Literary Evening

Did you know that all the writers of Romanticism in Serbia supported the ideas of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić for reforming the Serbian language? Did you know that Francesco Petrarch studied law at the University of Montpellier and University of Bologna and that he worked in Avignon as a court advisor and that he was an emissary of the church and of many eminent people of his age?  Have you ever read that Vuk Stefanović Karadžić was a relative of Jevta Savić Čotrić, the only literate person in the region at the time, who taught him how to read and write? Did you know that Pushkin is considered to be the founder of modern Russian literature and Russian literary language? Not many people know that Sava Vladisavic, a Serbian merchant, introduced Pushkin to the court of Tsar Peter the Great. How about you? Did you perhaps know that Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Korsakov wrote operas based on Pushkin’s works?

We have to admit that we did not know the answers to most of these questions, and some information did seem, to say the least, unreal and suspicious. At the initiative of High School Students’ Parliament in 2013/14 we organized five literary evenings dedicated to Francesco Petrarch, William Shakespeare, Alexander Sergeyevich Puskin, Branko Radičević, and Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. Our charming, witty, inspiring narrator, second year student Damjan Spasojević and our teacher of the Serbian Language and Literature, Ms. Ljiljana Ćuk, have given us a new perspective on national and world literature, inwrought with secrets, contradictories and paradoxes of human destiny. We are looking forward to VI literary evening with great expectations as we are sure it will expand the boundaries of our knowledge.