Stojan Novaković (; 1 November 1842 – 18 February 1915) was a Serbian politician, historian, diplomat, writer, bibliographer, literary critic, literary historian, and translator. He held the post of Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Serbia on two occasions, post of minister of education on three occasions, minister of interior on one occasion and leading the foremost liberal political party of that time in Serbia, the Progressive Party. He was also one of the most successful and skilled Serbian diplomats, holding the post of envoy to Constantinople, Paris, Vienna and Saint Petersburg.
Noted intellectual, Stojan Novaković was the president of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, head of the National Library the first president and a founding member of Serbian Literary Guild, Professor at the Belgrade's Grande école, member of Serbian, Yugoslav, French, Czech, Polish and Russian academies. Stojan Novaković is considered one of the foremost Serbian historians of the nineteenth century and one of the founders of modern Serbian historiography.
Scholarly career
Novaković was the first Serbian-educated scholar of the 19th century that obtained international renown. After finishing his secondary education in Belgrade (1860), he studied law and philosophy until 1863 at the Belgrade Lyceum () that was eventually transformed into the Belgrade's Grandes écoles (). In 1865 he became a professor in this Belgrade institution of higher learning. By 1872 he was the librarian of the National Library and curator of the National Museum in Belgrade.
As a young scholar, he was founder and editor of the journal Vila (Fairy Lady) that was published from 1865 to 1868. In the early years of his scholarly engagement, Novaković translated into Serbian Leopold von Ranke's monumental work Die Serbische Revolution, as well as its revised and updated edition (1864–1892) as well as the equally famous Histoire de Charles XII by Voltaire (1897) and Joseph Scherr, General History of Literature from German (1872–1874). An admirer of Adam Mickiewicz, Novaković translated into Serbian his famous poem Grażyna in 1886 and the famous poem "The Captive of the Caucasus" by Alexander Pushkin. Stojan Novaković was one of the founders and first president of the Serbian Literary Cooperative in 1892, a prestigious publishing house for the most important literary and historical works.
He was strongly influenced by internationally renowned professors of Slavic philology and literature, in particular by Pavel Jozef Šafárik, who was living and working in Serbia at the time, and Đura Daničić, the translator of the Bible into the vernacular. Under the influence of Daničić, Novaković wrote "The History of Serbian Literature," (Istorija srpske književnosti) in 1867 (revised in 1871), and compiled also the first "Serbian Bibliography" (Srpska bibliografija za noviju književnost, 1741–1867) in 1869, published by the Serbian Learned Society, which resulted in him becoming a corresponding member of the Yugoslav Academy in Zagreb in 1870. He prepared simplified, but complete manuals for Serbian grammar that were widely published and used in various schools.
In 1865 Novaković was elected member of Serbian Learned Society in Belgrade, the precursor of the Serbian Royal Academy (), officially founded in 1886. When the Serbian Royal Academy was founded Novaković was made one of its 16 initial members, while in 1906 he became President of the Academy, a position he held until his death in 1915. It was at the initiative of Novaković that the Serbian Royal Academy started comprehensive research and collection of various materials available throughout the Serb-inhabited Balkans, which realized the Dictionary of Serbo-Croatian Literary and Vernacular Language. Although a disciple of Đura Daničić, who was concentrated primarily on linguistic issues, Novaković managed to expand the field of research, establishing a multi-disciplinary approach in treating all the social sciences related to national history, culture and tradition.
The early works of Novaković were mainly on poetry and literature, including his own early poetry (Pevanija, 1862) and attracted minor interest, as did his early novels (Nesrećni andjelak, Kob, Lepa Nerećanka, Vampir, Kaludjer) written between 1862 and 1865. Novaković was the Serbian counterpart to the prominent Slavist scholars, philologists such as Czech Dobrovský or Šafárik among Slovaks, Jernej (Bartholomeus) Kopitar and Franz Miklosich among Slovenians, and Vatroslav Jagić among Croats.