DAM ON THE GREAT RUSSIAN SEA (Contribution to the interpretation of the Review of the History of Serbian Literature by A. N. Pipin)

Abstract

The paper aims is to present and evaluate the Review the History of Serbian Literature A. N. Pipin's as a classical history of Serbian literature that became part of the national culture. The development of the history of literature among Serbs, as an independent discipline and its modest beginnings, can be found in the first decades of the 19th century, in the time of Dositej and Vuk. In its beginnings, the history of literature was a "story" about the literary past of a nation and at its core was - criticism. This main idea as an axiom is a signpost that leads from the history of literature, which has long performed the function of criticism, to the genesis of literary criticism as the youngest branch of literary science and the way it formulated and exercised its functions in conditions when literary history was in a certain measures and history of the people. The Serbs received the first History of Serbian Literature (1865) from the pen of Pavel Jozef Šafarik (1795–1861), a Protestant and German student who served in Novi Sad. The next history of Serbian literature was also written by a foreigner, the Russian Alexander Nikolaevich Pipina (1833–1904). His Review the History of Serbian Literature (1865) has not been fully translated into Serbian. When marking questions from the new Serbian literature, Pipin's approach leads to a synthesis of ideas about cultural and political and national development. Slavery replaced the idea of revival "among Orthodox Serbs who fled to Austria". From that perspective, he views the development of national literature as an important part of culture and identity. Pipin also deals with the issue of national identity and the awakening of the national consciousness of the Slavs in his extensive study "Panslavism in the Past and Present" (1878), in which "the Serbian national question is incorporated into the general critique of Russian official policy and Slavophile orientation in the Balkans during Eastern Europe crisis". In this paper, we value his competence, cultural mission, the gift of the comparator, without which there is no great literary historian, and his practical contribution to classifying Serbian literature and culture in the European context.