Dobrovsky, JOSEPH

Dobrovsky, JOSEPH, the founder of Slavic philology, was born August 17, 1753, at Gyernet, near Raab in Hungary, where his father, a Bohemian by birth, was stationed in garrison. He studied mainly at Prague, in 1772 entered the Jesuit order, and was successively a teacher, a family tutor, and the editor of a critical journal. In 1792, at the expense of the Royal Bohemian Scientific Society, he made a journey to Denmark, Sweden, and Russia, to search after the fate of those Bohemian books and MSS. which the Swedes had carried off from Prague during the Thirty Years' War. Till his death, January 6, 1829, he was reckoned one of the highest authorities on all matters connected with Bohemian history and literature. Among his works are Scriptores rerum Bohemicarum (1784), a history of the Bohemian language and literature (1792), a German-Bohemian dictionary (1802-21), Glagolitica (1807), and Institutiones Linguae Slavonicae (1822). See his Life in German by Palacký (1833).