SOURCE: Stolz, Benjamin. “Kopitar and Vuk: An Assessment of Their Roles in the Rise of the New Serbian Literary Language.” Papers in Slavic Philology 2 (1982): 150-67.

[In the following essay, Stolz describes Kopitar's considerable influence on Vuk Karadžić and the modern development of the Serbo-Croatian literary language.]

But the most important result of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars together was the quickening of nationalism, marked by a return to local origins: the collection and imitation of folklore, folk dance, and music, and medieval and Renaissance works. This passed beyond a revival of themes and forms into the rebirth of the use of inhibited languages … in literature.

Francis Scarfe

The scholarly literature on Jernej (Bartholomäus) Kopitar and Vuk Karadžić is so voluminous … that anyone who approaches the topic runs the risk of mere repetition, with slight reinterpretation, or of loose speculation and reckless theorizing. Still, the contribution of Jernej Kopitar and Vuk Karadžić to the rise of the modern Serbian literary language retains its fascination, for it is surely one of the most dramatic stories of individual intervention in the history of any literary language, Slavic or non-Slavic. The roles of Kopitar and Vuk deserve reexamination, for the impact of their collaboration can now be more accurately and dispassionately measured. Recent research, the increasing availability of published source materials connected with Vuk's career, and the evolution of the Serbian (and Serbo-Croatian) literary language in the two hundred years since the birth of Kopitar have placed all of us in a relatively favorable position.

Both men rose from South Slavic peasant origins, but beyond that their backgrounds diverged sharply: Kopitar, a learned Slovene Catholic with a classical education, was one of the greatest Slavists of his era; Karadžić, an Orthodox Serb who was to become his brilliant protégé in Vienna, had only a sporadic formal education and had functioned as a scribe and civil servant in unlettered rebel Serbia prior to the collapse of the first Uprising in 1813. Kopitar's romantic attitude toward vernacular language and folklore and his particularly strong interest in Serbian are evident in his correspondence as well as his publications, much of it dating from before his meeting with Vuk. It is clear that Kopitar owed a great deal to his European contemporaries and precursors: Herder, Grimm, Dobrovský, Schlözer, and Adelung. He cites Schlözer in support of his notion that truly vernacular-based literary languages are a prerequisite for culture among the emerging nations: “Culture does not begin among the peoples until they write in their own languages.”¹

Earlier, in his Slovene grammar Kopitar had mused along Herderian lines on the history of the Slavs. “One can think what the same religion, the same literary language—and why not also [living] under a single leader, a Slavic Vladimir (‘World-ruler’)—might have done even earlier for this gigantic nation?” He goes on to list a number of disadvantages suffered by the Slavic peoples: (1) the Great Schism, with the resultant split of Christianity into Eastern and Western churches; (2) the introduction of the Latin rite in those Slavic lands under the Western church, preventing the use of the Slavic tongues for liturgical purposes; (3) the subjugation of the Slavs (whom he describes as “peaceful farmers who in their innocence had forgotten to think ahead about war”) by Magyars, Turks, Mongols, and Germans—with the result that “on the throne and in all state functions the language of the foreign conquerors rules, while the poor native language is banished to the huts of the conquered, who are declared bondsmen.”² The situation, Kopitar tells us in a footnote, obtains for all the Slavs, except for the Russians, among whom the language of the folk is also the state language. A long discussion of orthographic problems ensues, with reference also to the difficulties engendered by the two alphabets, roman and cyrillic. Chaos reigns in the use of the roman alphabet in the West, including those Slavic languages where it is employed. “Only [let there be] an intelligent and strong leader and this anarchy too will vanish.”³

