Matija Murko and structural 
aesthetics
Miloš Zelenka
university of south Bohemia, Faculty of education, department of slavic language and literatures, 
jeronýmova 10, 371 15 České Budějovice, Czech republic
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4049-3263
zelenka@pf.jcu.cz
At	first	glance,	the	connection	between	the	positivist-oriented	Murko	and	
structural	aesthetics	may	seem	inappropriate	and	paradoxical.	However,	his	
unpublished	correspondence	with	his	student,	the	renowned	Czech	Slavist	
and	comparatist	Frank	Wollman	(1888–1969),	shows	the	convergence	of	
thematic	areas	and	disciplinary	intersections	that	foreshadowed	structural	
aesthetics.	As	the	editor	of	slavia, Murko	made	it	possible	for	the	key	figures	of	
Czech	structuralism	to	publish	in	this	journal	even	before	the	founding	of	slovo 
a slovesnost	(e.g.,	R.	Jakobson,	P.	Bogatyrev,	etc.).	At	the	same	time,	as	the	main	
organizer	of	the	First	International	Congress	of	Slavic	Philologists	in	Prague	
in	1929,	he	agreed	to	set	up	a	thematic	section	in	which	the	theses	of	the	Prague	
Linguistic	Circle	were	announced.	In	the	first	issue	of	slavia	in	1922–1923,	
a	survey	study	by	Jakobson	and	Bogatyrev	entitled	“Slavjanskaja	filologija	v	
Rossii	za	gody	1914–1921”	was	published.	Wollman,	who	after	Murko	was	to	
become	a	candidate	for	the	Chair	of	South	Slavic	Languages	and	Literatures	at	
the	Faculty	of	Arts	in	Prague,	oriented	himself	towards	the	study	of	versology	and	
stylistics,	as	reflected	in	his	article	“Njegošův	deseterec”	on	the	evolution	of	verse	
forms	in	the	Serbo-Croatian	verse	(slavia	1930–31).	Murko	also	encouraged	
his	student	to	write	slovesnost slovanů	(1928),	a	pioneering	work	that	focused	
on	the	structural	history	of	Slavic	literatures	as	a	history	of	timeless	forms	and	
structures.
Keywords: Slovenian literary historians / Murko, Matija / structural aesthetics / Prague 
Linguistic Circle / versology / South Slavic folk poetry / Wollmann, Frank
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primerjalna književnost (ljubljana) 48.2 (2025)
At first glance, the connection between the positivist-oriented Matija 
Murko and structural aesthetics may seem inappropriate and paradoxi-
cal. Although Murko is not currently one of the frequent sources of 
inspiration, and during his more than seventy years of development 
he advanced revivalist Slavic philology, his contacts with the Prague 
Linguistic Circle founded in 1926 and the areas of contact with his 
pkn, letnik 48, št. 2, ljubljana, avgust 2025
144
structural-functionalist point of view should not be overlooked.1 A 
hitherto unpublished correspondence with his student, the leading 
Czech Slavist and comparatist Frank Wollman (1888–1969), who 
was a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, shows thematic breadth 
and disciplinary intersections that anticipated structural aesthetics. 
Wollman praised Murko as being permeated by “versatile curiosity and 
fluidity, a kind of vibrant practicality” (Wollman, “Murkova vědecká 
osobnost” 1). This is why he bridged the gaps between generations, 
antagonistic personalities and their intellectual orientations. The label 
of positivist obsession with facts can be relativized by pointing to the 
creative ability of the insightful philologist, who chose different work-
ing methods according to the nature of the subject and thus always 
achieved the desired goal, despite the apparent thematic distraction.
Murko’s erudition at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies represents an ideal combination of Western and Eastern sources 
of thought: the impulses of the Russian positivist school (A. N. Pypin, 
W. Spasowicz, etc.), historical poetics (A. N. Veselovskij) and philo-
logical interpretation of the text (N. Tichonravov) with Taine’s soci-
ologism developed by H. M. Posnett and some other French ideo-
graphically-oriented comparative literature (L.-P. Betz, F. Brunetière, 
J. Texte, etc.). To this orientation were added the impulses of German 
literary history, especially the biographical method of A. Scherer and 
his students (R. Heinzl, E. Schmidt, etc.). The Czech Slavist Jiří Horák 
generally appreciates the analytical approach resulting from the phil-
ological basis and tradition built by F. Miklošič and later developed 
literary-historically by V. Jagić and his contemporaries (A. Brückner). 
Along with this he lists Murko’s strengths exhaustively: methodologi-
cal grounding in the material, the absence of unproven hypotheses, 
and the precise development of the topic (Horák vii). Although in his 
literary-historical studies the researcher often numerically accumulates 
“influences” and “dependencies” and makes parallel comparisons of 
the authors’ life histories, at the beginning of the twentieth century he 
switches from the factual descriptiveness of the externally contacted 
sphere of relations, and overall from genetic “influenceology” to an 
intuitive typology of verb forms and structures presented within the 
framework of a synthesizing conception of the reciprocity of Slavic lit-
eratures (Zelenka, “Matija Murko” 30).
1 Frank Wollman wrote 233 items of correspondence to Matija Murko between 
1922 and 1951 which are stored in the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech 
Literature (Matija Murko Fonds and Slavia Fonds). These letters are being prepared 
for critical edition publication by A. Zelenková (see Zelenková, “Komparativistika”).
Miloš Zelenka:     Matija Murko and Structural Aesthetics
145
This thesis applies in particular to Geschichte der älteren südslav-
ischen Literaturen (History of the Older South Slavic Literatures, 1908), 
in which Murko, even before P. Van Tieghem, attempts a theoreti-
cal definition and literary-historical justification of a larger interliter-
ary whole, in this case a specific littérature générale of the South Slavic 
literatures. At the forefront of the researcher’s attention is not only 
the minutiae of textual interpretation and philological acrobatics, but 
especially the conditioning of the genesis and existence of verbal cre-
ations by cultural and political history and the reconstruction of the so-
called literary culture in the broadest sense, which was later elaborated 
in detail as a theoretical category by modern sociology (see Krejčí). 
