Jovan Skerlić

Jovan Skerlić
Born	(1877-08-20)20 August 1877 Belgrade, Principality of Serbia
Died	15 May 1914(1914-05-15) (aged 36) Belgrade, Kingdom of Serbia
Occupation	Writer and critic

Jovan Skerlić (Serbian Cyrillic: Јован Скерлић, pronounced [jǒʋan skêːrlitɕ]; 20 August 1877 – 15 May 1914) was a Serbian writer and literary critic.^[1] He is seen as one of the most influential Serbian literary critics of the early 20th century, ^[2]after Bogdan Popović, his professor and early mentor.

Biography[]

It is said that Skerlić revolutionized the Serbian literary scene around the turn of the nineteenth century as a young dashing critic, historian of literature, politician and polemicist.^[3]Although he died at the age of 37, Skerlić managed to complete an impressive body of work that linked criticism and literary history.

According to his biographer, he became interested as a young man in the socialism advocated by Vaso Pelagić and Svetozar Marković. At 16 Skerlić began writing for the Zanatlijiski savez ("The Craftsmen Union", 1893). In 1895, he began to contribute writings to various newspapers, such as Socialdemokrat, Radničke novine, and Delo. At the university in Belgrade, he studied history and French philology. He received an excellent post-graduate education at Belgrade's Grande École under Bogdan Popović as his professor and mentor, before embarking on a graduate program at the universities of Lausanne, Paris and Munich. He completed his doctorate in French Literature in Lausanne in 1901. After three years of post-graduate research in Paris and Munich, he returned in 1904 to Serbia, where he taught French and French Literature at the Grandes Écoles, where he had been educated, before becoming professor of Serbian Literature at the same institution when the University of Belgrade was established the following year. Skerlić was a member of the Skupština (Serbian Parliament), and founder and editor of several literary periodicals. His political sympathies allied him with the Serbian socialist Svetozar Marković, whose posthumous biography Skerlić came to write.^[1] Skerlić insisted on a parallel between Svetozar Marković and Dositej Obradović, seeing the former as a reincarnation of the latter: "This young man's role in our public life in the 19th century was the same as that of the ex-monk Dositej Obradović at the end of the 18th century."

At the beginning of the 20th century, Skerlić became a member of the Independent Radical Party. As such, he was one of the ideologists of Yugoslav national youth advocating a common Serbo-Croatian language and national unity.

Memorial tablet on the house where Jovan Skerlić lived, in the Gospodar Jovanova street, Belgrade, Serbia

Skerlić viewed literature in terms of his political beliefs and adopted some aesthetic ideas from Bogdan Popović. His main sympathies in literary criticism lay, however, with his Lausanne professors, Georges Renard and Hippolyte Taine. Though he did not follow Svetozar Marković's utilitarian ideas on literature, he believed, like Ljubomir Nedić, that literature was linked to progress.^[1] He was familiar with Petrus Hofman Peerlkamp, founder of the subjective method of textual criticism, which meant rejecting in a classical author whatever failed to come up to the standard of what that author, in the critic's opinion, ought to have written.^[4]

Jovan Skerlić wrote in Istorija Nove Srpske Književnosti (Second Edition, Belgrade, 1921, page 43):

The authors of the 19th century, with all their differences nevertheless share a unity of literary ideas and theories. Each of the young poets of the 20th century had his own concepts and well-defined ideas. This phenomenon made it extremely difficult for the literary critic to label new poetic achievements as specific schools, and place them in a continuation of the organized pattern that evolved from Romanticism of the 1860–1870 decade to Realism after 1870.

He published in 1909 a seminal literary history of 18th-century Serbian Literature.

Life and work[]

On completing his doctorate work in Lausanne in 1901, Skerlić spent three years in Paris and Munich, where he broadened his knowledge of Western European thought and literary theory and fell under the influence of the French thinkers, Jean-Marie Guyau in particular. Skerlić was initially influenced also by French literary aesthetics, but later found himself completely opposed to any movement of l'art pour l'art. Skerlić used his influence to fight any movement he saw as egoistic or decadent. His concepts of literary aesthetics were so strongly influenced by his patriotic tendencies that he often reacted to artistic problems more as a national and political thinker than as an art critic.

