SOURCE: Pogačnik, Jože. “Jernej Kopitar and the Issue of Austro-Slavism.” Papers in Slavic Philology 2 (1982): 25-40.

In the following essay, Pogačnik studies Kopitar's activity in recognizing and promulgating Slavic cultural identity within the Austrian Empire.

The host of problems raised by Jernej Kopitar's cultural and political activities, including his scholarly work, will not be solved in any acceptable way for a long time to come.¹ His intellectual status established in modern research includes both elements of acceptance and denial, which is the reason why we still lack a historically objective value judgment concerning those meaningful aspects of his work which were relevant in his time and which are still relevant today. We are concerned here no doubt with a personality controversial and complex, whose evaluation cannot be simple, and the reason that it cannot be simple also lies in the fact that in Kopitar's numerous activities...