Anonymous article about Gogol in the Serbian press. To the question of Russian-Serbian literary relationship in the 1850s

The article deals with the issue of acquaintance of Serbian readers with the life and work of Gogol, which took place in the 1850s primarily through the press. The most important role in this was played by Danilo Medakovich, who published the literary newspaper “Sedmitsa” (Weekly) in Novi Sad. Particular attention is drawn to the anonymous review “Russian Literature over the Past Hundred Years”, published in Medakovich’s newspaper in 1855. A precedent-text of this work was discovered. It is Ivan Davydov’s report “On the Significance of Gogol for Russian Literature”, which he turned into a scientific article for the “Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Sciences”. It is analyzed that an anonymous Serbian critic (the article puts forward a hypothesis that this is the publisher himself, who knew the Russian language) omitted the first, theoretical part of Davydov’s article, in which the scholar considered the problem of ‘prototype’ in literature and its embodiment in Gogol’s works. At the same time, the conclusions of the Serbian critic about the nature of Gogol’s humor, its difference from the Russian satirists of the 18th century, and its closeness to the humor of Charles Dickens, testify to the reviewer’s good acquaintance with both Davydov’s article and Gogol’s works. A connection is established between the critic’s reflections on the language of Gogol’s writings, suffering from ‘barbarisms’ and ‘provincialisms’, and the ongoing reform of the Serbian literary language. It is concluded that in the middle of the 19th century, Serbian journalists and readers became more interested in Russian literature as a more developed national literature with an already formalized literary language.