Murko’s concern here is not with partial surveys of literary sections 
in diachronic outline, but with grasping a transnational literary whole 
determined geographically, linguistically, and ethnically, but above 
all by similar ideas and currents of thought formed over centuries in 
contact with both Byzantium and Western European writing. Murko 
aptly characterizes his method with the statement “from the history of 
the letter to the history of the spirit” (Wollman, “Pražská škola” 53). 
He therefore sees the essence of comparative and literary history as an 
intensive penetration into the inner meaning of verbal creation and an 
actualization of new ideas and values of a living philology developing 
in close cooperation with related sciences, such as cultural and political 
history, ethnology, and ethnography.
As is well-known, Murko was awarded an honorary doctorate from 
Charles University in 1920 on the initiative of the first president of 
the Czechoslovak Republic, T. G. Masaryk, as a replacement for the 
ill Jagić at the Chair of South Slavic Languages and Literatures. He 
was also involved in the establishment of the Slavic journal Slavia and 
served as the second director of the Slavic Institute. As the editor of 
Slavia, Murko facilitated the publication of works by young Russian 
formalists working in Czechoslovakia, including R. Jakobson and P. 
Bogatyrev, prior to the establishment of the journal Slovo a slovesnost 
in 1935. At the same time, Murko, as the main organizer of the First 
International Congress of Slavic Philologists in Prague in 1929, agreed 
to create a thematic section in which the theses of the Prague Linguistic 
Circle were announced (Zelenka, “Rȏle” 47–48). In the first issue of 
Slavia in 1922–1923, a survey study by Bogatyrev and Jakobson, 
“Slavjanskaja filologija v Rossii za gody 1914–1921” (“Slavic Philology 
in Russia in the Years 1914–1921”), appeared. Jakobson’s last essay in 
Slavia, at the time already under censorship of the Nazi regime, was 
published after his forced departure in April 1939 for emigration under 
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146
the pseudonym Olaf Jansen. It is a little-known fact that Murko, at 
Jakobson’s invitation, attended some meetings of the Prague Linguistic 
Circle as a guest. The archival records show that in 1928–1936 Murko 
listened to about ten lectures by foreign and domestic linguists and 
literary scholars (Jakobson, Vinokur, Mathesius, Mukařovský, etc.), 
where he actively participated in the discussion (see Čermák et al.). On 
the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Prague Linguistic Circle 
on November 3, 1936, he participated in a festive meeting where he 
delivered a keynote speech evaluating the founding contribution of 
the chairman of the Prague Linguistic Circle, the Czech linguist and 
Anglicist V. Mathesius (215).
The theses of the Circle, presented at the First International Congress 
of Slavic Philologists in Prague in ten sections, summarized the func-
tional conception of language, that is, the investigation of language as a 
system and its components in terms of realized functions (Vachek 37). 
Despite the individual authorship of each section, the theses as a whole 
were the collective work of the Circle. Jakobson conceived the introduc-
tory passages: sections 1 and 2a dealing with language as a system, the 
synchronic method, the phonetic side of language, etc. Also, section 9 
dealing with language culture reflected some of Jakobson’s views. The 
one-sided focus on the linguistic aspect of philology logically meant a 
certain suppression of the literary-critical issues that appeared in sec-
tion 3c “O jazyce básnickém” (“On Poetic Language”) written by J. 
Mukařovský following Jakobson’s reflections on poetry from the mid-
1920s. Here Mukařovský demanded a synchronic description of poetic 
language and an analysis of its relations to the language of communi-
cation. Jakobson’s thesis that poetic language is “aimed at expressing 
itself” (Jakobson, “Nové možnosti” 4) was developed into the idea of the 
antithesis of automation and actualization of linguistic means. Murko 
regarded the theses of his younger colleagues in the Prague Linguistic 
Circle as an explicitly specialized linguistic matter, yet he was interested 
in the overlap with the theory of poetic language. Above all, however, 
he was bothered by the absence of a Slavic and comparative aspect, since 
in his view these were theses submitted to the Slavic Congress. In fact, 
the theses were clearly directed towards a theory of general linguistics 
for which the Prague School drew its linguistic material exclusively 
from Czech, Slovak and, thanks to Jakobson, Russian. If the collective 
of authors took a skeptical stance towards Slavic philology, it reflected 
a common view of the autonomy of linguistics and literary criticism, 
which separated itself from the complex of traditional cultural-histor-
ical Slavic studies by a newly defined subject and the use of specific 
Miloš Zelenka:     Matija Murko and Structural Aesthetics
147
methods. The emphasis on the linguistic basis also led to a different 
understanding of the comparative method. If the aesthetically oriented 
Mukařovský, in the conclusion of his passage on poetic language, gen-
erally states the need for comparative research in the field of predomi-
nantly divergent structural facts, the linguistically oriented Jakobson 
in section 1c entitled “Nové možnosti užití srovnávací metody” (“New 
Possibilities for the Use of the Comparative Method”) conceives of 
comparative research as a necessary means to analyze the lawful connec-
tion between divergent and convergent linguistic facts, namely connect-
ing the comparative method not only with the genetic systematization 
of correspondences and analogies, but also with synchronic differences 
against the background of common (Slavic and non-Slavic) and diver-
gent developments. From here, according to Jakobson, the path led to 
typology, namely to “the summing up of a series of interrelated changes 
into a single whole” (Jakobson, “Nové možnosti” 5).
In contrast to the narrower conception of Slavic philology defined 
by the Prague Linguistic Circle, Murko’s “Řeč při zahájení I. sjezdu 
slovanských filologů 6. X. 1929 v Praze” (“Speech at the Opening of 
the First Congress of Slavic Philologists on 6 October 1929 in Prague”) 
introduced a broader definition which prevailed in the Czech context. 
