The Impact of Vuk's Philological Reform on the Lyriks of Branko Radičević
The Impact of Vuk's Philological Reform on the Lyriks of Branko Radičević

Summary/Abstract: Reception of Radičević's poetry indicates that its aesthetic valuation has been determined foremost by the poet's association with the Vukovian program for reforming the literary language. For a century, academicians and publicist critics alike dominated the understanding of Radičević's poetry in the public mind through two interpretive methods: romantic subjectivism and critical positivism. More recent critical thinking applied to Serbian literary history challenges the influence of the philological principles based on notions of "folkloric" ethnographic purism, which yet affects appreciation of this poetry. More theoretically informed, intrinsic analysis of the poems' imagery shows how literary language — even the simplest, most crystaline, as Branko's was — can be neither completely "pure" nor in "common" use among the people. c oeuvre offers an optimum corpus for further socio-linguistic study of the aims, methods and aesthetic biases of Slavic language purist movements generally, both past and present.

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