Kopitar, despite certain misconceptions, had a keen awareness of the linguistic situation among the Serbs and Croats. He credited Dositej Obradović with being the first Serbian vernacular writer, and knew his works intimately; and as Censor for Slavic books in the Austrian Empire, he read and reviewed the works of later Serbian writers, criticising and praising them according to their mastery of the written vernacular. Kopitar's “Patriotische Phantasien eines Slaven,” published in 1810, encapsulates his views on a number of important language issues three years prior to his meeting with Vuk. Dositej Obradović, among others, had noticed the close similarity of the West Balkan Slavic dialects; Kopitar echoed this, pointing out that while the Serbs as yet had neither a grammar nor dictionary of the vernacular language, “those of the Catholic Slaveno-Serbs [i.e., speakers of the three ‘Illyrian’ dialects—Ragusan, Bosnian, and Slavonian] are also usable here.”⁴ Vuk Karadžić was a Serbian nationalist and populist with an essentially rationalist outlook acquired through reading the works of Dositej Obradović. Vuk (like Kopitar) shared Dositej's conception of language, not religion, as the primary determinant of nationality. In meeting Kopitar, Vuk was drawn into the orbit of German Romanticism and became convinced of the need for a radical language reform among the Serbs—and one that would unite them with their Roman Catholic brothers. Ambitiously espousing Kopitar's program, he immediately undertook in turn the collection of verbal folklore and the compiling of a grammar and dictionary of the vernacular language.

A number of earlier researchers agree on the crucial role Kopitar played as Vuk's mentor. In essence, they say with varying degrees of emphasis what Aleksandar Belić wrote: “Jernej Kopitar made Vuk Karadžić the man that he was. All the ideas which Vuk set forth on the necessity of introducing the vernacular (narodni jezik) were also Kopitar's or were derived from his ideas. Vuk's reform was the work of the two of them, in which the primary initiative and the fundamental idea, and the whole plan, were given by Kopitar.”⁵ The Slovene Matija Murko had earlier expressed much the same thing: “Kopitar so to speak created the whole Vuk Karadžić …”;⁶ and elsewhere Murko called Kopitar “the man who found, taught, led, and supported Vuk Karadžić.”⁷ Rajko Nahtigal, the leading Slovene linguist of his day, wrote: “Without Kopitar, his help, support, and instruction, there would not have been the great reform work … by his genius student Vuk Stefanović Karadžić.”⁸ Vatroslav Jagić, whose critical judgment of Kopitar's career was both severe and humane, considered the collaboration with Vuk in the period up to the publication of Vuk's Rječnik (1818) to be Kopitar's most significant achievement, standing above all his polemics and critiques.⁹ Quite naturally it is possible to find observers who would prefer to deemphasize Kopitar's role. N. Banašević, while admitting the importance of Kopitar in “the crystallization of Vuk's aspirations,”¹⁰ disputes the notion that without him Vuk would have amounted to nothing. S. Nazečić¹¹ interprets Kopitar's guidance as an important but not overriding factor, arguing on the basis of letters and documents that Vuk in addition to his native intelligence had the experience, knowledge, and ambition that prepared him to accomplish the projects which he tackled in such swift succession after his arrival in Vienna.

Obviously there is a danger in viewing Vuk's journey to Vienna as a kind of linguistic Hegira, or in treating Kopitar and Vuk as if they were central characters in G. B. Shaw's “Pygmalion”—or Cyril and Methodius. The reality is never as simple as it is made to seem in textbooks. Nevertheless, even a cursory reading of Kopitar's and Vuk's relevant works, as well as their extensive correspondence, offers convincing evidence of the enormous part played by Kopitar in Vuk's emergence as a man of letters and language reformer. And at the same time it confirms Vuk's inherent strength and talent. To ask whether Vuk in fact followed the course set by Kopitar or whether and to what extent Vuk's own goals were achieved poses a different set of questions altogether. Ultimately, as we shall see, Kopitar's indirect role as a liaison between Vuk and the leading European scholars, intellectuals, and literati was to prove every bit as important as his direct influence upon him.

