Vuk Stefanovic Karadzc

Born Oct. 26, 1787, in Tržić; died Jan. 26, 1864, in Vienna. Serbian philologist, historian, and folklorist; figure in the Serbian national renaissance.

The son of a peasant, Karadžić participated in the First Serbian Uprising of 1804–13. He carried out a reform of the Serbian literary language on the basis of the vernacular; he composed a grammar and a dictionary of Serbian. Karadžić’s efforts ended in the 1850 agreement between Serbs and Croats on a single literary language and common principles of spelling. After walking and riding through many regions of Serbia, the Voivodina, Montenegro, and Dalmatia, Karadžić collected and published very valuable historical and ethnographic materials. He also published a large number of works from the Serbian oral tradition of lore (his collections Serbian Folk Tales, 1821, and Serbian Folk Songs, vols. 1–4, 1823–33). He played an important role in the establishment of romanticism in Serbian literature. Karadzic’s work was highly esteemed by J. Grimm, J. W. Goethe, and A. Mickiewicz and by the Russian writers and scholars N. M. Karamzin, A. Kh. Vostokov, and I. I. Sreznevskii. He was a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1851).