Urban Jarnik

Urban Jarnik (born May 11, 1784 in Bach near Sankt Stefan im Gailtal ; † June 11, 1844 in Moosburg ) was a Slovenian writer from Carinthia . The Slovenian Folklore Institute in Klagenfurt , founded in 1992, is named after him.

Life

Urban Jarnik is the most important representative of Slovenian Romanticism in Austria. After studying ethnology about his homeland in Gailtal and studying theology in Klagenfurt and Graz, he performed with the leading Slovenian writers Janez Primic , Bartolomäus Kopitar , Valentin Vodnik, Matija Čop, Anton Martin Slomšek and France Prešeren , but also with the Croatian Illyrists Ljudevit Gaj and Stanko Vraz , the Slovak Pavel J. Safarik and the Russian Slavist Ismail Sreznevskij in contact. Since his criticism of the Germanization of Carinthia (1826), there has been a break with the German national circles surrounding the Klagenfurt magazine “ Carinthia ”. In the last phase of his life he advocated the creation of a common South Slavic written language and in this respect also influenced his pupil Matija Majar-Ziljski and the movement around the revolution of 1848.

Since the publication of the Slav chapter from Herder's “Ideas” in “Carinthia”, Jarnik, who also wrote poems with erotic content, met the Serbian Patriarch Leontije Lambrović in Klagenfurt, from whom he wrote some of the texts for his first Slovenian book for young people “Sber lepih ukov sa slovensko mladino ”(“ Small collection of beautiful lessons for Slovenian youth ”, 1814). As a true romantic, he dealt with the early history of the Slovenes and in 1820 published the study " Samo , King of the Carantan Slavs". In Kopitar's sense, he was a supporter of the “Pannonian-Carantan theory”, which saw the emergence of the South Slavic languages in connection with Church Slavonic and the “ Freising monuments ”. In 1822/23 he commented on the reform of the Slovene spelling and turned to etymology; his "Small collection of such old Slovenian words, which still live on vigorously in today's Windisch dialects" (1822) must be seen from the modest resources at that time before the emergence of the actual scientific Slavic studies . This also applies to his “attempt at an etymology of the Slovenian dialect in Inner Austria” (1832). He was at the very beginning of research into the Old Slovene language, literature and folklore. He wrote poems and ballads, treatises such as "Samo", "Dopis iz Koruske" ("A letter from Carinthia"), in which he spoke out in favor of the unification of all southern Slavs. Letters from Jarnik to Kopitar , Safarik and autobiographical fragments, letters from Primic , Prešeren and Sreznievsky, in which their meeting with the priest-poet is reported, complete the picture. In Jarnik's homeland, in the Gail Valley , his Slovene mother tongue has almost died out.

literature

• Constantin von Wurzbach : Jarnik, Urban . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 10th part. Imperial-Royal Court and State Printing House, Vienna 1863, p. 105 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Jarnik Urban. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 3, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1965, p. 82.
• Urban Jarnik. Romanticism, Nationalism and Pan-Slavism in Carinthia , Wilhelm Baum (Ed.) Kitab Klagenfurt 2009 ISBN 978-3-902585-40-0 , 216 pp.

Web links

• Urban Jarnik Slovenian Folklore Institute (Slovenian)
• Literature by and about Urban Jarnik in the catalog of the German National Library