On many occasions public and private, Vuk himself credited Kopitar with launching his career. Sreznevskij asked Vuk how he became a man of letters. “Oh,” he said, “Here's what I think: Without this wooden leg, and without my good wife, and without the noble Kopitar, I wouldn't have been a književnik; and it also helped that I loved to travel. … But the main reason I became a književnik will always be Kopitar. In that regard I owe him, if not everything, then much, very much.”¹²

Vuk's private correspondence with Kopitar is replete with gratitude for Kopitar's continuing guidance. In one of his earliest letters to Vuk, Kopitar spurs him on (Vienna, 21 March 1815): “Are you going ahead with collecting for the Song Book? … With the Song Book as well as with the Grammar you are on the only true path. … Look for everything on Kraljević Marko. Also, about the Grammar (which I haven't been able to read through yet), collect for the second, third, etc., editions; it will go through twenty more, and even after our death will be called Vuk's Grammar.”¹³ Vuk responds (Novi Sad, 18/30 March 1815) after answering about collecting folk songs: “I'm thinking about the grammar too, and have noted down some small points, and some of the learned Serbs have urged me to attend to it again; but that will be hard for me to undertake except at your place in Vienna, for without you neither the grammar nor the song book would ever see the light of day.”¹⁴

Vuk's conscious effort to satisfy his mentor's taste for vernacular Serbian is apparent in a letter written a year later from Šišatovac (10 March 1816):

This is the third year since I became acquainted with you. Since that time I have begun to go back and to get closer to the folk speech, and I still haven't come to the right place. The second part of the song book is purer than the first, and the grammar; but the third part of the grammar and the Serbian dictionary will be written and printed just exactly the way the people speak. It's a difficult thing when something gets twisted into a man's head from childhood!”¹⁵

And a week later Vuk, still in Šišatovac, writes joyfully (17 March 1816):

Last night I received your letter and the review of the song book. Lucky Serbs, to have such a friend and admirer of their language and literature! But as for myself I can say nothing! … The dictionary will already be done in ten days (that is, all the words will be put in order); then I'll leave it here and go to Serbia especially on account of the dialects; from Serbia I intend to return (if the Serbs don't kill me) in July, and then I'll come to Vienna so that we can print it (the dictionary); without you nothing can be.”¹⁶

Kopitar, in a letter to Jakob Grimm of 23 May 1829, expresses his high esteem for the young Leopold von Ranke, who had just finished his Die serbische Revolution with Vuk as his informant; Kopitar is careful to reaffirm Grimm's leading role as Vuk's intellectual sponsor in Germany: “He [Ranke] will make his fortune, and soon, and a brilliant one. Moreover, the Serbs also owe him such a real debt of gratitude. But you are and remain our first patron.”¹⁷ Demonstrating his constant solicitude for Vuk, Kopitar keeps Grimm informed of Vuk's activities. In letters of 1832 Kopitar discusses Vuk's difficulties in getting his translation of the New Testament published. Even Kopitar cannot help in Vienna, so strong is the opposition of the Serbian church:

Catholic police believe a schismatic monk more than an otherwise irreproachable Catholic Censor! But it is really so, and the situation here can't be helped. …¹⁸ Here is Vuk's answer. See if you can't help him (and me) somehow get the New Testament into print; for Turkish Serbs, since the Christian Macaronians [Kopitar refers here to the Serbian Church authorities who favor the Russian Church Slavonic and slavenosrpski traditions of the Vojvodina] … are still too strong.¹⁹

On the death of the formidable Metropolitan Stratimirović, in October 1836, Kopitar again writes to Grimm:

The Serbian Metropolitan Stratimirović has died at the age of seventy-nine, after having the day before hospitably entertained Prince Miloš! … He slandered me and even the good Vuk quite unscrupulously to Austria as a Russoman, to Russia as a Uniatoman!²⁰

The details of Kopitar's background and world view relevant to his influence upon Vuk can scarcely be hinted at in a paper of this length. Although much of the story of their collaboration has been told elsewhere, a great deal of research remains, for example, to properly illuminate the nuances of their mutual relationship, which was obviously productive and unusually altruistic. For the sake of brevity, therefore, it seems appropriate merely to list Kopitar's chief contributions to Vuk's emergence as a language reformer: (1) The Herderian notion that the language of folklore could serve as a model for a vernacular-based Serbian literary language; (2) the conviction that a radical reform of the Serbian alphabet and orthography was needed; (3) the notion that the language of the existing Serbian writing tradition was “macaronic,” “Russo-Slavo-Serbian jargon”—a bastardized form of Russian Church Slavonic, eighteenth-century Russian, and Serbian—and therefore not a true descendant of Old Serbian; (4) a practical program to overcome the existing deficiencies—published collections of folk songs, a grammar, and above all, a dictionary of vernacular Serbian.

