Poglądy Františka Palackiego na sprawę polską przez pryzmat austroslawizmu .......... 91

FRANTIŠEK PALACKÝ’S VIEWS ON THE POLISH ISSUE THROUGH THE PRISM OF AUSTRO-SLAVISM

This article attempts to delineate the attitude of František Palacký (1798–1876)—Czech historian, “father of the nation,” and the foremost ideologue of Austro -Slavism—towards the Polish question in the nineteenth century. The first part is a biographical sketch portraying Palacký as a scholar who gave the reviving Czech nation its grand historical narrative and then, as a leader of the Old Czech party, forged it into a political programme. The second part aims to reconstruct the anatomy of Austro -Slavism: its genesis in romantic Slavic reciprocity and in the sober anti-Russian realism of Karel Havlíček Borovský, its four load-bearing premises, and its evolution from the hope of 1848 towards disillusionment after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. The third and central part argues that Palacký’s stance towards the Poles had two aspects: a warm sympathy for the Poles as a “Slavic people,” and cool wariness towards an independent Polish state, regarded as strategically too costly in the face of the Russian threat. Although disillusionment with dualism logically opened a horizon of thinking about a future beyond the monarchy, Palacký himself never crossed that threshold, leaving the task of reconciling Slavic brotherhood with the affirmation of Polish sovereignty to his heirs—the Young Czechs and Masaryk.