Murko understood Slavic philology as the history of Slavic literatures, 
including folklore, Slavic linguistics, and also its methodological and 
didactic aspect, including the teaching of languages and literatures in 
secondary schools (Murko, “Řeč” 841). Related disciplines, such as 
material culture, ethnography, cultural history, mythology, etc. were 
to be integrated into the congress program, with the strict exclusion 
of political issues, only insofar as they were directly related to Slavic 
literatures or linguistics. Nevertheless, in his opening speech, which in 
this sense described the congress as that of philologists-Slavists and not 
philologists-Slavs, Murko outlined the vision of a synthetic construc-
tion, that is, the idea of educational and cultural cooperation between 
the West and the Slavic East (842). This orientation corresponded to 
the official line of Czechoslovak foreign policy in the field of the Slavic 
question influenced by the philosophical conception of T. G. Masaryk 
under whose ideological patronage the first Slavic Congress in Prague 
was held. Masaryk considered the Slavs to be an autonomous “organ-
ism” of a group of peoples defined by their own language and history, 
national literature, and a specific spirit of Slavic consciousness which 
is manifested only in relation to the whole Slavic organism and which 
is closer in linguistic and intellectual terms than that of the Germanic-
Romanic complex (Masaryk 518). Despite this opinion, it was evident 
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148
that Murko’s abstract understanding of Slavic philology appealing to 
Masaryk’s “humanistic ideals” was directed more towards the practical 
and utilitarian Slavic studies and towards organizational and cultural-
political matters without asking more fundamental questions about the 
methodology of the field, as was the case with the younger group of 
Slavists from the Prague Linguistic Circle, including Jakobson, who at 
the turn of the twentieth century had been involved in the Slavic studies 
of the Czechoslovak Republic. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Jakobson 
critically questioned the existence of Slavic studies as a gnoseologically 
cognizable system with a uniformly defined subject and methods of 
investigation (Zelenka, “Roman Jakobson” 165).
Murko, who counted on Wollman as his successor at the Chair of 
South Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Faculty of Arts in Prague, 
oriented his student towards the study of versology and stylistics, which 
was reflected in Wollman’s article on the evolution of verse forms in the 
Serbo-Croatian verse (see Wollman, “Njegošův deseterec”). Murko’s 
studies of the heroic oral epic were based on the knowledge of rhythm 
and accents, i.e., purely on the study of rhythmic-syntactic peculiari-
ties. Murko, like Jakobson in Základy českého verše (Fundamentals of 
Czech Verse, 1926), approached the structuralist starting point that the 
investigation of Slavic metrics and verse systems cannot be mechani-
cally derived from a comparative lexicon of Slavic languages, but must 
be based on a mutual confrontation of the differentiations of these sys-
tems with the differentiations of the respective languages, on the basis 
of existing linguistic correspondences and analogies. Thus, verse as a 
form of certain violence on natural language makes it possible to estab-
lish the ratio of variation and invariance of linguistic phenomena and 
to define the relationship between form and material.
In his analyses of South Slavic oral verse epics, Murko intuitively 
realized that language in its poetic function applies three rhythmic 
(rhythm-forming) factors: (a) emphasis or dynamic accent, (b) pitch or 
musical accent, and (c) quantity as temporal accent. In a strictly struc-
turalist understanding, however, only one of these elements becomes 
the constitutive moment of the prosodic system, into which external, 
extra-phonological stimuli, such as the aesthetic tradition, the rela-
tion of the poetic movement to that tradition, and foreign cultural 
influences enter as a whole. According to Murko, verse rhythm in the 
performance of folk guslars is not a monotonous symmetry; thanks 
to its variable rhythmic tendency, it is not a modified practical lan-
guage, but a specifically functional realization of poetic language. From 
here, Murko’s path led to a systematic effort to capture the still living 
Miloš Zelenka:     Matija Murko and Structural Aesthetics
149
epic tradition in a functioning environment as a kind of “ethnographic 
structure”: “From the verbal epic theme, Murko thus proceeds to the 
ethnographic structure of the epic, and his records are therefore invalu-
able and are, in time, among the first works of this kind” (Wollman, 
“Murkova vědecká osobnost” 15).
In this context, we can recall Jakobson’s opinion in the Základy 
českého verše, where among other things a polemic with the quantitative 
conception of the Czech positivist versologist Josef Král appeared. The 
latter derived the regularity of accentuation from practical language, 
not from specific poetic texts. Král’s mechanical parallel between prac-
tical and poetic language led to the enforcement of prosodic rules based 
on normative aesthetic canons, according to which the most artistically 
significant poets of the nineteenth century were paradoxically classified 
by Král as “negligent versologists” while poets versifying with minimal 
deviations were historically insignificant authors. Wollman, at Murko’s 
instruction, chose Njegoš’s ten-syllable line in his composition Gorski 
vijenac (The Mountain Wreath, 1847), its rhythmic-syntactic structure 
and overall rhythmic tendency producing an intense aesthetic effect. In 
a polemic with several previous theorists, such as M. Rešetar, P. Popović, 
T. Maretić, K. Šrepel, Ć. Ćorović, etc., these authors acknowledged the 
high artistic value and poetological originality of the poetic text, but 
they understood this epic as a reverberant transformation of the heroic 
epic supposedly written in either syllabic or tonically decasyllabic verse.
