author
Ján Kollár
1793–1852
A leading voice in the Slovak and broader Slavic cultural revival, he wrote poetry that tied personal feeling to big ideas about language, identity, and history. His best-known work, Slávy dcera (The Daughter of Sláva), helped make him one of the defining literary figures 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, Ján Kollár became a Slovak poet, Lutheran pastor, scholar, and an important advocate of Slavic cultural unity. He studied in Bratislava and later in Jena, and his years in Germany helped shape both his literary style and his ideas about the shared heritage of Slavic peoples.
Kollár is best remembered for his poetry, especially Slávy dcera, a work that blends love poetry with reflections on history, nationhood, and the future of the Slavs. Alongside his writing, he also collected folk songs and took a serious interest in language, history, and archaeology, showing how closely literature and scholarship were linked in his work.
He served for many years as a pastor in Pest and later worked in Vienna, where he continued his scholarly and public activity until his death in 1852. Today he is remembered as a central figure of Slovak Romanticism and as a writer whose work reached far beyond literature into the cultural and political debates of his time.