19th century.
1 Audiobook
Songs of the Slav : Translations from the Czecho-Slovak
by Petr Bezruč, Svatopluk Čech, Vítězslav Hálek, Ján Kollár, J. S. Machar
About the author
Born in Mošovce in 1793 and later active as a Lutheran pastor, he became an important figure in the literary and national awakening of the Slavs in the early 19th century. Reliable reference sources describe him as a Slovak poet and writer, and also note his wider scholarly and public interests, including language, history, and cultural thought.
He is especially remembered for Slávy dcera (The Daughter of Sláva), the work most closely associated with his name. Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that he played an important part in the national and literary revival of the Slavs, while other standard biographies describe him as a major advocate of Pan-Slavism.
He died in Vienna in 1852. Today, he is remembered not only for his poetry, but also for the way his writing joined lyric feeling with big questions of identity, language, and shared culture across Central and Eastern Europe.