Overall, Wollman refused to take into account the deviant accentua-
tion found in the spoken dialect of the Cetinje area (see also Balžalorsky 
Antić). In this matter, Wollman informed Murko in a letter dated 6 
October 1930, written from Cetinje, that he had been inspired in writ-
ing his study by the Russian formalists B. V. Tomaševskij (Russkoe 
stichosloženie, 1923; O stiche, 1929) and B. Eichenbaum (Melodika 
russkogo liričeskogo sticha, 1922):
[W]hen I approached my own topic a few days ago, I see that nothing has 
actually been done in Serbo-Croatian literature—except those works that 
caprice themselves on some exclusive versification principle (like Maretić, 
Matić). However, the situation is far worse than it was in Czech literature 
before Jakobson’s writings; in our country, at least, it was possible to build on 
facts already established, and our material does not show the accentual and 
quantitative difficulties of the Serbo-Croatian material. For the time being, I 
have analyzed about 200 verses of The Mountain Wreath and found that we 
can speak of neither syllabic nor accented verse, as it is stated in the school 
“theories of literature.” Repentantly, I return to philological methods and find 
out empirically, as Njegoš himself probably read his ten-syllable line, by the 
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150
differential method of yours: I compare the present-day accentuation with the 
living dialectical declamation. (Wollman, Letter II)
According to Wollman, it is an artificial verse that oscillates between 
the dactyl-trochee and iambic-anapest traces, and which is only inspi-
red by the dialect verse, because the original syllabism, typical of the 
South Slavic national epic, is replaced by a distinct rhythmic structure 
that breaks down into three structural parts with their own intonation. 
The first part is always four-syllabic, with the interword division after 
the first rhythmic member is superior to the division after the second 
member. The essence of Njegoš’s rhythm is that “the first interword 
prefix corresponds to the syntactic pause that ends the verse; thus, its 
grammatical nature is transformed into a rhythmic one” (Wollman, 
“Njegošův” 761). Njegoš creates a particular set of functional words 
and pauses, a kind of unique sound wave, which in the reflective parts 
has its basis in a specific dramatic speech. Gorski vijenac can therefore 
be considered a poetic drama organically placed in the development 
of South Slavic balladic drama. Here, in line with Murko, Wollman 
proceeds from a rejection of previous prosodic doctrines, with which 
he settles his “accounts” in the study, especially in the methodological 
introduction. In contrast to the graphicological, objective-kinetic and 
acoustic-metrical prosodic doctrines, the researcher highlighted a pho-
nological, that is, structuralist versology based on the functional diffe-
rentiation of disjunctive and non-distinctive prosodic elements.
As we have already pointed out, Wollman’s study was intended to 
support his candidacy for the Chair of South Slavic Languages and 
Literatures at the Faculty of Arts in Prague. Murko asked Jakobson, as 
a theorist of modern versology, for his expert opinion in this context. 
Jakobson replied to Murko in a letter:
I consider this work to be symptomatic of contemporary literary scholarship 
directed towards the problems of artistic form. … It is the first time that the 
formal peculiarity of literary works in comparison with folklore works has 
been significantly taken into account. … As far as I know, it is the first time 
that the question of the evolution of verse forms in the work of a poet has been 
raised in the scholarship on Serbian verse. (Jakobson, Letter)
Jakobson appreciated the methodological contribution of Wollman’s 
study and spoke positively about the use of a comparative perspec-
tive, using concrete material from various national literatures. He also 
praised the dialectical conception of elements and structure in Njegoš’s 
poetry, but believed that Wollman could have paid more attention to 
Miloš Zelenka:     Matija Murko and Structural Aesthetics
151
a general linguistic analysis. Murko also prompted Wollman to write 
Slovesnost Slovanů (Literature of the Slavs, 1928), essentially the only 
attempt to conceive a structural history of Slavic literatures as a his-
tory of atemporal forms and structures. This genre principle was later 
reflected in the so-called eidographic method, which Wollman used 
to enrich contemporary comparative thinking about literature. This 
method was also reflected in the monographic series devoted to South 
Slavic drama (Zelenková, “Frank Wollman” 242–243). These titles 
(Srbochorvatské drama, 1924; Slovinské drama, 1925; Bulharské drama, 
1928; Dramatika slovanského jihu, 1930) were written under the di-
rect influence of Murko, who, as we have already noted, counted on 
Wollman as his successor to the Chair of South Slavic Languages and 
Literatures at the Faculty of Arts in Prague after he received a full pro-
fessorship in 1928. Wollman was therefore to devote himself system-
atically to South Slavic literature along with Bulgarian literature; he 
was generally expected to become a good mediator of cultural contacts 
with the Slavic South. Murko considered South Slavic drama to be 
the least explored in comparison with other prose and poetic literary 
types, and therefore, through his influence, secured his pupil a scholar-
ship from the Ministry of Education and National Enlightenment for 
study trips and archival research in the Balkans; indeed, he assumed 
that Wollman would publish in this area. The notion of structure ap-
peared for the first time in the introduction to the book Dramatika 
slovanského jihu (Drama of the Slavic South, 1930), and therefore 
Wollman himself placed the loose genesis of literary structuralism at 
the beginning of the early 1930s, that is, before the publication of 
Mukařovský’s study on M. Z. Polák (1934–1935), which is consid-
ered the prologue to structuralism in the Czech intellectual context 
(Zelenková, “Frank Wollman” 243–244). Wollman eschewed a con-
ventional history of theatre or biographical data of dramatists in his 
oeuvre, instead interpreting dramatic texts as “the variable structures 
of literary eras and the function of the components in a certain area in 
individual types” (Wollman, Dramatika vi). This led to the establish-
ment of an “internal developmental regularity” (vi). According to the 
author, the given eidographic approach “is all the more appropriate 
in drama the more autonomous this genre is in comparison to other 
verbal genres” (vi).
