Gavrilo Stefanović Venclović

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Gavrilo "Gavril" Stefanović Venclović (

Later, as a parish priest serving the Military Frontier communities in Hungary, Venclović advised his peers to use the people's idiom and abandon the Slavonic-Serbian language (славяносербскій / slavjanoserbskij or словенскій slovenskij; Serbian: славеносрпски / slavenosrpski), a form of the Serbian language which was used by an educated merchant class under the heavy influence of the Church Slavonic and Russian languages of that time.

The first Rača School in Srem was in the Monastery of St. Lucas. Venclović had acquired skills as a poet and

In 1739, during a time of religious persecution, he became a renowned speaker (slavni propovednik) to live among the Serbian Šajkaši in Komárom.^{[clarification needed]} He also played an influential role in politics.

He preached to the Orthodox

Literary work

At the beginning of the 18th century, Venclović translated some 20,000 pages of old biblical literature into vernacular Serbian.

Venclović's opus was vast, consisting of orations, biographies, church songs, poems, illuminations and illustrations of church books. His language was full of vernacular vitality yet able to express the inner, the subtle, and the transcendent. He was familiar with the works of contemporary Russian and Polish theologians. From Russian, he translated archbishop Lazar Baranovych's Mech Dukhovny (The Spiritual Sword),^[2] and from Polish, he translated Istorija Barona Cezara, kardinala rimskago.

The sway of

Gavrilo Stefanović Venclović was among the first to use Serbian vernacular as a standard language for the purpose of writing sermons. After the Vuk type of written language had won, lexical gaps were filled mainly with words and expressions already present in the vernacular. This method provided a very limited stylistic and lexical inventory for the writers. Venclović's stylistic neologisms, possessing such qualities as picturesqueness and semantic transparency, served to draw the attention of the audience to the text of the sermon. Rooted in the biblical tradition, they represent a "bridge" between the Old Church Slavonic lexical legacy and the Serbian vernacular, as well as demonstrate the possibility for the creation of a standard language based on vernacular, without divorcement from the tradition of Cyril and Methodius.

Selected works

• Slova izbrana
• Udvorenje arhanđela Gavrila Devici Mariji
• orations
• The Spiritual Sword
• Prayers Against Bloody Waters

See also

• Čirjak Račanin
  (1660–1731), Serbian Orthodox monk and writer
• Kiprijan Račanin (1650–1730), Serbian Orthodox monk and writer
• Jerotej Račanin (1650–1727), Serbian Orthodox monk and writer
• Teodor Račanin (1500–1560), Serbian Orthodox monk and writer
• Simeon Račanin (fl. 1676–1700), Serbian Orthodox monk and writer
• Hristifor Račanin (1595–1670), Serbian Orthodox monk and writer
• Jefrem Janković Tetovac

References

Sources

• Milorad Pavić
  : Gavril Stefanović Venclović, 1980, Belgrade
• Jovan Skerlić, Istorija Nove Srpske Književnosti / History of New Serbian Literature (Belgrade, 1914, 1921), pp. 28–29.

External links

• Gavrilo Stefanović Venclović profile Archived 24 September 2008 at the Wayback Machine, rastko.org; accessed 26 December 2016.