Svetozar Marković | |
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Portrait of Svetozar Marković
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Born |
Zaječar, Principality of Serbia |
21 September 1846
Died | 26 February 1875 Trieste, Austria-Hungary |
(aged 28)
Era | 19th-century philosophy |
Region | Western Philosophy |
School | Socialism |
Notable ideas
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Serbia in the East |
Influences
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Influenced
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Svetozar Marković (Serbian Cyrillic: Светозар Марковић, pronounced [sʋêtozaːr mǎːrkoʋit͡ɕ]; 9 September 1846 – 26 February 1875) was an influential Serbian political activist, literary critic and philosopher. He developed an activistic anthropological philosophy with a definite program of social change. He was called the Serbian Nikolay Dobrolyubov.
Marković was born in the town of Zaječar on 9 September 1846, the son of a police clerk. Marković's childhood was spent in the village of Rekovac and then the town of Jagodina. The family moved to Kragujevac in 1856. He reached adolescence at about the time Mihailo Obrenović became the Prince of Serbia. In 1860 he began to study at the gymnasium in Belgrade and in 1863 at the Grande École of Belgrade, the highest educational body in Serbia at that time, founded in 1808.
It was only at the Grande École that he began to become interested in literature and politics falling under the influences of Vuk Karadžić and Vladimir Jovanović, a leading Serbian Liberal. Because of his outstanding record as a student at the Belgrade college, his professors unanimously nominated him for a post-graduate scholarship to study abroad. He chose to study in Russia, in St. Petersburg in particular. For the next three years, he lived in Russia and had come under the influence of Russian radicals of the 1860s, but his political agitation forced him to leave Russia for Switzerland. At the ETH Zurich, a STEM university in the City of Zurich, Marković resumed his interrupted studies and in his spare time continued to write articles on social and political issues. There too, politics got in the way of his studies, and when his scholarship was suspended, he returned to Belgrade with new ideas. Marković immediately began attracting attention and from 1868 until his early death, became one of the leading figures in Serbia's quest to reclaim its lost ancestral territories and enter into the comity of nations.