It is possible to conclude that Murko’s inspirations contributed to 
the gradual formation of Wollman’s research method as one of many 
relevant factors. In contrast to the aesthetically oriented structuralism 
of Mukařovský, Wollman represented an eidological, form-oriented 
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152
structuralism, which, with reference to Husserl’s phenomenology, con-
ceived of eidos as a valuable and general essence abstracted from the phe-
nomenon under investigation. Eidos manifested itself here as an open 
(absent) structure, as a “network of relations” in the form of a substan-
tial structure that makes visible the thing itself. Eidos in this conception 
represented “a transcendental reduction to pure phenomena, but only a 
reduction to appearance, an eidos where essence is sought by variation in 
what remains unchanging” (Rieger 222). This opened the way to a meth-
odological bridging of the gap “between the notion of essence and the 
time-varying aspects of things” (222). A work is a verbal form created at 
the “intersection of several layers of structure” (Wollman, K methodologii 
109), a material existence, an intentional totality with a series of func-
tions, layers, and emergent values. Wollman called his method “com-
parative structuralism” derived from the comparative study of evolving 
forms. The form aspect must be combined with an evolutionary proce-
dure: the duration and transformation of forms, the convergence and 
divergence of verb forms, and change over historical time.
Murko invited Wollman to participate in the First International 
Congress of Slavic Philologists in Prague in 1929. Wollman’s paper 
“Nové směry literární vědy a eidografická metoda” (“New Directions in 
Literary Studies and the Eidographic Method”), although not included 
among the theses of the Circle, refined his definition of eidography as a 
comparative morphology derived from the study of verb forms and struc-
tures. The relation of eidography to Russian formalism and philology was 
characterized by Wollman in a letter to Murko of 3 December 1929:
I consider myself fortunate that I came out of traditional studies and that I have 
thus, with the basic conception of literary history as an intellectual science, … 
remained with my eidographic approach in philology, and that (even before the 
elaboration and spread of Russian methods in our country in recent times) I 
have also combined in this eidography an aesthetic-linguistic consideration. … 
I broke with purely literary methods, and therefore I pleaded … so much for 
eidography, in which I summarized philology and aesthetic-linguistic questions 
as a necessary prerequisite of any work of literary history. (Wollman, Letter I)
In literary-historical application, this meant that Slavic vernacular is an 
autochthonous organic system manifesting itself not only in its con-
crete manifestations (in national literatures), but also in its ideal essence 
(eidos), that is, in its forms and structures respecting the immanence of 
“inner form.” Modern comparative literary history should therefore ex-
amine not the closed “organisms of small literatures, but the individual 
forms in their structural relations” (Wollman, K methodologii 10), that 
Miloš Zelenka:     Matija Murko and Structural Aesthetics
153
is, the self-movement of literary structures within a diachronic frame-
work. The notion of structure thus brought a historical and sociological 
dimension to the static essence, balancing in dialectical tension “the 
static nature of fixed forms and concepts with the dynamics of the tem-
poral variability of phenomena” (Rieger 222). The “dynamic” and “dia-
lectical” conception of open structure meant the investigation of analo-
gies in literary forms without regard to mediation by contact, influence, 
and action, thus laying the foundations for a “comparative structural-
ism” based on the comparison and syntax of literary works. In this way, 
Wollman was in retrospect closer to Murko than to Mukařovský, who 
at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s maintained a more reserved attitude 
towards comparative literature: the unresolved relationship between lit-
erary theory and comparative literature as an “influenceological” liter-
ary-historical discipline reflected the dichotomy of synchrony and dia-
chrony resulting from the absolutization of the immanent development 
of national literature as a relatively closed system, in which overlaps 
from other systems intervene randomly and insignificantly. Murko, on 
the other hand, never doubted the function of comparative literature, 
although it was limited by Slavic material and positivist assumptions.
Wollman first demonstrated these methodological principles in prac-
tice—even before his memorable presentation at the Slavic Congress in 
1929—in Slovesnost Slovanů, where he originally placed inter-Slavic lit-
erary relations in the context of European and world literature in the 
spirit of the eidographic approach. Wollman thus distinguished himself 
from his teacher, Czech Slavist J. Máchal, who wrote Slovanské liter-
atury (Slavic Literatures, 1922–1929) and captured the history of Slavic 
literatures individually in isolated parallels. Although Wollman lacked 
the factual breadth of Máchal, the synthesizing view, which the scholar 
modestly described as “an attempt at a synoptic-ideographic collection 
of Slavic verbal production” (Wollman, Slovesnost 237), makes this 
handbook—even from a great temporal distance—modern history of 
Slavic literatures in their mutual relationships and contexts, in form, 
content, and aesthetic-philosophical analogies, which scientifically docu-
ment the gradual birth and growing consciousness of Slavic affiliation. 
The nine chapters of this small handbook, in comparison to the the-
matic scope of Máchal’s encyclopedic overview, capture in a condensed 
form the history of Slavic literature from the first Great Moravian monu-
ments to 1914. Murko recommended P. Van Tieghem’s foundational 
work La littérature comparée (Comparative literature, 1931) to Wollman. 
Wollman elaborated this concept in detail in a functional applica-
tion to Slavic literatures, which he understood as the specific literary 
pkn, letnik 48, št. 2, ljubljana, avgust 2025
154
structure of an international community identified in a particular area. 
This “general literature” was understood as a precursor of a world lit-
erature into which only individual forms and structures enter, not 
national literatures as a certain whole. He divided the field of com-
parative research according to the tasks and research methods, in accor-
dance with Van Tieghem’s dichotomous division between comparative 
literature (littérature comparée) and general, generic literature (littérature 
générale). While comparative literature is a binary exploration of the 
individual forms of two national literatures through direct and indirect 
influences or contacts, general literature conducts research on forms 
regardless of place, time, and national language.
Murko’s contacts with the Circle—again mediated by Wollman—
are evidenced by his indirect support in a dispute with the German 
Slavists K. Bittner and J. Pfitzner from the German University of 
Prague. Bittner, an associate professor at the German University of 
Prague and a propagator of Nazi ideology (he served as a cultural advi-
sor to Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich during World War II), had 
already questioned the specificity of Slavic literatures as a distinct and 
historically legitimate entity at the Second International Congress of 
Slavic Philologists in Warsaw in 1934. Bittner escalated this position in 
his parodic book Deutsche und Tschechen (Germans and Czechs, 1936). 
