Dositej Obradović

Works

• 1783Life and Adventures

  An autobiography, its second part in the form of letters, describing the author’s flight from the monastery and travels through Europe as an education in reason and tolerance.

• 1784Counsels of Sound Reason

  Short moral essays on virtue, happiness and reason, written for a broad readership in a language close to spoken Serbian.

Position

Obradović is regarded as the leading figure of the Serbian Enlightenment. What he brought back from his travels was less a system than an attitude: the moral philosophy of the German Enlightenment, which he encountered in Halle and Leipzig, together with English and ancient authors, adapted for readers who had so far known mainly church books. His central decision was linguistic. In the “Letter to Haralampije” (1783) he announced that he would write not in the learned language based on Church Slavonic but in a language close to the speech of ordinary people, so that everyone could read and understand. In “Life and Adventures” he turned his own departure from the monastery into an argument for reason, useful work and education and criticised monasticism, superstition and rigid fasting rules; in the “Counsels” and the fables he taught an ethics of moderation, friendship and self-improvement. He argued for religious tolerance between Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants and for the education of women. Vuk Karadžić’s language reform built on his turn to the vernacular, though Vuk went much further; the literary historian Jovan Skerlić made him the emblem of the Serbian Enlightenment. Historians of philosophy describe his thought as eclectic and largely dependent on German popular philosophy; its importance lies in transmission and in the creation of a modern reading public.

Life & context

Dimitrije Obradović was born in Čakovo in the Banat, then part of the Habsburg Monarchy (today Ciacova in Romania); his year of birth is given as 1739 or 1742. Orphaned early, he entered the monastery of Hopovo in the Fruška Gora as a youth and took the monastic name Dositej. Around 1760 he left the monastery in search of learning and began decades of travel: he taught in Dalmatia, visited Mount Athos, studied Greek in Smyrna, lived on Corfu and in Vienna, studied philosophy in Halle and Leipzig in 1782–83 and visited Paris and London, where he learned English. In Leipzig he published his autobiography “Life and Adventures” (1783, second part 1788) and the “Counsels of Sound Reason” (1784); his “Fables”, adapted from Aesop and others with commentaries, followed in 1788. After years in Trieste he went to Serbia, which had risen against Ottoman rule, in 1807. In Belgrade he helped to found the Higher School (Velika škola, 1808), and in 1811 he became the first minister of education of the insurgent government. He died in Belgrade in 1811, a few weeks after taking office, and was buried by the entrance of the Cathedral Church.

Further main works

• Letter to Haralampije (Pismo Haralampiju, 1783)
• Fables (Basne, 1788)