Adolfo Veber Tkalčević

Adolfo Veber Tkalčević (11 May 1825 − 6 August 1889) was a Croatian philologist, writer, literary critic, aesthetician, priest, and politician.

Veber is regarded as one of the most prominent Croatian intellectuals of the 19th century and as the founder of Croatian literary criticism.

Life Veber was born in Bakar in 1825. His father, Josef Weber, an army officer, was a German immigrant from Moravia.

He received degrees in philosophy in Zagreb, theology in Budapest and Slavistics in Vienna.

He has continued the tradition of the Illyrian movement, as outlined by Vjekoslav Babukić and Antun Mažuranić, but clearly distanced himself from Gaj's attempts of relating to Vuk Karadžić. He was important as one of the storytellers which has, in the middle of the 19th century, broken the practice of Turkish novellas and romantic prose introducing the elements of Realism into Croatian literature. His aesthetic views with a classicistic background influenced his philological works and many of his solutions in norming the Croatian standard language.

He was the author of the first syntax of Croatian literary language, Skladnja ilirskog jezika (Vienna, 1859).