Murko, as the father of European Slavic studies (he was more than 
seventy-five years old at the time) and an expert on the German intel-
lectual milieu, devoted his professional life, especially after his arrival in 
Czechoslovakia in 1920, to the study of Slavic literatures and especially 
their contribution in the field of oral literature to the pantheon of world 
literature. In doing so, he partially distanced himself from the conclu-
sion of his 1897 monograph Deutsche Einflüsse auf die Anfänge der böh-
mischen Romantik (German Influences on the Beginnings of Bohemian 
Romanticism), to which Bittner purposely referred. However, the 
whole affair had deeper political and organizational overtones. Bittner 
was also an associate of the Slavic Institute and editor of the journal 
Germanoslavica, which was founded in 1931 thanks to Murko’s ini-
tiative. His writings in this journal aroused the resentment of Czech 
Slavists for their “hyper-positivism” and underestimation of the “Slavic 
world,” as Wollman complained to Murko in a letter of 28 October 
1935 (Wollman, Letter III). The editors of Germanoslavica refused to 
publish a critical response by Wollman, who was a proponent of the 
structural, internally differentiated unity of Slavic literatures. Wollman 
decided to respond to Bittner’s conclusions with the monographic study 
K methodologii srovnávací slovesnosti slovanské (Towards a Methodology of 
Miloš Zelenka:     Matija Murko and Structural Aesthetics
155
Comparative Slavic Literature, 1936). In a later complaint addressed to 
the editors of Germanoslavica and to the presidium of the Slavic Institute, 
dated 13 November 1936, Wollman stated that he was “exposing the 
politicized method” of Bittner’s book which, in his judgment, must 
not “serve the conniving anti-Slavic tendencies” (Wollman, Letter VI). 
In his study, Wollman attempted to defend the historical community 
of Slavic literatures and the validity of inter-Slavic literary relations in 
which the consciousness of Slavic belonging was formed as an integrat-
ing element in the constitution—in Van Tieghem’s terminology—of a 
Slavic general literature.
Its legitimacy in the concept of Wollman is evidenced by the fact that 
if general literature can be defined as a ratio of verb forms and structures, 
then the justification for a synthesizing study of Slavic literatures is dem-
onstrated by the fact that structures occur there that are general. The 
reciprocal inter-Slavic literary relations—especially in the oral vernacu-
lar—do not support the thesis of a cultural schism of Slavic verbal pro-
duction into the Latin West and the Byzantine East. In the cultural-his-
torical and literary development of the Slavs, Slavic integrative and dis-
integrative dominants operate dialectically, which from a structural and 
formalistic point of view are manifested in specific texts as different types 
of “Slavisms” (Old Church Slavonic Slavism, social and moral reform 
Slavism, Baroque Slavism, Polish Messianism, Czech Austro-Slavism, 
Illyrianism, Yugoslavism, Russian Slavophilism, Neoslavism, revolution-
ary Slavism), characterized among other things by an analogous manner 
of reception of foreign artistic influences and thought impulses. These 
Slavisms do not only appear as modern binary links between individual 
Slavic literatures, but also figure as a general Slavic (inter-Slavic) ver-
nacular, which is an organic part of the general (world) literature.
Wollman considered the permanent presence of folk culture an 
essential feature of Slavic literatures with regard to world literature: 
the genetically demonstrable connection between oral production and 
written texts supports the thesis of Slavic literature as a structurally 
organic and historically constituted synthesis. The researcher further 
assumed that the peculiarity, and therefore the superiority, of Slavic lit-
eratures lies in their “agency,” that is, political commitment to national 
and social emancipation, which the most important works of Slavic 
literatures fulfill by striving for “ethical realism” (Wollman’s term) and 
moral values. The advantage of Wollman’s comparative conception of 
the Slavic literatures is its interdisciplinarity and, in modern terminol-
ogy, its areal foundation: the Slavic literatures are understood not only 
as a whole, but also as a historically changing, internally diverse, and 
pkn, letnik 48, št. 2, ljubljana, avgust 2025
156
yet integral entity (eidos). The Slavic literatures reflect not only the eth-
nicity of the Slavs, but also geographical administrative categories: the 
author shows the Slavic cultural world as open to various Eastern and 
Western influences, taking shape, as we have already noted, at European 
cultural crossroads as a product of a Mediterranean cultural type.
In this context, it should be noted that Murko’s enduring interest 
in South Slavic heroic poetry, and Slavic folklore in general, prompted 
Wollman to undertake extensive collections of folklore in Slovakia 
(Gašparíková, “Wollmanovská zberateľská akcia”) and in Moravia 
with his Bratislava and Brno students as part of his Slavic seminars.2 
Although Wollman did not concentrate, as Murko did, on questions 
of folk customs or on manifestations of material culture, he generally 
understood folklore as a reproductive art in which a syncretic combi-
nation of variable, thematic and genre elements was applied as a basic 
procedure. He proceeded from the fact that a folklore text, by its struc-
tural construction, is a carrier of a specifically receptive quality that 
encourages constant reproduction and transformation of the invariant 
into a new variant. He understood oral vernacular to be only that part 
of the tradition “which attaches itself by its form to the vernacular, 
where it can be compared with the artificial forms of the literary, nar-
rative, lyrical, and dramatic” (Wollman, Uvedení 59). The notion of 
literature as a unity of written and oral production represents a “totality 
of forms,” in which substances, forms, and, to some extent, ideas are 
constantly exchanged. This creative relationship “makes oral rhetoric 
a coherent part of the literary whole” (2). Wollman thus followed up 
with his paper “Problémy srovnávacího studia literatur slovanských 
a lidového podání slovanského, jeho cíle a metody” (“Problems of 
Comparative Study of Slavic Literatures and Slavic Folk Performance, 
Its Aims and Methods”) which he presented at the Slavic Congress in 
1929. According to him, “the research on folk traditions has abolished 
the boundaries between so-called artificial, written and folk, and oral 
creations, between literature in the narrower sense of the word, namely, 
literary verbiage, and traditions (i.e., oral verbiage) and has discovered 
a continuous fluctuation of synopses, motifs, characterological and 
formal elements, and fabulation in both vertical and horizontal direc-
tions” (Wollman, “Problémy”). The author’s structuralist foundations 
2 The Moravian folklore collection took place in 1929–1933. Compared to the 
more extensive Slovak collection, it amounts to around 1,100 pieces. The collection 
was thought to have been lost and was only discovered by A. Zelenková in the estate 
of Frank Wollman in 2016. It is currently being prepared for critical publication (see 
Zelenková, “Frank Wollman v kontextu”).
