Milovan Vidaković

Milovan Vidaković (Nemenikuće, May 1780-Pest, 28 October 1841) was a Serbian novelist. He is referred to as the father of the modern Serbian novel.

Biography

Milovan Vidaković was born in May 1780 in the village of Nemanikuće, in the Kosmaj area of Serbia. For generations the ancestors of Vidaković had been Serbian soldier (haiduks), and he himself would have joined armed freedom-fighters if his father hadn't given him to the care of Momir Vidaković, an uncle in Irig. When he was nine, his father took Milovan to Irig in the Srem region of the Vojvodina, because of the outbreak of hostilities between the Austro-Russian alliance and the Turks in the war of 1788-1791, and then returned to Nemanikuča to rejoin with his comrades-at-arms. Milovan started school in Irig and then continued to further his education at Temesvar, Novi Sad, Seged, and Kezmarok. He studied at the Piarists' Gymnasium (high school) in Seged, the capital of the county of Csongrad in Hungary. His education involved the traditional study of Old Slavonic, Greek and Latin classics together with philosophy and philology in a modern atmosphere of rationalism. Later, at the Piarist college in Kezmarok in Hungary he made rapid progress, especially in jurisprudence, though preferring the study of languages (Latin, German, French), history, literature, judicial science and philosophy.

Public education was the career which seemed to lie open to Vidaković after he graduated from the Evangelical Lyceum in Kezmarok. His education was much the same as Hungarian language reformer Ferenc Kazinczy, physician and botanist Samuel Genersich before him and Slavist Pavel Josef Šafárik and poet Pavol Orszagh Hvezdoslav after him.

In 1814 in Budapest, Vidaković published Ljubomir u Elisiumu, Part I, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile (a treaise on education). Like his previous novels, this was an adventure story, with the usual sentimental, moral-didactic digressions. The volume is remarkable, however, for the twenty-page introductory essay, "Observation on the Serbian Language," dated October 1813. The opening statement suggests that the author was not unaware of the articles on the Serbian literary language published by Jan Kopitár in the German press. "Now we who begin to write a little for our people find ourselves in rather unpleasant times; they criticize us more for our language than for our work, but they are right too; it is the duty of the translator, as well as the writer himself, to pay as much attention to his language as to the thing he is expressing in it."

Vidaković has been generally described as a solitary figure, out of harmony with the spirit of his time and often directly opposed to it. Yet a closer look into social conditions of Vidaković's time, and of the studies then flourishing, shows him to have been thoroughly in touch with them.

The new spirit among the Serbs of Vojvodina that took hold then was known as "Dositejism," coined after Dositej Obradović, who became popular among his people for criticizing the Serbian Orthodox Church hierarchy for their old fashioned ways. His views had been espoused by most intellectuals but were bitterly opposed by the caesaro-papal Orthodox hierarchy, especially after the accession of Stefan Stratimirović as metropolitan in 1790. Serbian literary critic Pavle Popović outlines Dositejism thus:

"What he (Dositej Obradović) preached became common property, the spirit of the times. With his common sense writings he opened the way of enlightenment, literature, and, national education, and the whole Serbian society in the Hungary and Austria of that time followed the slogans he gave. 'Education, education, that is what we need,' was the constant motto from then on; education in all its forms: schools, printing houses, books.... Literature is the most important, it needs the most help, it spreads education more freely, and directly than the public school; especially the Latin schools that Serbian students were attending at the time.... Every educated man and patriot must help literature, everyone can write carefully must write, because that is what the people especially need." (Pavle Popović, Milovan Vidaković, pp. 9–10, 23, 24).

The desire to help the Serbian people was the motive that Milovan Vidaković gave for writing his first work, a biblical adaptation called "Istorija o prekrasnom Iosife" (The Story About Beautiful Joseph). In the deduction to this novel in verse, first published in 1805, the Kosmaj peasant's son wrote:

"It being that common sense demands from us that each one, as much as his God-given strength and talent permit, should be of use, in some way to his fellow-man, and especially to his race, from such an obligation I, loving my Serbian race, compose for the youth this 'Story About Beautiful Joseph' in verse."

Vidaković, though always as a kind of outsider, attached himself more or less to the Romantic movement during that transitional period of Rationalism towards Romanticism and the years immediately preceeding and following it, and was stimulated by this movement both to drama and to novel-writing.

Even Atanasije Stojković (1773-1832), who was seven years Vidaković's senior, and his predecessor in novel writing, seems rather to have been guided by Vidaković than Vidaković by him. Vidakovic's eight novels, which at least equalled the poems of Lukijan Mušicki in popularity, will hardly stand the judgement of posterity so well. It had in its favour the support of the Serbian reading public, the immense vogue of the novels of Walter Scott, on which it was evidently modelled, the advantages of an exquisite style, and the taste of the day for the romance as opposed to the novel of analyses. It therefore gained a great name both in Serbia and among the Slavic reading public abroad. No one can read "Usamljeni junosa" or "Ljubomir" without seeing that the author had little to learn from any of his Serbian contemporaries and much to teach them.

