| Ante Starčević | |
|---|---|
| Born | 23 May 1823 Žitnik, Austrian Empire |
| Died | 28 February 1896 Zagreb, Austria-Hungary |
| Resting place | Šestine Zagreb |
| Alma mater | University of Pécs |
| Occupation | Politician, writer |
| Known for | Founder of the Croatian Party of Rights; leading proponent of Croatian nationalism |
Ante Starčević (; 23 May 1823 – 28 February 1896), was a Croatian politician and writer whose activities and works laid the foundations for the modern Croatian state. His works are base for Croatian nationalism, he is often referred to as Father of the Fatherland by Croats.
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Starčević was born in the village of Žitnik near Gospić, a small town in the Military Frontier within Austria-Hungary, to a family of a Croat Catholic father and a Serb Orthodox mother.[1] In 1845 he graduated from a comprehensive secondary school in Zagreb. He then briefly continued his studies at the seminary in Senj, but soon moved to Pest in 1845 to attend a Roman Catholic theological seminary he eventually graduated from in 1846.[2] Upon his graduation Starčević returned to Croatia and continued studying theology in Senj. Rather than becoming a priest, however, he decided to engage in secular pursuits and started working at Ladislav Šram's law firm in Zagreb.[3] He then tried to get an academic post with the University of Zagreb, but was unsuccessful, so he remained in Šram's office until 1861 even though he was banned from practicing law in 1857. He was also a member of the committee of Matica ilirska, a Croatian cultural society connected with the Illyrian movement, in the Historical Society and in the editorial board of Neven, a literary magazine.
In 1861, he was appointed the chief notary of the Fiume (Rijeka) county. That same year, he was elected to the Croatian Parliament as the representative of Fiume and founded the original Croatian Party of Rights with Eugen Kvaternik. Starčević would be reelected to the parliament in 1865, 1871, and from 1878 to his death.
In 1862, when Fiume was implicated in participation in protests against the Austrian Empire, he was suspended and sentenced to one month in prison as an enemy of the regime. When he was released, Starčević returned to Šram's office, where he remained until 11 October 1871, when he was arrested again, this time on the occasion of the Rakovica Revolt. The revolt was launched by Kvaternik, and who had become convinced that a political solution of the type Starčević called for was not possible. While the revolt drew several hundred men, both Croats and Serbs, it was soon crushed by Imperial Austrian troops. The Croatian Party of Rights was abolished. Starčević was released after two months in prison.
In his old age, he moved to Starčević House (Starčevićev dom), built for him by the Croatian people in 1895. He died in his house a year later, when he was 73. According to his wish, he was buried in the Church of St Mirko in the Zagreb suburb of Šestine. His bust was made by Ivan Rendić. On his deathbed, he requested that no monuments be raised to his honor, but his statue was put up in front of Starčević House in 1998.
After being banned from practising law in 1857, Starčević travelled to Russia where he hoped he would gather support from his country's eastern rival. When this failed, he travelled to France, pinning his hopes on French emperor Napoleon III. While in Paris, he published his work La Croatie et la confédération italienne, considered by some to be the precursor to his Party of Rights' political program. In 1859, the Austrian Empire was defeated in the Second Italian War of Independence, during which time Starčević returned to Croatia. Austria lost control over Italy, and Austria's weakening status in the world paved the way for Starčević's career.[4]
As the chief notary in Fiume in 1861, Starčević wrote "the four petitions of the Rijeka county", which are considered the basis of the political program of the Croatian Party of Rights. He pointed out that Croatia needed to determine its relationships with Austria and Hungary through international agreements. He demanded the reintegration of the Croatian lands, the large kingdom of Croatia of old (the medieval Kingdom of Croatia), the homeland of one people, with the same blood, language, past and (God willing) future.
On that ideological basis, he founded the Party of Rights with his school friend Eugen Kvaternik in 1861. That party demanded an independent Croatia independent of Austria and Hungary. Starčević's famous phrase was: "Ni s Bečom ni s Peštom" ("Neither with Vienna nor with Pest")[5] Starčević was the only parliamentary representative who agreed with Kvaternik's draft constitution of 26 June 1861. He advocated the termination of the Military Frontier and persuaded parliament to pass on 5 August 1861 the decision annulling any joint business with Austria.
