He had three brothers. He lost his father early, when the boy was 13. But his mother Ana selflessly insisted on the children's education.
His five-year-old brother Miloš Popović moved from Novi Sad to Belgrade at the age of twenty-three, where he was editor for a decade. Serbian newspaper, the official newspaper of Obrenović's Serbia. In addition, he edited the literary newspaper Danube River, as well as the leaf The Serb in German. He also started a conservative newspaper in Belgrade See you there, which he edited for 15 years, until its closure in 1876.
Vasilije Popović, the two-year-younger brother, was educated in Novi Sad and Szeged, and completed seminary in Belgrade. He belonged to a very conservative faction of the clergy, and was often criticized by Jovan Jovanović Zmaj. He was an opponent of Svetozar Miletić and Jovan Subotić, as well as the People's Party.
Coming from a family where education was valued, but also where his father purchased and read Serbian heroic poems, Đuro Daničić was educated first in his hometown, and then in Požun, today's Bratislava. As a very young man in the multilingual Habsburg monarchy, he learned several languages. German and Hungarian, classical Latin, but in Požun he additionally acquired knowledge of Slovak, Polish, Czech and Russian. He began to study law in Pest and Vienna, but fate had other plans for him.
ELITE UNIT IN WAR
Vuk's language reforms had polarized the Serbian learned public of the time for decades. Some welcomed them with enthusiasm, sensing the revolutionary spirit that combined the vernacular language and high literacy. Others, such as learned Serbs from Austria-Hungary, led by Jovan Hadžić, founder of Matica Srpska and a protégé of Metternich, defended six centuries of literacy associated with the church – Serbo-Slavic, Russo-Slavic, Slavonic. “From 1768, when Orfelin, the first among Serbs, in the preface to the Slavonic Magazine, published the idea of the general benefit of writing in the vernacular, to 1868, when the last ban on Vuk's orthography was lifted in Serbia, exactly one hundred years passed,” notes Vojislav Đurić in the preface to the collection “The Book of Đuro Daničić”. This means that in the Hundred Years' War, the young man from Novi Sad appeared at its decisive stage. It turns out that he was worth several linguistic divisions. Jovan Bošković's note remains about how the young Daničić, upon arriving in Vienna, saw Vuk and Franc Miklošič, a Slovenian linguist and author of the Comparative Grammar of the Slovenian Languages. The former "revealed the treasures of the Serbian language to Daničić, and the latter gave him the light so that he could see and understand those treasures."
Relying on his multilingualism, Daničić became one of Vuk's most important collaborators. However, his polemical work "The War for the Serbian Language and Spelling", which was published in Pest in 1847 due to the lack of a censor's permit in Vienna, is one of the turning points in the development of the Serbian language. In fact, it is a response to the work of Jovan Hadžić, which he published under the title Fight published under his literary pseudonym Miloš Svetić.
From today's perspective, it is a complete triumph of everything that Đuro and Vuk advocated. That year, Njegoš's Gorski vijenac, the poems of Branko Radičević, and Vuk's New Testament appeared. The victory of Vuk's principles was assured. But it didn't seem that way back then.
WHAT IS REALLY WRITTEN IN WAR?
"Svetić scolds Vuk! He scolds him because he does not know what Vuk is in Serbian literature. Vuk did not live and does not live for his own age, but for another age that is coming; for that his age does not understand him, for that his age persecuted him". Here the polemical fervor is immediately visible. The educated young man Đorđe Popović becomes the linguistic fighter Đuro Daničić. Born in the Ekavian environment, he accepts Vuk's ijekavica.
Đuro first notes the sad state of Serbian literacy: "In addition to many other troubles, our literature is lagging behind, and this is because our writers still cannot even guess what letters we should write in. We have been shouting and arguing about this for thirty years." He sees his motivation for joining the debate in the national good - "so that our people would take a step forward. With these thoughts and with this intention, I am releasing these few words into the Serbian world."
It turns out that the "Serbian world" is not a phrase coined by Russophile politicians of this millennium. The expression is much older and had a different meaning.
Elsewhere, Daničić says: “Among all the orthographies available today, Vukov's is the most perfect, and for that reason it is the best for the Serbian language.” Such self-confidence from a young man who is barely over twenty can bring a smile to your face.
Rereading Daničić’s “War”, I am less interested in the argumentation with which Daničić scientifically dismantles Svetić’s linguistic views. In this respect, Daničić is a pioneer among Serbs – his scientific methodology seems like a letter from the future. Even the famous opponent of his views, the Secretary of the State Council Jovan Stejić, was amazed: “No Serb has ever written like that.”
But I was still amused by the witty turns and quotes. Thus, in "War" there was also a thought whose author was Nicolo Tomaseo, an Italian writer and fighter for national unification, born in Šibenik. He recommends to the Italian learned elite the same thing that Đuro and Vuk recommend to the Serbian one - to listen to the vernacular: "From it we learn our human language, and not spoil it with our wise barbarism!"
BELGRADE PAIN
It could be said that Daničić did not court the authorities. Some of the Obrenovićs supported him. Nevertheless, in 1852 he published an article Government and spelling in which he says: "Every man in the state has the right to do whatever he finds good with his own reason, as long as it does not interfere with the state's strength and progress. According to which any government would forbid its people to write and print books in the spelling that they find good with their own reason, it would be committing injustice, because it would be appropriating more power than it deserves, and with that injustice it would be committing folly, because it would be insulting its people and sowing discontent without any trouble."