Kopitar's collaboration with Vuk on the dictionary (published in 1818) was no doubt his most important scholarly contribution to Vuk's success. His help in Vuk's translation of the New Testament might also be mentioned, but although the manuscript was ready in the 1820's, its publication was suppressed until 1847. The ultimate success of Vuk's efforts, however, resulted not so much from any theoretical indoctrination, scholarly training, or direct aid Kopitar provided but rather indirectly from the latter's effectiveness as an agent for Vuk and his work among the leading scholars of the day, and especially the Germans. Vuk was fighting against tremendous odds and powerfully entrenched opponents. Kopitar correctly understood that for Vuk to succeed in his revolutionary task he would need the prestige and legitimacy of European recognition. He and Vuk may not, however, have realized how many years would pass before this recognition took effect in Serbia and how oblique and in certain ways mixed the results would be. In any case Vuk sensed that time was on his side, and that Serbian youth would be the key to the installation of his vernacular-based language as the literary norm.

Only a decade after his fateful meeting with Kopitar, Vuk Karadžić was famous throughout Europe, was a member of academic and learned societies, and held an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree. Kopitar did not engineer these honors for Vuk, but his connections helped make them possible. Shortly after Vuk's arrival in Vienna and his discovery by Kopitar, Vuk had made the acquaintance, through Kopitar, of the likes of Jakob Grimm, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Friedrich Schlegel, who had come to the Congress of Vienna with German diplomats. (Grimm would subsequently write laudatory reviews of Book III of Vuk's folk songs and the dictionary as well as an introduction to the German translation of Vuk's grammar, which he not only extensively edited, but for which he even found a publisher.) In 1819, after the publication of his folk songs, his grammar, and his dictionary had brought him European renown, Vuk traveled to Russia. Stopping on the way in Cracow he was granted membership in the Towarzystwo naukowe krakowskie. In Moscow he was made a member of the Moskovskoe obščestvo ljubitelej russkoj slovesnosti, and at St. Petersburg won a gold medal from the Russian Academy for his dictionary. Among the luminaries whom he met in Russia were Karamzin and N.P. Rumjancev. During his visit to Germany (March 1823-March 1824) Vuk saw Grimm again, met Vater in Halle, received an honorary doctorate at Jena, and was accorded a reception by Goethe himself. A short list of foreign scholars, writers, poets, and statesmen (besides those mentioned earlier) whom Vuk met in Vienna, on his travels, or corresponded with, includes Dobrovský, Šafárik, Hanka, Palacký, Wieland, Ranke, Talvj, Šiškov, Vostokov, Griboedov, Gnedič, Polevoj, Köppen, Žukovskij, Sreznevskij, Nadeždin, and Pogodin. Janeff's claim that without Grimm and Goethe, Vuk would have amounted to “only a small episode in the history of Serbdom”²¹ is of course tendentious and inflated, but the importance of such contacts is not to be underestimated.

Leopold von Ranke is an interesting case in point. The brilliant young German historian came to Vienna in 1827 with the purpose of studying the recently acquired Venetian archives. Kopitar introduced him to Vuk, and from their acquaintance sprang von Ranke's Die serbische Revolution. Written on the basis of the author's detailed conversations with Vuk and access to his papers, it is often considered their joint work. First published in Hamburg in 1829, this famous history of the Serbian uprisings was to go through numerous printings and two revised editions during von Ranke's lifetime, and was translated into Serbian, Russian, and English. Its huge impact upon European knowledge of Serbia and the Balkans is generally recognized. As Vladimir Stojančević puts it in his introduction to a recent Serbian translation, “Die serbische Revolution had the same significance for the political understanding of the ‘Serbian question’ in European politics as Vuk's collections of songs had for the knowledge of the culture of the Serbian people in the world.”²²

