Ivo Cipiko

Born Jan. 13, 1869, in Kaštel Novi, Dalmatia; died there Sept. 23, 1923. Serbian writer.

Ćipiko graduated from a forestry school in 1890 and worked as a forestry officer until 1909. During the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 he was a military correspondent. In his short-story collections, such as Seaside Souls (1899) and By the Sea (1911), the novel For Bread (1904), and the drama On the Border (1910), Ćipiko depicted the life of Dalmatian peasants and their struggles with moneylenders, landowners, and Austrian bureaucrats. He introduced the figure of the peasant rebel into Serbian literature in the novel Spiders (1909; Russian translation, 1958). His search for moral ideals was expressed in his poetization of the “natural man,” who resists the hypocrisy of bourgeois society. Ćipiko’s notes and diaries from the front, Impressions of the War of 1912 (1914) and From the Days of War (1917), are marked by a spirit of antimilitarism.