From Vienna, Daničić moved to Belgrade in 1856. There he served as librarian of the National Library for three years, then as secretary of the Serbian Literary Society for four years. He left the society because not everyone in it immediately accepted his project. Dictionary of Serbian literary antiquities. Contemporaries testify that he reacted too sensitively. Perhaps because the work of processing 16 units was already nearing completion. Most members supported his work. But there were also vocal opponents.
Đuro Daničić began printing his own capital dictionary, which led him into financial trouble. He was supported by the princely house of Obrenović. Until 1965, he remained a professor at the Lyceum, or the Great School from which the University of Belgrade emerged.
From 1867 he spent six years in Zagreb as secretary of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts. As a signatory of the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850, which laid the foundation for the future Serbo-Croatian language, but which later also served as the basis for the nominally different languages that emerged from it, Daničić embedded himself in the great linguistic undertaking of systematizing that language. It is worth mentioning that he made his greatest contribution to the study of accents.
He records the suffering of the Belgrade years in the article "Something Else": "Any censorship is a great evil in this world; that is why all the more honest peoples throughout Europe have already abolished it. But it certainly was never a literary party, like the one in Biograd, which covers up and defends the ignorance and foolishness, lies and impudence of its comrades."
Between privatized censorship on the one hand and the resistance of the educated elites of the time on the other, who were frantically defending their language monopoly based on the church and additionally Russified language, Đuro Daničić had no intention of giving up. There were also some developments. Vuk's greatest opponent since the 1866s, Jovan Hadžić, in XNUMX allowed the Great Serbian Gymnasium in Novi Sad, where he was the principal, to teach using Vuk's and Daničić's spelling. Vuk's language was like water, no one could stop it.
From 1873, Daničić returned to Belgrade for four years, as a professor at the Great School. It is also recorded that in 1877, due to financial difficulties, he sold his large library there.
CROATIAN OR SERBIAN DICTIONARY
Again, he is not satisfied with his position. He goes to Zagreb again, this time as a redactor at the Yugoslav Academy. Dictionary of the Croatian or Serbian language.
Sometimes I leaf through that Dictionary with pleasure. I discover hidden chambers, as in a labyrinth. The adjective “čemer” says: “See also čemer under 1. in one writer of the last century and in our time in a poem. Grief has seized me, drought binds my tongue, bile full of čemeri cuts through my bowels”. The author of these verses is Mateša Antun Kuhačević, a Croatian writer from the 18th century, who took up writing only when he fell into imperial disfavor and was sentenced to prison. The čemer in the verse is prison čemer.
I remember that during our studies and poetic apprenticeship in Sarajevo, I sometimes talked with my friend Maja Otan about the Old Testament Song of Songs. He was fascinated by the erotic flashes in the Bible. Now when I read Daničić's translation – he translated the Old Testament from Latin, and edited Vuk's translation of the New Testament – I admire the freshness of his language:
"On my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but I did not find him."
Now I will arise and go about the city, in the squares and in the streets, I will seek him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but I did not find him.
The watchmen who go about the city found me. Have you seen him whom my soul loves?
This female love longing, contained in the biblical writings, several thousand years old, and brought to our native language a century and a half ago, still has the same power – the power of Daničić's translation.
Leafing through old editions of Daničić's books, I come across some amusing details. Thus, in the first edition of his Dictionary of Serbian Literary Antiquities It says that it was printed in 1863 "In Biograd, in the state printing house". And in the very Dictionary The Belgrade item also contains the following folk song: "The Sava Flowed Below Biograd". A resident of the city would be a Biogradac or Biogradlija. The Ikavian name of Belgrade, which Daničić also used, therefore lived in parallel with its Ekavian history. I am also amused by some of Daničić's linguistic stunts - etymology is etymology, the same applies to all similar terms.
Of his proposals for how to fully equalize the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets according to the principle of one letter – one sound, only “đ” was adopted instead of “dj.” Too bad for nj, lj, dž.
I would like to return to that fateful year of 1847 for the Serbian language. At that time, the young Đuro Daničić prophetically wrote: "Folk works are the seed: from that seed our literature should sprout; only that will be true literature. Vuk sowed the field for us with that seed: he was the first to start buying folk works of every profession, he was the only one who collected them most faithfully, and he most faithfully handed them over to the world. We are indeed able to acknowledge this, when other Slavs also take Vuk as an example in this matter."
How right Daničić was is shown by a series of literary undertakings – from Njegoš, through Andrić, Crnjanski, Meša and up to the present day. What Daničić fought for has turned into a powerful river. Of course, Daničić's opponents today, with hindsight, reproach him for equating Serbian and Croatian. If he were alive, he would probably answer them linguistically and scientifically with superiority. Namely, Daničić came to the belief that they were the same language by studying – Croatian literary sources in Zagreb.
Franjo Rački left a testimony that "Serbs and Croats can rightfully call Daničić their own." Zmaj left a verse on the occasion of his death that such losses "only the future will understand."
Finally, it would be best to let Đura make his own point with his final sentence from "January 10, 1847":
"Whatever I said, I said nothing to anyone out of love, nor anything to anyone out of defiance; but I said what I think, and what I am firmly convinced of. If I am wrong in anything, I would be very glad if someone would correct me."
Bonus video:
