Say It as You Read It

A Slovenian linguist by the name of Jernej Kopitar was working in Vienna at the time, and he had already completed a large amount of work for the outline of what would become modern Serbian. What he needed was a Serbian to come along and put in the hard yards, put in the groundwork to complete the task. As a result, Jernej Kopitar and Vuk Karadžić fast became friends. Karadžić would prove to be just what Jernej was looking for.

At this point, the Serbian written language was based on the liturgical language of the Serbian Orthodox Church, a script known as Slaveno-Serbian. This was completely understandable, as the church was the only decent-sized institution to survive the many Ottoman invasions and occupations and as a result was the only one to preserve high cultural ties with those glorious Serbian Kingdoms of years gone by. The main problem with the language was that it was archaic as balls, and took many features from Old Bulgarian and Russian. The only folk who used it were those heavily involved in the church, with the vast majority of Serbs speaking something rather different. They wrote as they spoke, read as they wrote. Think of it as text message language but less soul-destroying.

Being a chap brought up in the peasantry, Karadžić had been exposed to the poetry and songs of the Serbian people from a young age. He began to collect these songs in an attempt to put them to paper, to take the vast cultural reservoir of traditional songs, imagery and themes and found a regularised literary language in the process. The conservatives of Serbia were understandably miffed by all of this, but the momentum of the peasants proved too strong.

Karadžić published his two volumes of songs in 1815 (he eventually published nine), the first of which consisted of mostly lyric songs (which he referred to as ‘women’s songs’) and the second was full of stirring heroic songs. It was at this time that the importance of the Battle of Kosovo began to scrap its way to the fore, with Karadžić frequently comparing Miloš Obilić (the man thought to have jammed a knife through the heart of the Ottoman leader of that invasive battle) to Achilles. On the whole Kosovo took a fairly minor role in his collection, but from this point on it would be latched onto with greater frequency.

As a result, Vuk Karadžić became the founder of modern Serbian literary consciousness. His work became essentially the voice of the national spirit, inadvertently creating a powerful symbol of potential Yugoslav unity. Rousing peasant songs weren’t exclusive to the Serbs of course, and Karadžić’s collection contained songs from Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro and Slavonia. Epic poetry was a shared property of the South Slavs, but Vuk was a man of his time. To him, you were a Serb if you spoke like one. He may have created the basis for contemporary Yugoslav literature, but Vuk Karadžić didn’t give a hoot about such things. He was doing what he considered to be purely Serbian work.

Along with his volumes of epics, Vuk Karadžić published the first Serbian grammar, a dictionary, and in 1847 a translation of the new testament. That man Kopitar did a lot of PR work, making the intellectuals of Austrian and German society aware of Vuk’s forays into the art of Serbia’s simple folk. Karadžić continued collecting songs well into the 1830s, at which point he went to Kotor (Montenegro) to recover from a bout of illness and subsequently met another Vuk, Vuk Vrčević, who went on to be one of his most loyal collaborators.

At this time however Karadžić’s work was banned throughout Serbia, at the decision of its ruler, Miloš Obrenović. There were many reasons for this, the main one being that it was a time of uneasy peace between Obrenović and the Ottomans, and it was felt that Karadžić’s work was potentially politically hazardous. Serbs had been under Turkish rule for a fair whack by this point, and despite the failure of Karadjordje’s uprising, the scent of independence had been crammed deep into the Serbian nose. Probably fairly, ol’ Miloš thought that the inspirational olde-timer songs that Karadžić was publishing would stir up further national pride, and the recently ended (second) Serbian Uprising against the Turks would be revisited with terrible consequences. Out of that uprising Serbia had won an uneasy autonomy, one that couldn’t be risked.

Even so, Karadžić was reforming the Serbian language whether Miloš liked it or not. He established that Serbian has 30 distinct sounds, and six of these had no Cyrillic letter equivalent. He introduced new letters and discarded some of the obsolete ones. He made a concise effort to distance modern Serbian from Slaveno-Serbian and to bring it closer to common folk speech. In his reformation of the language, Vuk Karadžić made the official language from the words of the people.

Despite his influence and not infrequent luck Vuk lived in poverty throughout the majority of his life. His work was viciously opposed by the Church and by many other writers, due to its almost heretical nature. Abandoned by the ruling Serbs of the time, Karadžić was nonetheless honoured across Europe and decorated by the monarchs of both Russia and Austria-Hungary. He was particularly popular in the former, and it was the Tsar of Russia who granted our Vuk his pension in 1826. Despite their opposition, his modern Serbian language was adopted by the government in 1868, four years after his death. He died in Vienna at the age of 76. How he managed to get to that age is a mystery to me, as his life was plagued with illness and injury. He had a wooden leg for much of his life, due to complications when young and a refusal to amputate the thing. 76! Not bad.

Just a reminder: the preceding was an excerpt from the book, An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery: The good and the great of Slavic history, dusted off and celebrated, which you can read more about here and here, and buy online here.