Sima Matavulj

Born Sept. 14, 1852, in Šibenik; died Feb. 20, 1908, in Belgrade. Serbian writer.

Matavulj was the son of a minor tradesman. He worked as a teacher and was one of the most educated Serbian writers of his day. His early writings, containing ethnographic descriptions, bore the imprint of a romantic idealization of reality, such as the novel The Refugee (1892, 1st ed. called Janko the Refugee, 1885). Switching to realism, Matavulj created a whole gallery of social types in his most significant works, the collection of short stories From Montenegro and the Dalmatian Coast (vols. 1-2, 1888-89) and the anticlerical novel Brother Brne Bakonja (1892, 1st ed. 1888).