Laza Lazarević
| Laza Lazarević Лаза Лазаревић |
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| Born |
Lazar Lazarević May 13, 1851 |
| Died | January 10, 1891 (aged 39) |
| Other names | Laza |
Lazar "Laza" K. Lazarević (Serbian Cyrillic: Лазаp К. Лазаревић, Šabac, 13 May 1851 – Belgrade, 10 January 1891, Gregorian calendar) was a Serbian writer, psychiatrist, and neurologist. The primary interest of Lazarević throughout his short life was the science of medicine. In that field he was one of the greatest figures of his time, pre-eminently distinguished and useful as a doctor, teacher, and a writer on both medical issues and literary themes. To him literature was an avocation; yet he was very good at it and thought of himself as a man of letters. He translated the works of Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Ivan Turgenev.
Few writers have achieved fame with such a small opus as Lazar Kuzmanović Lazarević, for it rests on nine stories; yet he is considered one of the best Serbian writers of the nineteenth century. He was often referred to as the Serbian Turgenev. During his brief life, "the less than prolific opus" enshrined him in Serbian literature as a writer who introduced the psychological story genre.
Born in Šabac in 1851, to Kuzman Lazarević, a small trader, and his wife Jelka, Lazar Lazarević was brought up in the close atmosphere of a typical Serbian provincial, patriarchal family. When he was eleven years old his father (Kuzman) died and Jelka immediately took over the care of the family, which consisted of Lazarević and three sisters. His mother fostered a deep feeling of family unity and affection, which influenced Lazarević all his life. Lazarević's sister Milka married the Serbian writer and poet, Milorad Popović Šapčanin, and settled in Belgrade, where Lazarević stayed as a student from 1866 until 1871, before going abroad to study. In Belgrade he attended high school and in 1867 he entered the law faculty of Belgrade's Grandes écoles, but soon decided that medicine was his true calling.
The period of Lazarević's life as a student in Belgrade (1866–1871) was one of considerable intellectual activity. In 1867 the second annual meeting of the Ujedinjena Omladina Srpska (United Serb Youth) was held there. This organization, which spun out the Serbian romantic movement, sought to unite all Serbs, whether of the Serbian principality, the Vojvodina or the European Turkish-controlled territories, in order to raise national consciousness and culture as a means of achieving the liberation of all Serbian-speaking peoples into a greater, cosmopolitan Serbia (after all Serbian territories in the hands of the Habsburg and Ottomans are redeemable to their rightful inhabitants and landowners according to law). The general development of Serbian intellectual life in the 1860s led to an increased interest in European culture, especially literature, and the literary periodicals Danica (1860) and Matica srpska (1866) in Novi Sad and Stojan Novaković's Vila (1863) in Belgrade contained many translations from French, German, Russian, and English literatures. Lazarević, absorbed by the prospective literary and political challenges that came out of these activities, undertook the task to translate Gogol's "Diary of a Madman", Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? (1863), a work that eventually had profound influence on Svetozar Marković and other members of Omladina, the United Serb Youth.
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