Laza Kostic

Born Jan. 31, 1841, in Kovilj, Bačka; died Dec. 9, 1910, in Vienna. Serbian writer.

Kostić graduated from the University of Pest in 1864. He was persecuted as a prominent figure in the Omladina by the Austro-Hungarian authorities. Kostic’s poetry is distinguished by a romantic impulse toward freedom and toward the intellectual emancipation of the personality. His romantic dramas Maksim Crnojević (1866) and Pera Segedinac (1882) are based on the motifs of folk songs and on subjects from the national history. As a literary critic, Kostic advocated idealist aesthetics. This view was also reflected in his works on the philosophy of art (for example, The Principles of the Beautiful in the World, 1880).