Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2009
In 1826 Jan Herkel's Elementa universalis linguae slavonicae etc. was published in Buda. In it, the author, who was a Slovak by birth, demanded the establishment of a common Slav language as a prelude to the creation of some kind of Slav unit—a “unio in literatura inter omnes Slavos sive verus panslawismus.” To my knowledge, this was the first time that the expression “Pan-Slavism” was ever used. As the title of the book shows, the word had no political, but only a literary, meaning.