Vuk looked to Russia as well as Western Europe for support in his struggle to gain acceptance in his native Serbia, and was well aware of the importance of scholarly connections, east and west, as a means of promoting his own works (in the original and in translation) as well as those of associates well disposed to his cause. In 1825 Vuk writes to V.G. Anastas'evič (1775-1845, a Russian bibliographer and translator) announcing that he is forwarding a copy of his Serbian grammar “edited in German by the famous German philologist and grammarian Jakob Grimm.”²³ In the same year he asks P.I. Köppen whether Talvj has sent him a copy of her translations of his folk songs, Volkslieder der Serben; in letters of 1826 and 1829 Vuk informs Köppen that he has sent copies of Šafárik's Geschichte der slavischen Sprache und Literatur (“which I received from the author for forwarding to you”) and Ranke's Die serbische Revolution.²⁴

In fact Vuk, who frequently proclaimed his desire to turn Serbia into an educated European country (even offering to teach Prince Miloš to read and write!), was at pains to use not only Western Europe but also Russia as models. Vuk's Prvi srpski bukvar, published in Vienna in 1827, has a special foreword for Russians explaining the phonetic values of the various letters in his new orthography. And while holding up the European example of high literacy, he is quick to point out that the Russians had given up the traditional names of the letters a century before as a hindrance to the mastery of reading:

Let us not take as a model peoples of other faiths and races, but the Russians, who are of one faith and race with us. A hundred years ago, when they separated their language and alphabet from the church language and alphabet, they recognized that the names of our letters were difficult, too difficult, for learning to read; therefore even then in their schools in place of az, buki, vjedi … they began to teach a, be, ve …²⁵

His long and friendly association and correspondence with I.I. Sreznevskij attests to the success of his “Russian” strategy. By the 1840's Vuk's efforts had begun to make real headway among the Serbs. Sreznevskij writes in July 1842, “… I am sincerely delighted that the Serbian government has begun, as it ought, to appreciate your merits … ; with time, God grant, they will take the path you have laid out and will cease to be ridiculous in the eyes of people who understand the importance of nationality, national education, and literature.”²⁶

In 1847 Vuk expressed his amazement to the Russian historian V.I. Grigorovič at the favorable notice his own work had received: “Really! Have you read in Part IV of the Srpski ljetopis of last year, ‘Neke čerte iz “pověstnice našeg” kn'ižestva’? I never hoped that something like this would be said in this Ljetopis during my lifetime.”²⁷ What Vuk referred to was a wide-ranging article by the editor of the journal, Jovan Subotić, in which Vuk is described as a successor to Dositej Obradović, and in which nearly all aspects of Vuk's work—including his orthography—are singled out for praise. Serbian folk songs, writes Subotić, are not just Volkslieder but Nationlieder, and stand closer to the poetry of the ancient Greeks than does the poetry of any educated European nation. The Serbs, he claims, appreciated their songs long before Goethe dreamed of the Hasanaginica, and before Talvj was even born. When they were published by Vuk in Serbian,

And when after that learned Europe exclaimed not only about the inherent value, but about the form of communication, the language in which the songs were sung, then our learned men also saw that it was possible to write in the vernacular (narodni jezik) in such a way that it pleased Europe. Now it was useless to say that books could not be written in the vernacular; and if a teacher was found who said that, then the student couldn't believe him, for on the opposite side stood much greater authority. … Dositej introduced the vernacular into books, and Vuk showed us which vernacular it was; Dositej showed us that we should write books in the vernacular, and Vuk showed us how we should write. … At the beginning Vuk exaggerated in his language, and under the guise of the vernacular took everything that was common. But this was on the one hand natural, for what reform at the beginning hasn't gone to the opposite extreme, and on the other hand necessary: for if something was to be gained, everything had to be sought. But still that served a good purpose in that it immediately became clear what was not needed and what was. And he himself has long since drawn his compass more narrowly, and on the other hand has broadened the territory of the vernacular. Now Hercegovina is not the Serbian Paris, but Hercegovina is everywhere Serbian is spoken—that is, all the lands in which Serbs live and speak Serbian seem suitable for his attention.²⁸

