Ľudovít Štúr: The Man Who Wrote a Nation Into Being
On 2 February 1843, a group of young men in the Kingdom of Hungary sat down and decided what language several million people would henceforth write in. The decision — to build a Slovak literary standard on the central Slovak dialects — was taken by Ľudovít Štúr and his circle, and it worked. The standard they codified is, in its essentials, the Slovak written today. Few people in modern European history have so deliberately manufactured a nation's most basic instrument and lived to see it adopted.
Uhrovec, 1815
Štúr was born on 28 October 1815 in Zayugróc — today Uhrovec, Slovakia — the second child of Samuel and Anna Štúr. His father was a teacher and gave him his first education, Latin included. The house has a curious double distinction: Alexander Dubček, the leader of the Prague Spring, would be born in it too.
His schooling was the polyglot patchwork of the Habsburg lands. From 1827 to 1829 he attended lower grammar school in Győr, studying history, German, Greek and Hungarian. From 1829 to 1836 he was at the Lutheran Lyceum in Pressburg — Bratislava — where he studied under Professor Juraj Palkovič and joined the Czech-Slav Society, the student body that became the incubator of his life's project. From 1838 to 1840 he studied linguistics, history and philosophy at the University of Halle in Germany, absorbing Hegel and Herder: the first gave him a theory of history moving through nations, the second a theory of nations constituted by their languages. Štúr took both literally.
The Oath at Devín
The movement he built had the character of a sworn brotherhood. On 24 April 1836 at Devín Castle, Štúr and his collaborators — among them Jozef Miloslav Hurban, recruited in May 1835, and later Michal Miloslav Hodža — swore to be true to the national cause and adopted Slavic names. On 16 August 1841 Štúr and colleagues climbed Kriváň, the peak that became the movement's symbol; the ascent is commemorated annually to this day. These were young men consciously inventing rituals for a nation that did not yet formally exist.
Codifying a Language
The decisive act came in 1843. On 2 February, Štúr and his associates resolved to create a new Slovak language standard based on the central Slovak dialects, and from 11 to 16 July that year the leaders gathered at Hurban's house in Hlboké to formalise the codification. The new standard used phonetic spelling and rested on central Slovak speech, setting it apart from Anton Bernolák's earlier attempt — and, crucially, from Czech, which Slovak Lutherans had long used as their written language.
Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.
Take the IQ test →The choice was political as much as linguistic. To write in central Slovak was to assert that Slovaks were neither Czechs nor Hungarians but a nation with its own literary instrument. Štúr argued the case in print: *Nárečja slovenskuo alebo potreba píšaňja v tomto nárečí* in 1844 and *Nauka reči Slovenskej* — "The Theory of the Slovak Language" — in 1846.
The Newspaper
A language needs somewhere to be printed. On 1 August 1845 the first issue of *Slovenskje národňje novini* appeared, with its literary supplement *Orol Tatranský*, "The Tatra Eagle", following a week later. The paper ran until 9 June 1848, and through it Štúr gradually shaped a Slovak political programme built on Slovak nationhood and cultural autonomy. In the same period he published *Das neunzehnte Jahrhundert und der Magyarismus* (1845), taking the argument to a German-reading audience.
Deputy for Zvolen
On 30 October 1847 Štúr became an ablegate for Zvolen in the Hungarian Diet, and between 17 November 1847 and 13 March 1848 he delivered five speeches. Their content is worth noting: he demanded the abolition of serfdom, civil rights, and the use of Slovak in elementary schools. The national programme was inseparable, in his hands, from a social one.
Revolution, Warrant, Uprising
Then 1848 broke over Europe. In April Štúr prepared the Slavic Congress of Prague, arriving in the city on 20 April and winning support for Slovak language demands. In May he co-authored *Žiadosti slovenského národa*, the "Requirements of the Slovak Nation" — a petition demanding autonomy, Slovak as an official language, a Slovak Diet, universal suffrage and the restoration of land to the peasantry. The Hungarian government's answer came on 12 May 1848: a warrant for the arrest of Štúr, Hurban and Hodža.
On 15–16 September 1848 the Slovak National Council was formed in Vienna, comprising Štúr, Hurban, Hodža and Czech military advisers, and on 19 September at Myjava the council declared independence from Hungary. From November 1848 to March 1849 Štúr led volunteer campaigns across northern Hungary. On 20 March 1849 he led a delegation to Olomouc to present Slovak demands to the Austrian king. The volunteer corps was demobilised on 21 November 1849, and the nation Štúr had declared did not materialise. The Habsburgs, having used Slovak arms against the Hungarian revolution, felt no obligation to reward them.
Modra, Under Police Supervision
What followed was a slow, unglamorous defeat. Štúr retreated to his parents' house in Uhrovec. In October 1850 he applied unsuccessfully for a licence to publish a newspaper. His brother Karol died on 13 January 1851, and Štúr moved into Karol's house in Modra to care for seven orphaned children; there he lived under police supervision. His father died on 27 July 1851. In October 1851 he took part in meetings on Slovak language reform, and in 1852–53 he completed his philosophical works in Modra.
The late writing shows a man reaching past his own defeat. *O národních písních a pověstech plemen slovanských* — on the songs and myths of the Slavic peoples — appeared in 1853, as did *Spevy a piesne*, his only compilation of poetry. *Das Slawenthum und die Welt der Zukunft*, "Slavdom and the World of the Future", was published only later and in Russian, in 1867 and again in 1909. *Starý a nový věk Slovákov* did not reach print until 1935.
A Hunting Accident
On 22 December 1855, near Modra, Štúr accidentally shot and wounded himself while hunting. He died on 12 January 1856, aged forty, and was given a national funeral in the town.
The verdict came later, and generously. His face appeared on the Czechoslovak 50-koruna banknote in 1987 and on the Slovak 500-koruna note from 1993 to 2009. The town of Parkan was renamed Štúrovo in 1948. Asteroid 3393 Štúr carries his name, as does the Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics. But the real monument is unremarkable and everywhere: every sentence written in standard Slovak.
