Milovan Vidakovià(; 1780âÂÂ1841) was a Serbian novelist. He is referred to as the father of the modern Serbian novel. Today, his novels are mostly forgotten, and he is best remembered as a strong opponent of Vuk Karadà ¾iÃÂ's language reform and a proponent of the Slavonic-Serbian language as a literary language of Serbs.
Milovan Vidakoviàwas born in May 1780 in the village of NemenikuÃÂe, in the Kosmaj area of Serbia. For generations the ancestors of Vidakoviàhad been haiduks, and he himself would have joined the armed freedom-fighters had his father not entrusted him to the care of Momir VidakoviÃÂ, 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 Ottoman Turks in the War of 1787âÂÂ91.
Vidakoviàstarted school in Irig and then continued to further his education at Temesvár, Novi Sad, Szeged, and Késmárk. He studied at the Piarists' Gymnasium in Szeged, the capital of the county of Csongrád in Hungary. His education involved the traditional study of Church Slavonic, Greek and Latin classics together with philosophy and philology in a modern atmosphere of rationalism. Later, at the Piarist College in Késmárk, 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 Vidakoviàafter he graduated from the Evangelical Lyceum in Késmárk.
In 1814 in Budapest, VidakoviÃÂ published the first volume of "Ljubomir u Jelisijumu" (Ljubomir in Elisium), inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, or 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 aware of the articles on the Serbian literary language published by Jernej Kopitar 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."
VidakoviÃÂ has been generally described by critics of his opus as a solitary figure, out of harmony with the spirit of his time and often directly opposed to it. Yet in the context of social conditions of his time, and of the studies then flourishing, he appears as having 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 ObradoviÃÂ, 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 Orthodox hierarchy, especially after the accession of Stefan StratimiroviÃÂ as Metropolitan Bishop of Karlovci in 1790. Serbian literary critic Pavle PopoviÃÂ outlines Dositejism thus:
The desire to help the Serbian people was the motive that VidakoviÃÂ gave for writing his first work, a biblical adaptation called "Istorija o prekrasnom Josifu" (The Story of Beautiful Joseph). In the deduction to this novel in verse, first published in 1805, VidakoviÃÂ wrote: "It is 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."
VidakoviÃÂ, 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 preceding and following it, and was stimulated by this movement both to drama and to novel-writing.
Even Atanasije StojkoviÃÂ, who was seven years VidakoviÃÂ's senior, and his predecessor in novel writing, seems to have been guided by VidakoviÃÂ, rather than Vidakoviàby him. VidakoviÃÂ's eight novels, which at least equaled the poems of Lukijan Muà ¡icki in popularity, will hardly stand the judgment of posterity so well. It had in its favor the support of the Serbian reading public, the immense vogue of the novels of Walter Scott, on which it was evidently modeled, 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 junoà ¡a" or "Ljubomir" without seeing that the author had little to learn from any of his Serbian contemporaries and much to teach them.
In 1836, Vidakoviàpublished his translation from German of "Djevica iz Marijenburga" (Das Madchen von Marienburg), a drama in five acts by Franz Kratter (1758âÂÂ1830), dedicated to Marko Karamata, one of the students he was tutoring. The main character Chatinka, the maid of Marienburg, 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. Kratter himself had been one of the most ardent advocates of Josephinism, like Dositej Obradoviàamong the Serbs in Vojvodina. 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. VidakoviÃÂ's translation of Kratter's drama suggests how dear Vidakoviàheld his tenets of freedom for all people, not only the Serbs. Vidakoviàoften 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."
VidakoviÃÂ's fame rests on the first Serbian novel, "Usamljeni junoà ¡a" (A Forlorn Youth), which he modeled after German romances and the philosophic-pedagogical novels then extremely popular throughout the Austrian Empire and Germany. Coming under the influence of Romanticism, Vidakoviàtook 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 a historical framework to all his subsequent works. Literary critic Jovan Skerliàwrote: "All his novels have many historical elements, and his contemporaries called him 'the Serbian Walter Scott.'"
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Serbian people, like the rest of the Slavs, Hungarians, Italians, and Romanians living under the Habsburg rule, became engaged in a dual struggle for political and cultural independence. Chief Serbian cultural revolutionary was Vuk Karadà ¾iÃÂ, a minor government official in the Karadjordje administration who had fled to Vienna in 1813 after the breakup of the First Serbian Uprising. Vuk argued a campaign to free Serbian literature from its thralldom to Slavonic-Serbian, based on Church Slavonic, an important idiom that Serbs had been using in their secular and religious works for a century. There were a few extremists on both sides, such as Karadà ¾iàhimself advocating a purely spoken language and Pavel Kengelac favoring a complete acceptance of Russo-Slavonic, but most writers seem to have been moderate, who sought to improve and standardize their spoken language by retaining the particular features of Russo-Slavonic that they individually espoused. Their mixed but predominantly vernacular language was called Slavonic-Serbian. Vidakoviàwas a proponent of the Slavonic-Serbian as a literary language, unlike Karadà ¾iÃÂ, who proposed a simplified alphabet and a new literary language based exclusively on spoken Serbian. Karadà ¾iÃÂ'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 ÃÂuro DaniÃÂiànamed it "The War for a Serbian Language and Orthography." In the midst of it all were writers like Vidakoviàwho had the misfortune to put their theories on language into print at about the same time that Karadà ¾iàand DaniÃÂiàwere beginning their reforms.