Sremac, Stevan

Born Nov. 11, 1855, in Senta, Vojvodina; died July 12,1906, in Soko Banja. Serbian writer.

Sremac graduated from the department of history of the Higher School of Belgrade in 1878. He fought as a volunteer in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. His first published work, which appeared in the late 1880’s, was a cycle of romantic short stories, later collected under the title From Old Books (1903–09).

Sremac became a prominent satirical realist with his humorous and satirical works describing provincial life and mores. These included the novellas Ivkova slava (1896) and The Zone of Zamfirovo (Zona Zamfirova, 1907) and the novel Father Cira and Father Spira (1898; Russian translation, 1957). Other works by Sremac condemned the monarchical and bureaucratic regime in Serbia, for example, the novel Vukadin (1903; Russian translation, 1961). However, Sremac’s search for an ideal was linked with a Utopian image of a patriarchal way of life; he criticized the dissemination of social democratic ideas in the political satire Illumination in the Countryside (1893). The realism of Sremac is close to that of N. V. Gogol.