Svetolik Ranković

Svetolik Ranković (Serbian Cyrillic: Светолик Ранковић; Velika Moštanica, 7 December 1863-Belgrade 18 March 1899) was a Serbian author most prominent in the period of Realism. As a realist, he was the first Serbian author to take a significant step towards the emancipation of prose from the laws of event-centered narration. He was referred to as the Russian pupil for his elegant style.

Svetolik Ranković was born at Velika Moštanica, near Belgrade, on the seventh of December 1863. Ranković's preparation for writing lay in the precocious and omnivorous reading of his boyhood—perhaps stimulated by the example of his father (who was a teacher at the time before becoming a priest) and the scholarly teachers at school. In grammar school he began reading and studying the works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Turgenev, Gogol, Vladimir Korolenko, in fact, all the Russian greats of the nineteenth century, which made a lasting impression on him. After graduating from the Seminary of St. Sava in Belgrade and from the prestigious Kiev Theological Academy in 1888, he returned to Serbia to teach religion, but found a country in flux, economically, socially and most of all, politically. In the Balkans at the time, as in other parts of the world, many people reacted against the authorities and makeshift politics. Agitation for reform was carried on in particular by several intellectuals, among them the most influential were Svetolik Ranković, Milovan Glišić, Janko Veselinović, and Laza Lazarević of Serbia, and Aleko Konstantinov and Tsanko Tserkovski of Bulgaria.

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