Jovan Hadžić


Jovan Hadžić was a Serbian writer, legislator and the founder of Matica Srpska. He signed his literary work as Miloš Svetić and was an influential figure in the drafting of the Civil and Criminal Code of Serbia in 1844. Serbia is the fourth modern-day European country after France, Austria and the Netherlands to have a codified legal system because of Hadžić's work.

Biography

Jovan Hadžić is remembered as a founder of the Matica Srpska and as the most persistent opponent of Vuk Karadžić's orthographic reform. However, Hadžić was also a poet and translator, a legislator in the Principality of Serbia, as well as an active public figure. Having established a commendable reputation through his early poetry, many thought he could be a worthy successor to Lukijan Mušicki.
As a student in Pest, Hadžić founded Matica Srpska in 1826, modeled in part after the recently established but dormant Magyar Tudós Társaság which eventually became the Hungarian Academy of Science. In addition to books, it published journal Serbski Letopis, founded two years earlier by Georgije Magarašević, Pavel Jozef Šafárik and Lukijan Mušicki in Novi Sad, where Magarašević was professor and Šafarik the director of the Serbian gymnasium there.
Vuk Karadžić foresaw that the biggest battle in the future would be the battle for orthography. Hadžić wrote Sitnitze jezykoslovne in 1837, in which he attacked Vuk's reforms. He signed it with a pseudonym, Miloš Svetić. Once a supporter of Vuk, Hadžić was now an opponent, like Metropolitan Stevan Stratimirović who died a year earlier. Vuk responded to Hadžić in kind, two years later. Other events at the time worked in favor of the vernacular, converging to make 1847 a decisive year. Vuk's translation of Novi Zavjet appeared that year.

Selected works