In this published PhD. dissertation (Wisconsin, 2003), Alexander Maxwell sets out to reinterpret the national awakening of the Slovaks in the nineteenth century. The essence of the book is that “Magyar stubbornness and chauvinism may have ultimately proved self-defeating” (71) because most Slovak intellectuals in the nineteenth century were patriotic “Hungarians” in the political sense, who simply wanted autonomy within the Kingdom of Hungary and the right to speak in their own “dialect.”

Maxwell explores how Slovak intellectuals split into three groups: the pro-Hungarian, the pro-Czechoslovak, and the pro-Slavic (later Slovak). In the early nineteenth century, Magyar intellectuals rejected the concept of a “Hungarian” political nation, to which many Slovak intellectuals were sympathetic, and began to force “Magyarization” on the Slovaks. Maxwell claims that this policy affected only Slovak intellectuals, as “Slovak peasants, laborers, and craftsmen rarely felt persecuted by Magyarization” (31). One has to wonder if the fifteen Slovaks shot dead and the dozens wounded by Hungarian gendarmes in the village of Černová in 1907, or the hundreds of thousands of Slovaks who had to study (and pray) in Magyar in the village schools, or the thousands of Slovak laborers who could find work on public works projects only if they spoke Magyar did not feel “persecuted”? Because Maxwell is not a social historian, he does not answer these questions. He concludes that right up to World War I, many Slovak intellectuals regarded themselves as “Slavophone Hungarians” who simply wanted autonomy within Hungary. Maxwell accuses most historians of having ignored this “Hungaro-Slavism” of the Slovaks, but he seems unaware of a similar argument made by Gabor Vermes in the 1975 issue of the scholarly annual Slovakia (Vol. XXV, no. 48, 105–17).

Maxwell also looks at the rise of “Czechoslovakism” among Slovaks in the early nineteenth century. He agrees with previous scholars that it grew out of Slovak Pan-Slavism, whose proponents (principally Ján Kollár and Pavol Jozef Šafárik) stressed the cultural and linguistic unity of the Slavs. However, this philosophy was propounded principally by Lutheran intellectuals who, since the Reformation, had used a Slovakized version of ancient Czech in their liturgical texts and personal correspondence. These intellectuals formed a minority in Slovakia and had little impact on the Catholic majority. At the same time, German and Magyar intellectuals in the Habsburg monarchy perceived Pan-Slavism as a political threat to the monarchy and turned it into a “bogeyman” (96). In the twentieth century, after Austria-Hungary collapsed and Czechoslovakia came into existence, the Czech professor Albert Pražák, at the newly established (1919) Comenius University in Bratislava, reached back to these early-nineteenth-century arguments, to once again promote and justify “Czechoslovakism,” but to no avail.

In the third section of his book, Maxwell looks at what he terms “Slovak Tribalism.” Ľudovít Štúr, whom most historians and linguists regard as the codifier of the Slovak language, was to Maxwell not a nationalist but rather a “tribalist” who codified not a “language” but a “dialect.” Indeed, it was the linguist Martin Hattala who, according to Maxwell, then re-codified the central Slovak dialect by dropping Štúr's phonetic spelling and thereby created “Hattalovčina,” which Slovak “tribalist” intellectuals then adopted. Maxwell concludes that Ľudovít Štúr, and his followers, “may have intended to promote Hungaro-Slavism, but he unintentionally laid the foundations of Slovak particularist nationalism” (139).

In the fourth and final section of the book, Maxwell argues that Slovak nationalism triumphed only in the newly created Czechoslovak Republic. It did so because, for the first time in their history, the Slovaks had control over their own educational institutions, in which they could educate their people in their own language. The irony was that these schools were staffed largely by Czech teachers who tried to resurrect the nineteenth-century concept of a “Czechoslovak” language and nation. By then it was too late, however, as both Slovak intellectuals and the new graduates of the Czechoslovak gymnasia and universities rejected this path and chose to elevate their “tribe” into a nation and their “dialect” into a language.

Although Maxwell makes an intriguing argument, he seems to be unaware of certain key documents that appeared before World War I. For instance, during the Revolution of 1848, Štúr and his colleagues issued “Žiadosti slovenského národa” (Demands of the Slovak Nation), which was addressed to the emperor and to the Hungarian Parliament. Furthermore, in 1861, a mass meeting of 5,000 Slovaks in the central Slovak town of Turčiansky Sväty Martin resulted in a “Memorandum of the Slovak Nation” addressed to the Hungarian Parliament. Curiously, Maxwell ignored the 1848 demands and renamed the 1861 document the “Slovak Memorandum,” dropping the word “nation” from it (24), probably because it did not fit into his theory of “tribalism.” Furthermore, in 1906, a group of leading Slovak intellectuals wrote to their counterparts in the United States, where over 500,000 Slovaks lived, that they should coordinate their efforts on behalf of the Slovak “nation” (Imrich Mažár, Dejiny Binghamtonských Slovákov…[Binghamton, New York, 1919, 22]).

Moreover, at a meeting of the Society of Slovak Roman Catholic Priests, held in Philadelphia in 1903, the delegates resolved henceforth to preach in central Slovak, even though the majority of their parishioners hailed from Eastern Slovakia (Ms. Society of Slovak Roman Catholic Priests, Minutes, 1 September 1903, Microfilm, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota). If Slovak intellectuals and their followers were merely “tribalists,” they would not have used the word “nation” when describing themselves, nor would they have accepted central Slovak as their standard literary medium. They would have written in their various dialects, especially in the eastern Slovak dialect, as the Hungarian government wanted them to do in such government-sponsored publications as “Naša zástava,” published in Prešov before World War I.

Finally, Maxwell makes many spelling and factual errors, which suggests that his Slovak is weak and his manuscript was not subjected to expert evaluation. For example, in his introduction, he misspells Komárno/Komárom as “Komarno/Komáron” (ix); on page 4, he misidentifies the Ukrainian-American Lev Dobriansky as a Slovak-American; on page 25, he misspells “St. Sava” as “St. Slava”; on page 30, he locates the village of Černová in a nonexistent Ružemberok County (it should have been Liptov County); on page 58, he mistranslates “Dobruo slovo Slovákom” (A Good Word to the Slovaks) as “A Good Word as a Slovak”; and on page 93, he misnames Matej Bel as “Martin Bel.” The book also lacks a bibliography.

Thus, while Alexander Maxwell presents an intriguing, but not completely new, reinterpretation of the Slovak national movement in the nineteenth century, it is marred by errors and omissions.