Milovan Vidaković

Milovan Vidaković (; 1780–1841) was a Serbian novelist. He is referred to as the father of the modern Serbian novel. Today, his novels are mostly forgotten, and he is best remembered as a strong opponent of Vuk Karadžić's language reform and a proponent of the Slavonic-Serbian language as a literary language of Serbs.

Biography Early life Milovan Vidaković was born in May 1780 in the village of Nemenikuće, in the Kosmaj area of Serbia. For generations the ancestors of Vidaković had been haiduks, and he himself would have joined the armed freedom-fighters had his father not entrusted him to the care of Momir Vidaković, an uncle, in Irig. When he was nine, his father took Milovan to Irig in the Srem region of the Vojvodina, because of the outbreak of hostilities between the Austro-Russian alliance and the Ottoman Turks in the War of 1787–91.

Vidaković started school in Irig and then continued to further his education at Temesvár, Novi Sad, Szeged, and Késmárk. unlike Karadžić, who proposed a simplified alphabet and a new literary language based exclusively on spoken Serbian. Karadžić's program was first derided and then bitterly opposed by Church-led conservatives and others who wished to preserve some bond between the new Serbian literary language and Slavo-Serbian. The ensuing struggle became so fierce that Đuro Daničić named it "The War for a Serbian Language and Orthography." In the midst of it all were writers like Vidaković who had the misfortune to put their theories on language into print at about the same time that Karadžić and Daničić were beginning their reforms.

Works Istorija o prekrasnom Josifu (epic, 1805) Usamljeni junoša ("A Forlorn Youth", novel, 1810) Velimir i Bosiljka (novel, 1811) Ljubomir u Jelisijumu ("Ljubomir in Jelisium", novel in three volumes, 1814, 1817, 1823) Mladi Tovija ("Young Tobias", story in verses, 1825) Kasija Carica ("Casia the Empress", novel, 1827) Siloan i Milena Srpkinja u Engleskoj ("Siloan and Milena the Serb in England", novel, 1829) Ljubezna scena u veselom dvoru Ive Zagorice, (historic story, 1834) Putešestvije u Jerusalim ("Voyage to Jerusalem", epic, 1834) Gramatika srpska ("Serbian Grammatic", 1838) Pesan istoričeska o Sv. Đorđu ("Historic Poem on St. George", 1839) Selim i Merima (unfinished novel, 1839)