Medo Pucić
Medo Pucić | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Occupation | poet |
| Nationality | Ragusan |
| Notable works | Spomenici srpski od godine 1395. do 1423 Pisma Republike Dubrovacke, Talijanke, Dei canti popolari illirici |
Medo Pucić, also known as Orsat Pucić, (Italian: Orsato Pozza; March 12 1821 - June 30 1882) was a Serbian writer and politician from Dubrovnik, in the Austro-Hungarian Kingdom of Dalmatia.
He participated in movement of Serb Catholics, political movement from 19th century, financed from Kingdom of Serbia. He was a part of group of Dubrovnik gentry that identified with the idea of Serb Catholic, because was irrelevant the religion for ethnic afiliation, this policy was imposed by the austrian empire; called divide et impera, and for slavs culture and language were influenced by the Serbs in this Balcans region, Dalmatia and for the latin-romance world. So, that movement had some Pan-Slavic features, but was primarily South Slavonic nation building.
Medo Pucić was descended from the House of Pucić, an old noble family of Ragusa. He attended the lyceum in Venice, where in 1841 he became acquainted with Jan Kollár. Pucić was impressed with his pan-Slavist ideas, and went on to join the Illyrian movement. From that impression of Pan-Slavism, came Medo's joining to the idea of Serb Catholics.
He studied between 1841 and 1843 in the University of Padua, and then from 1843 to 1845 he studied law in Vienna and was a Knights Hospitaller of Sovereign Order of Saint John. Pucić lived in the cities of Lucca and Parma between 1846 and 1849, and after that usually in Dubrovnik. Pucić was in active contact with cultural and political circles of Central Croatia (the banate), the rest of the Habsburg monarchy, and different countries of Europe. After 1860 when the political life in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was revived, he took part in the Serbian and Croatian national movements in Dalmatia and the politics in Croatia proper. Pucić as a leader of the conservative faction wedded the theory of the Croatian historical right to the Dalmatia to the convoluted ethno-linguistic arguments originating in early Slavonic studies circles (Kollar, Šafarik, Dobrovsky,..) which considered all native Štokavian speakers as Serbs; later that century the theories about linguistic demarcation of Serbs and Croats, and hence the ethno-historical "ownership" of Dubrovnik and Kotor, had been subsumed in the ideology of Serbo-Croatism, a sort of cover term which considered Croats and Serbs as tribes of a single South Slavic nation. Medo Pucić was a vocal supporter of the unification of all the South-Slavic lands within the Habsburg Monarchy around one nation, called later Yugoslavia.
Pucić started writing poetry in 1840. He was initially writing romantic lyrics, but later moved towards a more national epic style. Some of his more important works include:
- Slovjanska antologija iz rukopisah dubrovačkih pjesnikah, 1844.
- Talijanke, 1849. (elegies)
- Spomenici srpski od godine 1395. do 1423., book I, Belgrade 1858.
- Dei canti popolari illirici, discorso detto Adam Mickiewicz.... tradotto da O. Pozza, con un'appendice dei testi illirici citati dall autore (Zara 1860, Battara 8°)
- Giovanni Gundulich. vita, sta in Favilla giornale Triestino. 1843. N°XIX, p.293-301.
- Spomenici srpski od godine 1395. do 1423 Pisma Republike Dubrovacke [1], book II, Belgrade 1862.
- Pjesme, 1862. and 1879.
- Karađurđevka 1864.
- Kasnachich G.(Giovanni) Augusto e O.P (Orsato Pozza)sugli slavi. Sta nel regionale la Favilla, Ann. 1842. storia, alfabeto del slavi - storia e poesia - un canto popolari della Servia - canti pololari - Il manuscrito de Kraljodvor - Ann. 1843 Proverbj pololari - Etnografia - Statistica delle popolazioni slavi nel 1842 - costume slavi le nozze - Adamo Mickievich - Dositeo Obradivich - Giovanni Gundulich una lezione del profess. Mickievich - Ann. 1844 Andrea Cubranovich -Questi studij continuati nel giornale Dalmazia 1847 n. p.43 furono poi continuati sotto la direzione E.A. Kaznacich e Baldovino de Bizarro.
- Le nozze di Platone, o dialogo dell amore, tradotto nell´occasione delle nozze di sua sorella Anna (con Marino Giorgi) dal Conte Orsato Pozza, Trieste, Lloyd, Austriaco 1857..
- Compendio della storia di Ragusa dall´originale italiano di G. Resti per cura di O. Pozza, Zara, Battara, 1856.
In 1868, he moved to Belgrade to become a teacher to the young prince Milan Obrenović IV until he came of age in 1872. He returned to Dubrovnik in 1874, and played an important role in the cultural life of the city in the 1870s.
Pucić's pan-Slavic (or pan-South-Slavic) idea was based on the principle of unification of Croats with the Slavic tradition in Dubrovnik/Ragusa, but Pucić believed that all speakers of the Štokavian dialect are nationally Serbs. Pucić particularly respected the Principality of Serbia as the liberator of South Slavs from the rule of the Ottoman Empire.
Pucić wrote lyrical and epic poems, patriotic lyric poetry, political essays and historical studies. The preferred motive of his work was the history of Dubrovnik and the Republic of Ragusa. He also translated literary works from several European languages into his own Dubrovnik language, which he declaratively considered Serbian, but which was at that and later time (until the dissolution of Yugoslavia) widely understood as a hodgepodge quasi-unity of a so-called Serbo-Croatian, and translated various Croatian and Serbian works into Italian, which is when he used the name Orsatto Pozza.