In 1836, Vidaković published his translation "Djevica iz Marijenburga" (Das Madchen von Marienburg), a drama, in five acts, from the German of Franz Kratter (1758-1830), dedicated to Marko Karamata, one of the students he was tutoring. The main character Chatinka, the maid of Marienburg, or Molbork, came originally from Poland, but she had been abducted by Russian troops and now found herself at the summer palace of Peter the Great, the Peterhof, outside of St. Petersburg. In the play—Kratter's most successful drama, originally performed in Manihein and Vienna in 1793—Peter fell in love with the virtuous maid, and, though tempted to wield his arbitrary power finally resolved to respect her virtue, marry her, and make he his czarina. Peter had to struggle against "fanaticisim that fear the light of day -- ancient barbarity -- and bloody insatiable oppression," laboriously striving "to bring barbarous people from the yoke of superstition and savage customs to obedience through his wise laws." This was absolutely consistent with the celebration of Peter in the age of Enlightenment, most famously by Voltaire, but it was also strikingly similar to the rhetoric in which Emperor Joseph of Austria had been celebrated by his admirers for his efforts in Serbian Vojvodina. Kratter himself had been one of the most ardent advocates of Josephinism, like Dositej Obradović among the Serbs in Austrian- and Hungarian-occupied Serbian territorries. And it would have been obvious to the readers in 1836, that the drama's reflections on Peter the Great were also relevant to the people under the Habsburgs. Vidaković's translation of Kratter's drama suggests how dear Vidaković held his tenets of freedom for all people, not only the Serbs. Vidaković often read Kratter's well-publicized quotation: "Absolute monarchies are but one step away from despotism. Despotism and Enlightenment: let anyone who can try to reconcile these two. I can't."

Milovan Vidaković's fame rests on the first Serbian novel, Usamljeni junosa (A Forlorn Youth), which he modeled after German romances and the philosophico-pedagogical novels then extremely popular throughout the Austrian Empire and Germany. Coming under the influence of Romanticism, Vidaković took an interest in the history of his people whose lands were then occupied by two empires (Habsburg Germans and the Ottoman Turks) and by so doing gave an historical framework to all his subsequent works. Literary critic Jovan Skerlić wrote,

"All his novels have many historical elements, and his contemporaries called him 'the Serbian Walter Scott.'"

A Language Reformer?

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Serbian people, like the rest of the Slavs, Hungarians, Italians, Romanians living under the Habsburg yoke, became engaged in a dual struggle for political and cultural independence. Our early political leader was Karađorđe, who with his chieftains were able to lift the Turkish burden that had been oppressing their countrymen for four long centuries. Our chief cultural revolutionary was Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1778-1864), a minor government official in the Karadjordje Administration who had fled to Vienna in 1813 after the Turks reconquered the territories which were liberated for almost a decade (1804-1813). Vuk argued a campaign to free Serbian writing from its thralldom to Russian Slavonic (Rusko-slovenski), based on Church Slavonic (the classical language of all Slavdom), an important idiom that Serbs had been using in their secular and religious works for a century. There were few extremists at both sides such as Vuk Stefanović Karadžić himself advocating a purely popular language and Pavle Kengelac favoring a completely acceptance of Rusko-slovenski, but most writers seem to have been moderate, who sought to improve and standardize their spoken language by retaining the particular features of Russian Slavonic (Rusko-slovenski) that they individually espoused. Their mixed but predominantly vernacular language was called Slavo-Serbian. A very popular writer of the Slavo-Serbian school was Milovan Vidaković, known as the father of the Serbian novel. Vidaković, however, wanted a slower transition from Slavo-Serbian unlike Vuk Karadzic who proposed a simplified alphabet and a new literary language based exclusively on spoken Serbian. Vuk's program was first derided and then bitterly opposed by Church-led conservatives and others who wished to preserve some bond between the new Serbian literary language and Slavo-Serbian. The ensuing struggle became so fierce that Đuro Daničić named it "The War for a Serbian Language and Orthography." In the midst of it all were writers Milovan Vidaković who had the misfortune to put their theories on language into print at about the same time that Vuk and Daničić were beginning their reforms.

Works

• Istorija o prekrasnom Josifu (spev; Budim, 1805)
• Usamljeni junoša (roman; Budim, 1810)
• Velimir i Bosiljka (Budim, 1811)
• Ljubomir u Jelisijumu (u tri knjige; Budim, 1814, 1817, 1823)
• Mladi Tovija; pripovetka u stihovima (Budim, 1825)
• Kasija Carica (Budim, 1827)
• Siloan i Milena Srpkinja u Engleskoj (Budim, 1829)
• Ljubezna scena u veselom dvoru Ive Zagorice, pripovetka iz srpske istorije (1834)
• Putešestvije u Jerusalim (spev; Budim, 1834)
• Gramatika srpska (Pešta, 1838)
• Pesan istoričeska o Sv. Đorđu, u stihovima (Novi Sad, 1839)
• Selim i Merima (nedovršeni roman; Novi Sad, 1839)
• Smesice: 10 raznih članaka (Pešta, 1841)
• Istorija srpskog naroda, po Rajiću (u 4 knjige; Beograd 1833-37)
• Avtobiografija Milovana Vidakovića, Glasnik Srpskog učenog društva 1871,30

Translations

• Ljubav k mladoj Muzi Srpskoj (s latinskog; Pešta, 1812)
• Djevica iz Marijenburga (s nemačkog; 1836)
• Blagodarni otrok (s nemačkog; Budim, 1836)

References

• Translated and adapted from Serbian Wikipedia: http://sr.chped.com/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD_%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%9B
• Translated and adapted from Jovan Skerlić's Istorija nove srpske književnosti / A History of the New Serbian Literature (Belgrade, 1914, 1921) p. 149