Marko Car (writer)

Photography from ca. 1885.

Marko Car (Serbian Cyrillic: Марко Цар; 30 August 1859 – 1 December 1953) was a Serbian writer, politician and activist from the Bay of Kotor. He was a polyglot and an aesthetic essayist, writing numerous poems, novels, narratives, essays, and travel reports. During his lifetime, he wrote for many newspapers and magazines.

Biography

Marko Car was born in 1859 in the town of Herceg-Novi in the Bay of Kotor, then a part of the Kingdom of Dalmatia province of the Austrian Empire. He received his basic education in the local Italian popular school, after which he moved to Kotor and finished the classical gymnasium.

Then he moved to the province's capital of Zadar in 1879, entering political life by joining the Serb People's Party (Dalmatia) of Sava Bjelanović (whose biography he later wrote and published in Dubrovnik's Serb Press in 1911) which fought for the defense of national interests of the Serb people in the wake of the Croatian nationalistic movement. He worked in the Dalmatian Diet from 1884 to 1918. His friends and colleagues were Luko Zore, Antun Fabris, Pero Budmani, Medo Pucić, Niko Pucić, Ivan Stojanović, and other members of the Serb-Catholic circle. He was the editor of the Zadar magazine called Vuk (The Wolf), one of the most influential periodicals, that was being published in 1884. Though short-lived, Vuk provoked and stimulated numerous debates among Croatian, Italian and Serbian intellectuals in Dalmatia on the literary, artistic and social life of the time. Jovan Dučić in his 1898 article on Serbian writers, hailed Marko Car's travel writing, insisting on the possibility of a synthesis between the two types of travel writing dominant in the nineteenth century, the romantic travelogue marked by one's personality, and the scientific, positivist travelogue.

When the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was created, Car moved to the new monarchy's capital of Belgrade in 1919. The mid-war period he had spent working for the Yugoslavian Ministry of Education as the Inspector of the Artist division until retirement. Car is the founder of the Society of Serbian Writers in Belgrade, being its first President. He then received his membership in the Serbian Royal Academy, later known as the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and also membership in the Matica srpska in Novi Sad. He was also for one time a President of the Serbian Literary Community.

After the April war and the Nazi occupation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941, he fled to Italy across Zadar. After the war ended and the Communist Partisans won in 1945, he returned to Belgrade where he spent the rest of his life.

He became famous as a writer for his work in 1883 entitled Za kišljive dnevi (During the Rainy Days).

He worked for the Matica srpska in Dubrovnik in 1910, the year he published "Naše Primorije," printed by the Serbian Dubrovnik Printing Press.

He died on 1 December 1953 in the Yugoslav and Serbian capital of Belgrade, in the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. His remains were moved to Montenegro to the countryside of his birth and he was buried in the Savina Monastery, according to his own wishes.

He was a polyglot, translating from Italian and French into Serbo-Croatian. This is evident with Serbian writers (Marko Car, Lujo Vojnović, Matija Ban, Stjepan Mitrov Ljubiša and others, born and raised in nineteenth century Dalmatia or Montenegro) who were well acquainted with the Italian language and Italian literature.

Car collaborated closely with Svetomir Nikolajević.

Religious and national beliefs

Although born a Roman Catholic Christian, he converted before death to Eastern Orthodoxy, claiming that that was the only way to save the Catholic-Serb community from extinction and avoid assimilation into Croats, which he had claimed was occurring in the Bocca. His movement didn't have significant impact outside his native Dalmatian coastland, but in there a significant number of Catholics converted to Orthodox Christians considering it a confirmation of their Serbian national identity and affiliation.

Legacy

A street in Herceg Novi's Old City bears his name in his honor. In it is also a bust raised in his honor by sculptor Petar Palavicini (also spelled Palaviccini) not long after Car's death.

Quotes

Marko Car on Boka kotorska, in the "Niz rodno Primorje" (Slike i utisci s Jadrana, Mostar, 1899):

“ I tako biva te se u bokeljskog Srbina, pored svih plemenitih osobina koje su našem narodu već u krvi, obrazuje i neka druga narav, neko naročito fizičko i psihičko obličje, kojim se on od ostale svoje braće potpuno odvaja i koje mora da u toj braći izaziva čuđenje...Mnogi posumnjaju u srpsku krv Boke. Ali to iščuđavanje ne traje dugo, jer se uskoro iz svakog od njih iščauri kičeljivi starosjedilac koji svoje porijeklo dovodi od Kosova i u svoje pređe ubraja Strahinj-bana i Marka Kraljevića...Glavno mesto u Boki Kotorskoj po starinskom opredelenju i po zvaničnoj dezignaciji je grad Kotor. Ali je moralna prestonica, bez pogovora Herceg-Novi. Ovim ne obaram vrednosti Kotoru i ostaloj Boki, ali, badava. Novi je mesto gde se najbolje srbuje i gde je tuđinska dosad najmanje mogla da pusti korena. ”

Works

References

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