August Wilhelm Schlegel und die Imaginationen des Eigenen, Fremden und Nationalen in der slavischen Romantik

August Wilhelm von Schlegel, who, in contrast to his brother Friedrich Schlegel is nearly unknown today, was an important mediator of the wealth of ideas of Jena Romanticism for the Slavic cultures. His Vienna Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature belonged to the most frequently read theoretical essays of that time and influenced to a far extend the programmatically treatises of Polish, Czech and Russian romanticism. In contrast to Friedrich Schlegel’s way of thinking, which followed Fichte’s idealism and subjectivism and aimed at the epistemology, August W. Schlegel’ critical and theoretical works on art met with a lively response in the Slavic world. His theory of organically developing national cultures, which was written during the Napoleonic wars, initiated the idea of an autonomous cultural nation in the Slavic countries struggling for political independence. In this context the modern phenomenon of identity, alterity and hermeneutic were discussed at the early stage of the Romantic Movement