Background
He was born on the 6th of November 1787 in the Servian village of Trshich, on the border between Bosnia and Servia (now in Serbia).
(In the early nineteenth century, Vuk Karadzic, a Serb sch...)
In the early nineteenth century, Vuk Karadzic, a Serb scholar and linguist, collected and eventually published transcriptions of the traditional oral poetry of the South Slavs. It was a monumental and unprecedented undertaking. Karadzic gathered and heard sung to him the rich songs of Balkan peasants, outlaws, and professional singers and their rebel heroes. His four volumes constitute the classic anthology of Balkan oral poetry, treasured for nearly two centuries by readers of all literatures, and influential to such literary giants as Goethe, Merimee, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and Sir Walter Scott.This edition of the songs offers the most complete and authoritative translations ever assembled in English. Holton and Mihailovich, leading scholars of Slavic literature, have preserved here the unique meter and rhythm at the heart of Serbian oral poetry, as well as the idiom of the original singers. Extensive notes and comments aid the reader in understanding the poems, the history they record and the oral tradition that lies beneath them, the singers and their audience.The songs contain seven cycles, identified here in sections titled: Songs Before History, Before Kosovo, the Battle of Kosovo, Marko Karadzic, Under the Turks, Songs of the Outlaws, and Songs of the Serbian Insurrection. The editors have selected the best known and most representative songs from each of the cycles. A complete bibliography is also provided."This is the most comprehensive collection of Serbian oral poetry available today. The editors have done a superb job in presenting this invaluable material from the treasury of European folklore". Toma Longinovic, University of Wisconsin, Madison"There is no doubtin my mind that this large and informative collective will be of great and lasting value and interest to everyone concerned with the folk traditions and oral literatures of the perplexing and psychologically intriguing Southern Slavs". George Vid Tomashhevich, Buffalo State College
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He was born on the 6th of November 1787 in the Servian village of Trshich, on the border between Bosnia and Servia (now in Serbia).
He learnt to read and write in the old monastery Tronosha (near his native village).
He was engaged as writer and reader of letters to the commander of the insurgents of his district at the beginning of the first Servian rising against the Turks in 1804. Mostly in the position of a scribe to different voyvodes, sometimes as school-teacher, he served his country during the first revolution (1804 - 1813), at the collapse of which he left Servia, but instead of following Karageorge and other voyvodes to Russia he went to Vienna. There he was introduced to the great Slavonic scholar Yerney Kopitar, who, having heard him recite some Servian national ballads, encouraged him to collect the poems and popular songs, write a grammar of the Servian language, and, if possible, a dictionary.
This programme of literary work was adhered to by Karajich, who all his life acknowledged gratefully what he owed to his learned teacher. In the second half of the 18th and in the beginning of the 19th century all Servian literary efforts were written in a language which was not the Servian vernacular, but an artificial language, of which the foundation was the Old Slavonic in use in the churches, but somewhat Russianized, and mixed with Servian words forced into Russian forms. That language, called by its writers " the Slavonic-Servian, " was neither Slavonic nor Servian. It was written in Old Cyrillic letters, many of which had no meaning in the Servian language, while there were several sounds in that language which had no corresponding signs or letters in the Old Slavonic alphabet.
The Servian philosopher Dositey Obradovich (who at the end of the 18th century spent some time in London teaching Greek) was the first Servian author to proclaim the principle that the books for the Servian people ought to be written in the language of the people. But the great majority of his contemporaries were of opinion that the language of Servian literature ought to be evolved out of the dead Old Slavonic of the church books. The church naturally decidedly supported this view.
(In the early nineteenth century, Vuk Karadzic, a Serb sch...)
He was chosen as a member of various European learned societies, including: Member of academy in Berlin, Member of academy in Vienna, Member of academy in Saint Petersburg, Member of academy in Moscow, Member of academy in Göttingen, Member of academy in Zagreb.