Jovan Dučić
1871–1943 15 entries
Biography
Jovan Dučić was a Serbian poet, essayist and diplomat, one of the great lyric poets of Serbian modernism. He was born in Trebinje, in Herzegovina, then part of the Ottoman Empire; the year of his birth is not known for certain, and 1871, 1872 and 1874 are all given. He trained as a teacher in Sombor and taught in Bijeljina and Mostar, where he founded the literary magazine Zora with the poet Aleksa Šantić and the writer Svetozar Ćorović. He then spent nearly ten years abroad, mostly in Geneva, where he took a degree in law, and in Paris, and French poetry, above all that of the Parnassians and the Symbolists, shaped his own verse.
For more than thirty years he served as a diplomat, in posts that included Rome, Athens, Cairo, Budapest, Bucharest and Madrid, and in Bucharest in 1939 he became the first Yugoslav diplomat with the rank of ambassador. His poems, written in carefully wrought lines of twelve and eleven syllables, sing of women and love, death, God, the homeland and the landscapes of Herzegovina and the Adriatic, and his book of reflections Blago cara Radovana (The Treasure of Tsar Radovan), published in 1932, gathers his thoughts on happiness, love, women, friendship and fate. In 1941, after the invasion of Yugoslavia, he went by way of Lisbon to the United States, and he died in Gary, Indiana, in 1943. In 2000 his remains were brought back to Trebinje, as he had wished, and buried in the newly built church of Hercegovačka Gračanica.
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