The year 1847 has often been cited to mark Vuk's triumph, the final victory of his vernacular-based literary language among the Serbs. Four major works were published in that year which supposedly enshrined Vuk's language as the norm: Njegoš's Gorski vijenac; Radičević's Pjesme; Vuk's translation of the New Testament; and Daničić's Rat za srpski jezik i pravopis. But is the language of these works sufficiently uniform, or close enough to Vuk's previous writings, and especially to his normative works, to be called Vukovian? With the exception of Daničić's, the answer is no, as modern linguistic research has conclusively shown. Njegoš's poetic language was original, idiosyncratic, and contained numerous regional as well as Russian and Church Slavonic elements. Radičević, a disciple of Vuk's, nevertheless composed his poetry in a vernacular which bore significant traces of his native dialect. Vuk's New Testament displays a language which had evolved in many ways and which looked far different from the raw West Serbian vernacular of his 1818 dictionary. Nevertheless, the publication of these works, like the favorable reaction toward Vuk's reform by Jovan Subotić, indicates that by the late 1840's the balance had begun to tip decisively among the Serbs toward acceptance of a vernacular-based literary language which, if not identical to Vuk's in orthography or phonology, or even lexicon, was far closer to the Vukovian norm than to the various slavenosrpski models of the fading Vojvodina tradition. Despite the efforts of Duro Daničić, Vuk's jekavian reflex (even in its somewhat moderated last stage) never took root in the Belgrade-centered Serbian literary language; and although Vuk's radical orthography was grudgingly permitted for use in state editions in 1860, it was not officially adopted for public education until 1868. Kopitar died in 1844, and Vuk twenty years later. Vuk lived to see a vernacular-based language installed as the literary language. But was it really his language, or was Vuk himself part of a resurgent vernacular tradition? I believe the latter is correct, but I also believe that Kopitar and Vuk hastened the evolution of the Serbian literary language in the direction it ultimately took. Vuk, who in Skerlić's words “gave Serbian nationalism a West Serbian character,”²⁹ was aided as much by the European recognition he gained through Kopitar as by any other factor.

What led to the abandonment of the slavenosrpski tradition of the Prečani, the educated transriparian Serbs of Hungary, and to the acceptance of a vernacular-based literary language? Although there was a hiatus in written literary activity during the Ottoman occupation followed by a revival under strong Russian influence in the Vojvodina, there existed among the Serbs an unbroken vernacular tradition which was manifested in non-literary and literary genres and in written as well as oral modes of expression. Outside Serbia, Gavril Venclović's poetic works, written in the early eighteenth century but only recently published, reveal a mastery of vernacular Serbian; and Dositej Obradović's literary production in the late eighteenth century, if it does bear the mark of a learned Russian influence, nevertheless represents the strongest pre-Vukovian model of the vernacular literary tradition. These are not isolated examples. Both before and during Vuk's career as a language reformer there were Serbs who wrote in the vernacular with varying degrees of success, a fact which Kopitar and Vuk both acknowledged. Moreover, Vuk himself had written in the vernacular during the Uprisings, thus following a Serbian usage for administrative and diplomatic correspondence that was at least seven hundred years old. This indigenous vernacular tradition, combined with the massive illiteracy that prevailed among the population of Serbia proper, formed a barrier to the spread of the Russian-influenced slavenosrpski tradition of the Hungarian Serbs—and a powerful support for a language reform along Vukovian lines.

The historical preconditions for the success—such as it was—of Vuk's reform were two in number. The first was the resurgence under Miloš Obrenović of Belgrade as the administrative center of the semi-autonomous pašaluk after the second Uprising and of the autonomous Principality of Serbia in 1833; with a restored “national capital” there occurred a concomitant shift of cultural power southward from Budapest and Novi Sad. The second was the exposure of the next generation of Serbian youth to European universities, where they were introduced not only to Romanticism, nationalism, and democratic ideas, but also to the prestige and legitimacy of Vuk's vernacular-based literary language, which it had won through his published works in the original and in translation, and to the recognition also accorded the heroic Serbs, for example, in von Ranke's Die serbische Revolution.