After his return to Serbia in 1904, Skerlić was offered a chair of national literature at the University of Belgrade, a position that he held throughout the rest of his short but productive life. He became the editor of the respectable literary magazine Srpski književni glasnik (Serbian Literary Herald). As a critic, he stood for the importance of content in a literary text, rather than expressive and artistic form. His method of analysis involved reconstructing the social, cultural and political circumstances that formed the background and context of literary activity. Skerlić became famous for his style of writing, which was clear, picturesque and concise.

Skerlić soon revealed his talent for scholarly, analytical thinking and for literary criticism. In a single decade Skerlić published several hundred essays and critical studies on all major Serbian authors, collected into nine volumes as Pisci i knige (1907–1926; Writers and Books), and a cluster of long monographs, the more notable covering Jakov Ignjatović, Svetozar Marković, Vojislav Ilić, Omladina i njena književnost 1848-1871 (Young Serbia and Its Literature 1848–1871), Srpska književnosti u XVIII veku (Serbian Literature in the 18th Century), and others. These provided a foundation for his seminal work, Istorija nove srpske književnosti (A History of Modern Serbian Literature), completed just two months before his untimely death. It contains an objective, erudite and thorough critical analysis of Serbian writers and poets who managed to extricate themselves and their countrymen from the thraldom of the Holy Roman Empire (Habsburg Monarchy) and Ottoman Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.^[5]

When Istorija nove srpske književnosti was first released in 1914, Bogdan Popović praised it in a literary review as a sensitive, definitive study of modern Serbian literature. In the years that followed, Skerlić's biographies of poets, writers, novelists and men of letters became standard critical works indispensable to readers concerned with modern Serbian literature. Critics called the book "a seminal study of the modern literary imagination." It clarifies the continuing relevance of his provocative concept and provides insight into the literary achievements of Serbia's most significant poets and writers.

Skerlić's writings show a wish for the new Serbian poetry to be "clear, intense and straightforward." His article Jedna Književna Zaraza (A Literary Infection) demonstrates his repulsion at what he contemptuously called "decadence". Above all, he feared the influence of foreign, decadent poetry on the new Serbian poetry, never losing sight of the concept that poetry should serve to build a healthy, strong new generation. He challenged the pessimistic, sombre tones found in newer poems and detested the foreign poetic movements of "Cainism", "Satanism" and all "isms" in general.

Skerlić had a talent for rhetoric and describing the lives and works of literary authors. His history consisted of critical essays on authors, accounts of socio-historic contexts, and textual analysis. This critical nucleus would be followed by bio-bibliographical data. His talent for integrating, his tendency to epitomize, condense and classify according to a precise, pre-established historical roster, usually succeeded in synthesizing individual pieces into a convincing whole.^[1]

Skerlić's role in literature and general cultural and political development led Predrag Protić^[6] to suggest that the period in Serbian history from 1900 to May 1914 should be named after him.^[7]

Skerlić was buried in the Novo groblje cemetery in Belgrade.^[8]

Bibliography[]

His collected works include:

• Pisci i knjige I
• Pisci i knjige II
• Pisci i knjige III
• Pisci i knjige IV
• Pisci i knjige V
• Pisci i knjige VI
• Feljtoni skice i govori
• Istorijski pregled srpske štampe 1791–1911
• Javno mnenje u Francuskoj prema političkoj i socijalnoj poeziji od 1830 do 1848.
• Srpska književnost u XVIII veku
• Omladina i njena književnost (1848–1871) izučavanja o nacionalnom i književnom romantizmu kod Srba
• Svetozar Marković njegov život, rad i ideje
• Jakov Ignjatović književna studija
• Istorija nove srpske književnosti
• Jovan Skerlić čovek i dela by dr Midhat Begić

References[]

External links[]

• Biography on SANU website

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jovan Skerlić.

Bibliography[]

• , Jovan Skerlić et la critique littéraire en Serbie, Paris, Institut d’Études slaves 1963.