He advocated the resolution of Bosnian issues by reforms and cooperation between the people and the nobility. Starčević believed that Bosniaks were "the best Croats",[6] and claimed that "Bosnian Muslims are a part of the Croatian people and of the purest Croatian blood".[7]
Starčević wrote literary criticism, short stories, newspaper articles, philosophical essays, plays and political satire. He was also a translator.
His travelogue From Lika was published in Kušlan's magazine Slavenski Jug on 22 October 1848. He wrote four plays in the period 1851-52, but only the Village Prophet has been preserved. His translation of Anacreon from Ancient Greek was published in Danica in 1853. His critical review (1855) of Đurđević's Pjesni razlike was described by the Croatian literary historian Branko Vodnik as "our first genuine literary essay about older Dubrovnik literature". His opus shows an affinity with practical philosophy, which he calls "the science of life". As Josip Horvat said: "His literary work from 1849 to the end of 1853 made Ante Starčević the most prolific and original Croatian writer along with Mirko Bogović."
In 1850, inspired by Ljudevit Gaj, Starčević started working on the manuscript of Istarski razvod, a Croatian document from 1325. He transcribed the text from the Glagolitic alphabet to the Latin alphabet, analysed it and published it in 1852. In the foreword, young Starčević elaborated his linguistic ideas, specifically that the mixture of all three Croatian dialects (Shtokavian, Chakavian and Kajkavian) and the Krajina dialect, with its 600 year history, was the Croatian language. Starčević accepted the etymological orthography and used the ekavian accent for his entire life, considering it the heir of the old Kajkavian. He did not use assibilation, coarticulation nor assimilation, accepted in Croatian orthography since Ljudevit Gaj. His orthography was adopted by the Ustaše regime in Independent State of Croatia. His language is a "synthetic" form of Croatian, never used before or after him, most similar to the Ozalj idiom of Petar Zrinski, whom he probably never read.[8]
In that period, in the Call for Subscriptions to the Croatian Grammar (8 December 1851) he stated his opposition to the Vienna Language Agreement of 1850 and the linguistic concept of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. He continued his dispute with the followers of Karadžić in a series of articles published in 1852. His opposition to Karadžić's work was based in utter denial of the Serbs as the nation, their language, their culture and history.[9] He also did not recognize the Serbs, Slovenes, Bosniaks as separate nations or groups, referring to them all as Croats.[10] This was not a popular or widely accepted theory; educated people headed by Strossmayer and Gaj supported Karadžić. It was demonstrated publicly immediately after Karadžić's death - when Croatian Parliament (Sabor) collected a considerable amount of money in order to erect a monument to honor Karadžić in Croatia and the Court chancellor Ivan Mažuranić got the Viennese Imperial Court to financially support Karadžić's widow.[11]
When Srbski dnevnik from Novi Sad published an article saying that "Croatians write in Serbian", Starčević wrote a fierce reply: (...) Instead of claiming that the Croats use anything else but the Croatian language, those writers who consider themselves Serbs (or whatever they like) would do well to write in the educated and pure Croatian language, like some of them are already doing, and they can call their language Coptic for all I care. (...) He published the reply as an unsigned article in Narodne novine, the newspaper of Ljudevit Gaj, so the Serbian side attacked Gaj, wrongly attributing the article to him. Starčević subsequently proclaimed he was the author, not Gaj, who cared to maintain good relations with Serbia, distanced himself from his friend.[8]
Starčević was the only Croatian politician from his era respected by writer Miroslav Krleža.[12] Krleža used to compare Starčević's struggles to those of Don Quijote's.[12] For Miroslav Krleža Starčević has been the most intelligent Croatian politician.[13] Krleža, however, did not pay much attention to political aspects of his works.[3]
According to Croatian historians M. Gross and I. Goldstein, Starčević was a racist and an anti-Semite.[14][15] His understanding of the basic human rights and the way he linked them to the civil liberties were extremely primitive and selective. For example, Starčević criticized the socialism as "unshaped" and he was delighted by the colonialism and claimed that "Algeria should be densely populated by a few million of happy Frenchmen and not to allow to have one hundred fifty thousand of them against two and half million of Arabs".[14][15]
Starčević had based his ideological views on writings of those ancient Greek writers who thought that some people, by their very nature, are slaves, for they had "just half of the human mind" and, for that reason, they "shall be governed by people of the human nature". About the people and nations which he saw as cursed and lower ranked races - he spoke as of the animal breeds and uses the "breed" word to mark them.[14][15]