Ljubomir Nenadović (1826-1895) is a striking example of this transitional generation in new Serbia, the first generation of European-educated urban intellectuals centered in Belgrade. The son of Prota Matija Nenadović, a prominent figure in rebel Serbia, he was born in the same north Serbian ekavian village (Brankovina) and attended school there and in Valjevo and then in Belgrade, where he studied for five years at the gymnasium and lycée. In 1844, at the age of eighteen, he began his years as a wandering scholar and writer. Early in his first year abroad Ljubomir writes from Prague to his former classmates at the Belgrade lycée. Evoking the muses to compose two poems which express greetings to his friends and homesickness for Belgrade, Nenadović describes a few of the wonders of Prague. Significantly, the only person he mentions in the letter is Pavel Šafárik, “who is truly among the best of men, and whom I recommend to you as comrades that you respect him.”³⁰ Šafárik, the noted Slovak philologist and ethnographer, had long taught at Novi Sad before moving to Prague, and knew the South Slavic world intimately; he and Vuk had first met at Varadin in 1820 and had enjoyed a cordial and mutually supportive professional relationship ever since.³¹

After a year at Prague, Nenadović moved on to the universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, and Paris. Though he never took a final examination at any of these institutions, he seems to have pursued his studies with some interest, reading Czech and Serbian folk poetry (Vuk's collection), Branko Radičević, the Dubrovnik poets, philosophy, religious history, and Slavic philology (he translated Mickewicz). Without a diploma he returned to Belgrade from revolutionary Paris in 1848 and became a professor at the gymnasium. In 1850 he founded the journal Šumadinka and plunged into the publishing of a great quantity of material, including his father's strongly vernacular memoirs, and numerous translations.

Ljubomir Nenadović is best remembered for his mastery of the vernacular language and for his effortless, unselfconscious prose style. While Nenadović's orthography was traditional, he shared with his Serbian contemporaries the ekavian reflex and the lack of /h/. Otherwise he is basically Vukovian in his lexicon (despite an occasional borrowing) and grammar, but his syntax gives a more modern impression than Vuk's. As Miodrag Popović writes:

Nenadović's letters from abroad (putopisi) signaled a new era in Serbian literature. The links between living speech and the writer's word are even somewhat more obvious than in Vuk's work. Both writers, that is, have the same vernacular (narodni govor) as their point of departure; but Vuk's written style is more studied, more polished, heavier, while Nenadović's is more spontaneous, closer to the reader. Vuk, with his prose on the Serbian Uprising and his translation of the New Testament, introduces the vernacular (narodni jezik) into literature as early as the 1820's, but it took Nenadović to make the urban reader fond of literary prose in the vernacular. … Vuk writes, Nenadović talks (priča); Vuk is closer to the village, Nenadović to the city, Vuk's work is a monument to the Serbian language, while Nenadović is the beginning of the urban era in the development of the vernacular literary language (narodni književni jezik).³²

Quoting Ljubomir Nenadović himself from his Pisma iz Nemačke:

The same is true of human reason and writing. … You should just let the pen go along the paper; line after line will come by themselves. Writing is like yarn, it comes from the brain like a thread from the skein; not every skein need be silk, it can be made of nettles as well. Words are bricks, and style is architecture; not every building need be symmetrical, not every piece of writing need have a system. To write: that is the same as having a conversation with yourself. When you write, you do nothing more than photograph your thoughts. Not all photographs have to be beautiful.³³

It has been observed that it is not the normative grammarians who establish and consolidate literary languages, but good writers. The works of Ljubomir Nenadović and other popular writers of the new Serbia established once and for all the post-Vukovian norm which was to culminate in the distinctly modern “Belgrade style” of the early twentieth century and the extensively elaborated, constantly evolving Serbian literary language of the present day. How these same writers might have written had Vuk never met Kopitar is an entirely different question, the answers to which can only be guessed at. Clearly, however, without the sponsorship of European scholars and intellectuals, the intervention of Vuk Karadžić would never have won European prestige and legitimacy, and the language of the second generation of modern Serbian writers, even if essentially vernacular in its base, would have been markedly different in lexicon, phonology, morphology, syntax, and especially orthography. And finally, without the international acclaim achieved by Vuk with Kopitar's guidance, it is debatable whether modern Serbian and Croatian would have developed in tandem, with the result that we can speak today of a Serbo-Croatian literary language and not just Serbo-Croatian dialects.

