# Svetolik Ranković

Svetolik Ranković (Serbian Cyrillic: Светолик Ранковић; Velika Moštanica, Principality of Serbia, 7 December 1863 – Belgrade, Kingdom of Serbia, 18 March 1899) was a Serbian writer prominent in the period of Realism. As a realist, he was the first Serbian author to take a significant step towards the emancipation of prose from the laws of event-centered narration. He was referred to as the Russian pupil for his elegant style.

## Biography

His father Pavle was a teacher in Velika Moštanica at the time of Svetolik's birth, and became a priest after the family moved to Garaši, a village in the Kragujevac district, near Arandjelovac. Ranković completed his high school and seminary in 1884 in Belgrade, and then went to Kyiv Theological Academy and graduated from there. In Kiev, Ranković became acquainted with theological and philosophical sciences and the history of Russian and world literature, and the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, Goncharov, Korolenko, and other Russian writers had the greatest influence on him.
While Ranković was on summer vacation in 1886, bandits attacked the family home and killed his father Pavle, and tortured his mother and others. Ranković managed to escape, and brought help under circumstances similar to those described in his work "The Mountain King" (Gorski tsar) when he talks about the bandit raid of landlord Đorđe.

## Ministry

After graduating from the Theological Academy in 1888, Svetolik returned to Serbia and began working as a religious education teacher at a Gymnasium in Kragujevac. In 1893, he was transferred to the Belgrade Theological Seminary, and in 1894, he was transferred again, to Niš. In 1897, he established himself as a gymnasium religious education teacher in Belgrade. Dissatisfied with his precarious status as a temporary acting part-time teacher, he intended to leave the profession. In 1890, he passed the professorship exam with an excellent grade for his dissertation "On Church Oratory".

## Writing work

In 1892, he published the story "Autumn of a Picture" in the magazine Otadžbina. He fell ill with tuberculosis in 1897. He recovered in Garaši. The novel Gorski tsar, written a little earlier in Niš, was published as the 38th book of "Kola" by the Serbian Literary Cooperative. In 1898, he sought salvation from tuberculosis in the Bukovo monastery, where he wrote his second novel, Seoska učitejica. In the fall, he went to Herceg-Novi for treatment, where he completed his best story, "The Old Vruska Man," and began his third novel, "Broken Ideals." The Matica srpska awarded "The Village Teacher," and the Kolarac Foundation awarded it and took it to print.
After the death of his youngest son in 1899, he moved to Belgrade, where he died of tuberculosis at the age of 36. He had been teaching at the Belgrade Theological Seminary until then. In 1900, the Serbian Literary Cooperative published the manuscript of "Broken Ideals" as its 62nd book, "The Mountain King," (Gorski Tsar) which Ranković completed in the last weeks of his life on his deathbed.
He was married to Bosilka, with whom he had three children.

## Literary influences and models

In earlier criticism, the innovations brought by Ranković's prose were most often linked to the influence of Russian writers. Ranković himself, upon his return from the Kiev Theological Academy, wrote that he "knew the Russian language perfectly, along with the history of Russian literature", and his translations of Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches in the Serbian magazine Delo, Korolenko's texts, and some minor writers survived. However, the criticism of the time ignored the similarities between Ranković's prose and the works of Western European writers, such as Balzac and Flaubert, and with the domestic literary tradition.
The orientation towards Russian models was not a characteristic of Ranković alone, but of the entire literary era to which he belonged. Its specificity lies in the replacement of one model of the role model (Gogol, Turgenev, Saltykov-Shchedrin) by another (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky). The influence of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is particularly noticeable in Ranković's novels and relates, first of all, to the choice of theme and heroes, the depiction of inner life, the humanistic attitude towards a man caught in a helpless position, the nature of secondary characters as covert comments on individual hero traits, and composition. In parallel with the similarities, criticism has also written about the differences in relation to Russian models, which strove for comprehensiveness, anthropological optimism, the transformation of heroes through suffering, and a developed technique for describing psychological states, while in Ranković we have a segmentation of the world, pessimism, the absence of transformation (catharsis), and an unsuccessful attempt to develop a stream of consciousness.
Later interpretations have also shed light on the influences of the domestic literary tradition. In Ranković's stories, the influence of poetic realists (Vojislav Ilić) is evident, reflected in lyrically intoned autumnal images, as well as the influence of Milovan Glišić (witty stories in a folklore manner), Laza Lazarević (psychological stories), Radoje Domanović (satirical attitude towards rural society and rural bureaucracy). The influence of the symbolist stories of Simo Matavulj on Ranković's narrative work is also significant.
The elementary school "Svetolik Ranković" in Aranđelovac is named after him.