Miloš Zelenka:     Matija Murko and Structural Aesthetics
157
were particularly evident in his view that the most important aspects 
in the study of forms of folk literature are not originality and duration, 
but reception and individual reproduction, namely communicative 
aspects. The researcher acknowledged a certain improvisational nature 
that allowed for genre variation in oral expressions, but did not address 
the syncretic function of folklore texts, such as their relationship to 
dance and/or musical components. In his methodology of collecting, 
he focused primarily on the textual record of folk tradition, which he 
understood as a distinct literary text. Apart from the formation and 
morphological aspect, he gave priority to the receptive and existential 
(communicative-semiotic) being of folklore, namely its reproductive 
phase. In the relationship between creation and reception, he also high-
lighted the primary moment of reception and processing, that is, the 
question of the recorder, the editor of the text, which was related to 
the sociology and psychology of the collective perception of the folk-
lore text. According to the Slovak literary theorist P. Koprda, Wollman 
associated the process of reception with creation as “a mechanism that 
leads to the correspondence or similarity of the resulting transformed 
shapes with the stimuli” (Koprda 116). Thus, he understood the process 
of reception and action of folklore texts as a functional transformation 
and modification of shapes or plots which allowed for the creation of 
typological analogies across large temporal and geographical distances.
Murko did not directly intervene in the dispute, only in private cor-
respondence urging the polemically inclined Wollman to restrain him-
self, especially after the successful discussion in the Prague Linguistic 
Circle. In a letter to Wollman dated 3 January 1937, he wrote that 
“the best correction of Bittner’s and similar blunders is in the criti-
cal discussion that quickly and successfully emerged” (Murko, Letter). 
In this appeal for restraint, Murko was responding to the discussion 
between Czech Slavists and their German colleagues on the floor of 
the Circle. This debate was initiated by Murko himself, who through 
Frank Wollman appealed to the chairman of the Circle W. Mathesius 
to ask whether this association of generally respected linguists and 
literary scholars would not organize a public academic discussion 
where the plans of the German Slavists would be exposed. Bittner’s 
lecture with the subsequent debate took place on 7 December 1936 
at the premises of the Circle: Mukařovský, P. Eisner, B. Havránek, 
F. Trávníček, and the young R. Wellek took part in the discussion. 
Wollman and Jakobson were appointed as the main opponents on the 
advice of Murko, who was unable to attend the meeting due to illness. 
If Wollman reproached Bittner with misinterpretation of historical 
pkn, letnik 48, št. 2, ljubljana, avgust 2025
158
facts and a distorted conception of Czech-German relations (Wollman, 
“Literárněvědné metody”), Jakobson in his essay “Usměrněné názory 
na staročeskou kulturu” (“Curtailed Views of Old Czech Culture”) 
polemicized with the main thesis of his opponent consisting in the 
formulation of a kind of “law of scales,” that is, in the doctrine of 
the alternating cultural domination of Czechs and Germans. Jakobson 
used untypical literary-historical argumentation to prove that “it is not 
the law of scales that governs Czech cultural events, but the simple law 
of the inseparable connection between the fate of the Czech land and 
the cultural development of the Czech nation. In fact, the development 
curve of German cultural production in the Czech lands coincides with 
this development” (Jakobson, “Usměrněné názory” 221). Wollman and 
Jakobson jointly emphasized the ideological embeddedness of Bittner’s 
historiosophical reflections on German influence on old Czech culture, 
which with their terminology and semantics, were set in the context 
of the Third Reich to the slogan Blut und Boden (“Blood and soil”). 
Wollman reported in detail to Murko about the lecture at the Prague 
Linguistic Circle in a letter dated 22 December 1936, writing among 
other things: “We so dissected Bittner that I felt sorry for him in the 
end, although he deserves no pity” (Wollman, Letter IV).
Murko confirmed his polemical and personally courageous atti-
tude towards German Slavists during the celebration of his eightieth 
birthday in the altered (unfavorable) political conditions on 8 February 
1941 in the hall of the Municipal Library in the center of the Old 
Town, where Bittner spoke on behalf of the coerced rector of Charles 
University in Prague, W. Saure (Bečka 115). His speech was greeted 
with cold silence without any applause. According to a contemporary 
memoir, Murko did not publicly react to Bittner’s speech, which con-
tained denunciations against the Slavic Institute, and only a month 
later, on 4 March 1941, he sent a letter to the rector Saure in flawless 
archaic German in which he protested German plans to take over the 
Slavia magazine and the demise of the Slavic Institute. According to 
the memoirs of Slavomír Wollman:
In it the author, with a formal, deliberately offensive politeness, insists on 
legality, on compliance with the rules, regulations and statutes of the institu-
tion in which he works, and he directly justifies his position by the fact that 
he acts as a nationally conscious Slovene and native Yugoslav, and that he is 
accustomed to such compliance with legal rules at universities in the German-
speaking area. … A man, a scholar of world renown, a patriot and an educated 
descendant of tenacious farmers, towering over his opponents with persistence 
and moral superiority. (S. Wollman 12)
Miloš Zelenka:     Matija Murko and Structural Aesthetics
159
The following events have been sufficiently documented in Slavic lit-
erature: Murko announced his resignation in October 1941 because 
of his advanced age, and thus the Slavic Institute ceased to function 
in practice, legally ending in 1943 as constituent of the Reinhard-
Heydrich-Stiftung (Roubík 515–520).
