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- Title
PRAHA -- AUŠRA.
- Authors
Grigaravičius, Algirdas
- Abstract
The first newspaper of the Lithuanian national revival movement, Aušra (Dawn), came into existence after an unsuccessful attempt to establish a Lithuanian Scholarly Society. It was important to Lithuanian activists, particularly Jonas Basanavičius, that this newspaper be legally available in Lithuania. The coronation of Alexander III in Moscow led to attempts to have Aušra legalized, something encouraged by both pro-Czarist illusions and a belief in Russian predilections for a peasant nation. Seeking to exploit Russia's quest at eliminating Polish influence, Lithuanian activists emphasized the danger of Lithuanians becoming Polonized. This opened the door to an undesirable confrontation and marked a change in the relations between the Lithuanian and the Polish national movements, with tensions raised by the Polish insistence, in their press, of regarding the Lithuanians as their "younger brothers." Jonas Šliūpas, in his answer to the editor of Poznan's Polish newspaper, aimed at reaching a compromise, whereas Basanavičius took the position of feeling hurt and wronged. If the latter objected strenuously to Poles calling Lithuanians just a people but not a nation, Šliūpas in his article "Genuinely searching for nationhood" (Aušra, 1884, Nr. 1-3, p. 1-10) argued that the newspaper's primary goal was to "make" Lithuanians into a nation. Before a characteristically Lithuanian way had been decisively agreed upon, the divergence in the camp of the Aušrininkai could only be between the Polonophile and Russophile tendencies. The young Lithuanian activists, especially Šliūpas (the memorandum that he submitted to Warsaw's governor-general Iosif Gurka brough an end to efforts at legalizing Aušra) may be considered as pioneers of a not-very-successful but naively pragmatic Lithuanian politics of national re-awakening. The time Basanavičius spent in Prague (1882 to 1884) and his marriage to a Eleonora Mohl, a German living in Bohemia, strengthened his personal resolve to adapt patterns of Czech national self-assertion to the Lithuanian national movement and influenced the latter's further devolpment. The observations that Basanavičius and other Lithuanian movement activists made of the Czech national movement during the last quarter of the 19th century reveal their interest in situations and processes deemed to be similar to those evolving in Lithuania. As these Lithuanian activists set themselves off from the Poles, they were attracted by the successes of Czech national activities which they thought might be applied in Lithuania; moreover, budding sympathies were re-inforced by historical connections. In the more numerous community of Lithuanian students in Moscow it was contacts with Latvian students that prompted reflections on paths to a Lithuanian national revival, while interaction with other Slavic students at Moscow University provided more space for thoughts about a possible Lithuanian future. The achievements of the Czech national movement provided the most often discussed and emulated examples the presentation and analysis of which later moved to the pages of the clandestine Lithuanian press, Varpas (The Bell) in particular.
- Subjects
LITHUANIA; SOCIAL movements; NEWSPAPERS; ACTIVISTS; PEASANTS
- Publication
Darbai ir Dienos, 2011, Issue 56, p153
- ISSN
1392-0588
- Publication type
Article