Notes

1. Rajko Nahtigal, ed., Jerneja Kopitarja spisov, II del, 1 knjiga (Ljubljana: Akademija znanosti in umetnosti, 1944), p. 6; translations into English are mine (B.A.S.) throughout the present article.

2. Bartholomäus Kopitar, Grammatik der slavischen Sprache in Krain, Kärnten und Steyermark (Laibach/Ljubljana, 1808), p. xvii.

3. Kopitar, p. xxvi.

4. Bartholomäus Kopitar, Kleinere Schriften, ed. Franz Miklosich (Vienna, 1857), p. 67.

5. Aleksandar Belić, Vukova borba za narodni i književni jezik: rasprave i predavanja (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1948), p. 198.

6. Matija Murko, Izbrano delo, ed. Anton Slodnjak (Ljubljana, 1962), p. 277.

7. Matyáš (Matija) Murko, Rozpravy z oboru slovanské filologie, Práce Slovanského ústavu v Praze, svazek IV, ed. Jiří Horák (Prague, 1937), 27-28.

8. Nahtigal, p. xiii.

9. Vatroslav Jagič, ed., Enciklopedija slavjanskoj filologii, 1 (St. Petersburg, 1910), p. 196.

10. Nikola Banaševic, “Kako je Vuk postao književnik,” Kovčežić: prilozi i grada o Dositeju i Vuku, 1 (1958), 44-45, 54.

11. Salko Nazečić, “Vukova staza,” Izraz: časopis za književnu i umjetničku kritiku, 6 (1964), 628, 629.

12. Izmail I. Sreznevskij, “Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. Biografska i bibliografska skice,” trans. Miloš M. Moskovljević, Srpski književni glasnik, 52 (1937), 388, 390.

13. Ljubomir Stojanović, ed., Vukova prepiska, 1 (Belgrade, 1907), p. 143.

14. Stojanović, 144-45.

15. Stojanović, 156-57.

16. Stojanović, 159-60.

17. Max Vasmer, ed., B. Kopitars Briefwechsel mit Jakob Grimm, Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, 7 (1937), 62-63.

18. Vasmer, p. 92.

19. Vasmer, p. 94.

20. Vasmer, 160-61.

21. Janko Janeff, Südosteuropa und der deutsche Geist (Berlin: Fritsch Verlag, 1943), p. 132.

22. Leopold Ranke, Srpska revolucija, trans. Ognjan Radović (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1965), p. 9.

23. S. A. Vinogradov, E.P. Naumov, and G.P. Čekanova, “Iz perepiski Vuka Karadžiča s russkimi učënymi,” Slavjanskoe istočnikovedenie (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), p. 189.

24. Vinogradov et al, 187, 189, 195.

25. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Prvi srpski bukvar (Vienna, 1827, repr. Belgrade, 1978), p. 2.

26. P. T. Gromov, ed., “Perepiska V.S. Karadžiča s I.I. Sreznevskim,” Razvitie kapitalizma i nacional'nye dviženija v slavjanskix stranax (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), p. 328.

27. Vinogradov et al, p. 200.

28. Jovan Subotić, “Neke čerte iz” pověstnice serbskog” Kn'ižestva,” Serbskij lětopis”, vol. 75, part 4 (1846), 104-124, esp. 118, 121-23.

29. Jovan Skerlić, Istorija nove srpske književnosti (Belgrade, 1914), p. 274.

30. Savo Andrić, “Pismo Ljubomira Nenadovića iz Praga 1844 godine,” Zbornik Istorijskog muzeja Srbije, 8-9 (1972), 119-25.

31. Ljubomir Stojanović, Životirad Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića (Belgrade, 1924), 187, 287, 291-92.

32. Miodrag Popović, Istorija srpske književnosti:Romantizam,II (Belgrade: Nolit, 1972), p. 269.

33. Ljubomir P. Nenadović, Pisma iz Nemačke (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1922), p. 10.