If we are to summarize Matija Murko’s relationship to structuralism, 
it must be said that this apparent “paradox” has its justification. This 
is evidenced not only by individual examples of external contacts and 
rich organizational activity, but above all by the character of Murko’s 
work which has managed to bridge the intergenerational gaps between 
opposing types of scholarship and intellectual orientations, and which 
symbolically embodies the developmental stages of Czech, Slovenian, 
and European Slavic philology. Despite his methodological grounding 
in positivist assumptions, the researcher has stimulated the develop-
ment of the younger generation of scholars, especially Frank Wollman, 
and positively influenced its direction. Like Murko, Wollman, despite 
generational and methodological differences between them, emerged in 
Czech literary studies at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s as an innova-
tive scholar who completed the contemporary anti-positivist turn (in 
this aspect, he complemented and surpassed Murko), while his texts 
prepared the methodological transformation of Russian formalism and 
domestic structuralism. Although his membership of the Circle com-
mitted to the methods of structural aesthetics in accordance with its 
statutes, Wollman never permanently succumbed to this doctrine and 
remained receptive and open to a diversity of thought. It consisted 
above all in the view that literary history had to transcend a closed 
national horizon, that it had to be conceived “metonymically,” that 
is, on a geographic-administrative principle as the specific structure of 
a certain international community established in a specific area. This 
principle was later used by modern comparative literature, especially 
in the work of D. Ďurišin, building on Wollman’s legacy (Zelenka, 
“Concept” 16–17). Of Murko’s methodological virtue of not clos-
ing himself off from new scientific impulses and inspiring his pupils, 
Wollman wrote admiringly of his model in a letter of 14 January 1937: 
“I am very glad that you, Professor, who could be called the father of the 
positivist school of Slavic studies, have come to this conviction. There 
will come … younger ones who can already do it with more courage 
than we—girded by so much caution—could do” (Wollman, Letter V).
pkn, letnik 48, št. 2, ljubljana, avgust 2025
160
ARCHIVAL SOURCES
Jakobson, Roman. Letter to Matija Murko. 3 Feb. 1931. Matija Murko, Korespon-
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ního písemnictví, LA PNP 1147, 2a.
Murko, Matija. Letter to Frank Wollman. 3 Jan. 1937. Matija Murko, Korespondence 
(odeslaná), Frank Wollman (18, 1922–1951), Literární archiv Památníku národ-
ního písemnictví, LA PNP 1147, 2b.
Wollman, Frank. Letter to the editors of Germanoslavica and the presidium of the 
Slavic Institute. 13 Nov. 1936 (VI). Slovanský ústav, Fond, Masarykův ústav a 
Archiv Akademie věd České republiky, MÚA AV ČR 25.
Wollman, Frank. Letters to Matija Murko. 3 Dec. 1929 (I), 6 Oct. 1930 (II), 28 Oct. 
1935 (III), 22 Dec. 1936 (IV), 14 Jan. 1937 (V). Matija Murko, Korespondence 
(přijatá), Frank Wollman (156, 1922–1951), Literární archiv Památníku národ-
ního písemnictví, LA PNP 1147, 2a.
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Matija Murko in strukturalna estetika
Ključne besede: slovenski literarni zgodovinarji / Murko, Matija / strukturalna 
estetika / Praški lingvistični krožek / verzologija / južnoslovansko ljudsko pesništvo / 
Wollman, Frank
Povezava med pozitivistično usmerjenim Murkom in strukturalno estetiko se 
na prvi pogled zdi neprimerna in paradoksalna. A njegova neobjavljena kore-
spondenca z njegovim učencem, priznanim češkim slavistom in komparativi-
stom Frankom Wollmanom (1888–1969), razkriva preplet tematskih podro-
čij in disciplinarnih stičišč, ki so anticipirala strukturalno estetiko. Murko je 
kot urednik Slavie omogočil ključnim osebnostim češkega strukturalizma, da 
so v tej reviji objavljale še pred ustanovitvijo revije Slovo a slovesnost (npr. R. 
Jakobson, P. Bogatyrev idr.). Hkrati je kot glavni organizator prvega medna-
rodnega slavističnega kongresa v Pragi leta 1929 odobril tematsko sekcijo, v 
okviru katere so bile predstavljene teze Praškega lingvističnega krožka. V prvi 
številki revije Slavia (1922–1923) sta Jakobson in Bogatyrev objavila članek 
»Slavjanskaja filologija v Rossii za gody 1914–1921« (»Slavistika v Rusiji v 
letih 1914–1921«). Wollman, ki naj bi nasledil Murka na Katedri za južnoslo-
vanske jezike in književnosti Filozofske fakultete v Pragi, pa se je raziskovalno 
usmeril v verzologijo in stilistiko, o čemer priča njegov članek »Njegošův 
deseterec« (»Njegošev deseterec«) o razvoju verznih oblik v srbohrvaški poeziji 
(Slavia 1930–1931). Murko je svojega učenca spodbudil tudi k pisanju pio-
nirskega dela Slovesnost Slovanů (Književnost Slovanov, 1928), ki se osredotoča 
na strukturalno zgodovino slovanskih književnosti kot zgodovino brezčasnih 
oblik in struktur.
1.01 izvirni znanstveni članek / original scientific article
udk 81-116:821.163.4.09-1
doi: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v48.i2.08