Václav Hanka
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Václav Hanka (June 10, 1791 - January 12, 1861) was a Czech philologist born at Hořiněves near Hradec Králové.
He was sent in 1807 to school at Hradec Králové, to escape the conscription, then to the University of Prague, where he founded a society for the cultivation of the Czech language. At Vienna, where he afterwards studied law, he established a Czech periodical; and in 1813 he made the acquaintance of Josef Dobrovský, an eminent philologist.
On September 16, 1817 Hanka claimed that he had discovered some manuscripts of 13th- and 14th-century Bohemian poems in the church tower of the town of Dvůr Králové nad Labem. These were published in 1818, under the title Královédvorský Rukopis, with a German translation by Swoboda. Great doubt, however, was felt as to their genuineness, and Dobrovský, by pronouncing The Judgment of Libuše, another manuscript "found" by Hanka, to be an obvious fraud, confirmed the suspicion.
Some years afterwards Dobrovský saw fit to modify his decision, but modern Czech scholars regard the manuscript as a forgery. A translation into English, The Manuscript of the Queen's Court, was made by Wratislaw in 1852. The originals were presented by the discoverer to the Bohemian museum at Prague, of which he was appointed librarian in 1818.
In 1848 Hanka, who was an ardent pan-Slavist, took part in the Slavonic congress and other peaceful national demonstrations, being the founder of the political society Slovanská Lípa. He was elected to the imperial diet at Vienna, but declined to take his seat. In the winter of 1848 he became lecturer and in 1849 professor of Slavonic languages in the university of Prague, where he died on the 12th of January 1861.
His chief works and editions are the following:
- Hankowy Pjsne (Prague, 1815), a volume of poems
- Starobyla Skiadani (1817-1826), in 5 vols, a collection of old Bohemian poems, chiefly from unpublished manuscripts
- A Short History of the Slavonic Peoples (1818)
- A Bohemian Grammar (1822)
- A Polish Grammar (1839) (these two grammars were composed on a plan suggested by Dobrovský)
- Igor (1821), an ancient Russian epic, with a translation into Bohemian
- a part of the Gospels from the Reims manuscript in the Glagolitic alphabet (1846)
- the old Bohemian Chronicles of Delimit (1848)
- History of Charles IV, by Procop Luph (1848)
- Evangelium Ostromis (1853)
Hanka also composed the song Moravo, Moravo!, sometimes used as a Moravian national anthem.
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
