Jovan Skerlić

Jovan Skerlić was a Serbian writer and literary critic. He is seen as one of the most influential Serbian literary critics of the early 20th century, after Bogdan Popović, his professor and early mentor.
Skerlić was buried in the Novo groblje cemetery in Belgrade.

Biography

Skerlić's paternal family hailed from Šumadija while his maternal family hailed from Vojvodina. Already in high school he got interested in socialist ideas of Svetozar Marković and joined various groups and publications. In 1895 he enrolled into the Grand School of Belgrade where he was strongly influenced by French language and comparative literature course held by Bogdan Popović. During the university education he initiated correspondence with foreign socialist including professor Georges Renard at the University of Lausanne. He graduated in 1899 when he moved to Lausanne in Switzerland to work on his doctoral dissertation subsequently moving to Paris where he spent a couple of months before returning to Belgrade.
In early 1904, Skerlić spent two months in Munich, then went to Paris again and returned to Belgrade in July 1904 where he received a job offer at the University of Belgrade in 1905. With secured tenure, Skerlić took the ambitious and voluminous projects of writing the authoritative history of contemporary Serbian literature. His opus magnum, the History of the Contemporary Serbian Literature, was completed two months before his early death in 1914.