Jovan Skerlic

Biography

It is said that Skerlic revolutionized the Serbian literary scene around the turn of the nineteenth century as a young dashing critic, historian of literature, politician and polemicist. Although he died relatively young (he was 37), Skerlic still managed to complete an impressive body of work that linked criticism and literary history. According to his biographer, he became interested in the socialism advocated by Vaso Pelagic and Svetozar Markovic as a very young man. At sixteen Skerlic began writing for the Zanatlijiski savez ("The Craftmen Union", 1893). In 1895, he began to contribute his writings to various newspapers, such as Socialdemokrat, Radnicke 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 Ecole (his professor and mentor was Bogdan Popovic) before embarking on a graduate program abroad 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 Grande Ecole 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. Skerlic was a member of the Skupstina (Serbian Parliament), and founder and editor of several literary periodicals. His political sympathies made him an ally of the Serbian socialist Svetozar Markovic, whose posthumous biography Skerlic came to write. Skerlic always insisted on the parallel between Svetozar Markovic and Dositej Obradovic, seeing in the former a reincarnation of the latter: "This young man's role in our public life in the nineteenth century was the same as that of the ex-monk Dositej Obradovic at the end of the eighteenth century...."

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

Skerlic viewed literature in terms of his political beliefs, and he adopted some aesthetic ideas from Bogdan Popovic. His main intellectual sympathies in literary criticism lay, however, with the French: his Lausanne professors, Georges Renard and Hippolyte Taine. Though he did not follow Svetozar Markovic's utilitarian ideas on literature, he believed, like Ljubomir Nedic, that literature was linked to progress. He was familiar with Petrus Hofman Peerlkamp, the founder of the subjective method of textual criticism, which consisted in 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.

Writes Jovan Skerlic in Istorija Nove Srpske Knjizevnosti (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 a seminal literary history of 18th century Serbian Literature (1909).

Life and Work

Upon the completion of his doctorate work in Lausanne in 1901, he spent the next 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. Also, Skerlic was at the beginning influenced by French literary aesthetics, but later found himself in complete opposition to any movement of l'art pour l'art. Skerlic used his influence to fight any egoistic or decadent movement energetically. His concepts on 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 Skerlic 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. At the same time he became the editor of the respectable literary magazine called Srpski knjizevni glasnik (Serbian Literary Herald). As a critic, he stood for the importance of the content of the literary text, and no less for its expressive and artistic form.

The method of his analysis involved the reconstruction of the social, cultural and political circumstances that formed the background and context of literary activity. Skerlic became famous for his style of writing, which was clear, picturesque, and concise.

Skerlic soon revealed a talent for scholarly, analytical thinking and for literary criticism. In a single decade Skerlic published several hundred essays and critical studies on all the major Serbian authors, collected in nine volumes as Pisci i knige (1907-1926; Writers and Books) as well as a cluster of long monographs, the more notable of which are Jakov Ignjatovic, Svetozar Markovic, Vojislav Ilic, Omladina i njena knjizevnost 1848-1871 (Young Serbia and Its Literature 1848-1871), Srpska knjizevnosti u XVIII veku (Serbian Literature in the 18th Century), and many others. These monographs provided a foundation for his major seminal work, Istorija nove srpske knjizevnosti (A History of Modern Serbian Literature), completed just two months prior to his untimely death. The Istorija contains an objective, erudite, and thorough critical analysis of Serbian writers and poets who succeeded in extricating themselves and their countrymen from the thralldom of the Holy Roman Empire (Habsburg Monarchy) and the Ottoman Empire in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.

When Istorija nove srpske knjizevnosti was first released in 1914, Bogdan Popovic praised it in a lead article in a literary review as a sensitive and definitive study of modern Serbian literature. In the years that followed, Jovan Skerlic's biographies of poets, writers, novelists and men of letters became a standard critical work, an indispensable tool for readers concerned with modern Serbian literature. Literary critics described the book as "a seminal study of modern literary imagination." Skerlic demonstrates the continuing relevance of his own provocative concept and provides important insight into the literary achievements of Serbia's most significant poets and writers.

From Skerlic's writings we known that he wished the new Serbian poetry to be "clear, intense, and straightforeward." His article Jedna Knjizevna Zaraza (A Literary Infection) demonstrates how repulsed he was by what he termed, with utter contempt, "decadence". Above all, he feared the influence of foreign, decadent poetry on the new Serbian poetry, since he never lost sight of the concept that poetry should serve to build a healthy and strong new generation. He challenged the pessimistic and somber tones in the new poems, and he detested the foreign poetic movements of cainism, satanism, and, generally, all the isms.

Skerlic had a great talent for rhetoric and for describing the lives and works of literary authors. His history consisted of critical essays on authors, accounts of the socio-historic context, and text analysis. Bio-bibliographical data would follow this critical nucleus. Skerlic's unique talent for integrating, his tendency to epitomize, condense, and classify according to a precise, pre-established historical roster, usually succeeded in synthesizing the individual pieces into a convincing whole.

Jovan Skerlic's role in literature and general cultural and political development led Predrag Protic to suggest that the period in Serbian history from 1900 until May 1914 should be named after him.

Skerlic was buried in the Novo groblje cemetery in Belgrade.