He wrote a whole tractate about the Jews that could be summarized in a few sentcences: "Jews ... are the breed, except a few, without any morality and without any homeland, the breed of which every unit strives to its personal gain, or to its relatives' gain. To let the Jews to participate in public life is dangerous: throw a piece of mud in a glass of the clearest water - then all the water will be puddled. That way the Jews spoiled and poisoned the French people too much".[14][15]
For Starčević, there was a race worst than the Jews. For him, the "Slavoserb" notion was firstly of a political nature: the "Slavoserbs" are his political opponents who "sold themselves to a foreign rule". Then all those who favorably look on the South Slavs unity not regarding them (the South Slavs) as the Croats.[14][15]
Later, and with years, Starčević more and more marked the "Slavoserbs" as a separate ethnic group, or - as he used to say the "breed", ranked, as humans, lower than the Jews: "The Jews are less harmful than the Slavoserbs. For the Jews care for themselves and their people ... but the Slavoserbs are always for the evil: if they cannot gain a benefit, then they tend to harm the good or just affair, or to harm those who are for the affair." - he wrote once.[14][15]
Further, he claimed that the injustice was done to different "cursed breeds" what spoiled those breeds even more and made them "to be vengeful against their oppressors". As a convinced racist, he stresses that to the "cursed breeds", i.e. to the lower races should not be given any role in the public life.[14][15]
As an aged man, he makes the Serbs identical to the "Slavoserb breed" and mocks them for their defeats they suffered long ago - which provoked negative reactions even in his "Party of Rights". On that occasion, the Party member Erazmo Barčić (1894.) described Starčević's mockery and racism as "throwing mud at people and primitive cheeky invectives".[15]
When once facing with negative reactions to his open racism, he temporarily retreated. Accordingly, he wrote an article in Sloboda, issue of March 23, 1883: The main thing is this: everybody should work for the people and the homeland, and let them call themselves as they wish... We have disputes and dissensions only because they are supported and strengthened from the outside... We believe that hungry and cold Serbs and Croats feel the same... Therefore, everybody can assume the name of Hottentots, every person can choose their own name, as long as we are all free and happy!...
The British historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote (pages 188-189):
Starčević's racism was further fully elaborated by Ivo Pilar [under pseudonym L. von Südland][16] The same book was translated into Croatian language in the year of 1943, by Pavelić's regime, as one of the tenets of his Ustaše and his Independent State of Croatia.[17][18] This racist work was reprinted in 1990 in Croatia. In the preface to this edition, Dr. Vladimir Veselica, a Zagreb University professor, expresses his enthusiasm that the author had given "relevant answers" at the highest intellectual level. What thrilled him so was the consistently expressed racist hatred against the Serbs. It is sufficient to submit one quotation that explains the sense and content of this book, which far outdoes the current demonization of the Serbs: " it was not without reason that I tried to show how the Serbs today are dangerous for their ideas and their racial composition, how a bent for conspiracies, revolutions and coups is in their blood."[19]
Starčević had negative attitudes toward Roman Catholic clergy in Croatia. He was not an atheist but he supported secularism. According to him, Roman Catholic clergy in Croatia were servants of foreign masters and maintained poverty and illiteracy among the common people.[20] As a result, the clergy labelled him "atheist" and "antichrist". His position as a prominent politician in Croatia in the latter half of the 19th century only emphasised that. He and the bishop of Đakovo, Josip Juraj Strossmayer, disagreed about Croatian politics. Strossmayer was sympathetic towards panslavic unity of South Slavs (future Yugoslavia). Starčević, on the other hand, demanded an independent Croatian state and opposed any solution that would include Croats within some other multi-ethnic country. According to Starčević, the possible union of Croats with other South Slavs had no future because of greater Serbian expansionism. Rivalry between Starčević and Strossmayer has been described in the travel writing book Vidici i putovi (Sights and ways) by Antun Gustav Matoš.
Croatian writer Antun Gustav Matoš wrote an entire tractate about him. In it, he proclaims Starčević as the greatest Croat and the greatest patriot in the 19th century. He also describes Starčević as the greatest Croatian thinker.[3] For his political and literary work, Starčević is commonly called Father of the Nation (Otac domovine) among Croats, a name first used by Eugen Kvaternik while Starčević was still alive. His portrait is depicted on the obverse of the Croatian 1000 kuna banknote, issued in 1993.[21] Many streets, squares and schools are named after him. Most right wing parties in Croatia claim his politics as their legacy.