Vatroslav Jagić

Croatian Slavist (Varaždin, 6. VII. 1838 – Vienna, 5. VIII. 1923., buried in Varaždin). He attended high school in Varaždin and Zagreb, and completed his studies of classical philology in Vienna in 1860. He was a high school teacher in Zagreb (1860–70), a university professor in Odessa (from 1871), Berlin (from 1874), Petrograd (from 1880) and Vienna. (1886–1908). He earned a doctorate in Leipzig and an honorary doctorate in Petrograd with his dissertation "The Life of Dê Roots in Slavic Languages". At only 28 years old, he became the youngest member of JAZ in 1866. He was a member of many academies and scientific societies. – The range of his scientific activity is wide. Together with F. Rački and J. Torbar, he started the magazine Književnik, in which he expressed his views on the then unresolved literary-linguistic and spelling issues. Jagić introduced the results of comparative Slavic studies and Indo-European studies into Croatian linguistics. He founded and edited the Archiv für slavische Philologie (1875–1920), known as Jagić's Archive. He published the oldest written Slavic monuments and critical treatments of the texts: Zografsko and Marijnsko evangeljie, Kiev and Viennese listiće, Dobromirovo evangeljie, Bologna Psalter, Vinodol Law, Polish Statute, Hrvojev Missal, etc. He researched oral and older literature (History of the Literature of the People of Croatia and Serbian, 1867). He was especially occupied with the origin and development of the first Slavic literary language, about which he wrote many discussions and the book On the History of the Origin of the Church Slavonic Language, a sort of synthesis of the entire issue. He studied the origin of the Glagolitic alphabet, inscriptions on Bosnian stećci, wrote about topics from other Slavic languages ​​and published their written monuments, wrote a comprehensive review of Slavic philology from the beginning to the end of the 19th century. century as part of the Encyclopaedia of Slavic Philology project, which he designed. Jagić's correspondence with the leading linguists of his time is enormous. He raised many great Slavists (A. A. Šahmatov, V. Vondrák, A. Brückner, P. Diels, F. Ramovš and others). His last major work was the monograph The Life and Work of Juraj Križanić (1917). His scientific oeuvre is impressive both in terms of the breadth of topics and scope (around 700 scientific papers on 20,000 pages). Large and wide-educated, Jagić solved all the open linguistic questions of his time, and many of his solutions are still valid in science today, for example on the origin of Glagolitic and its precedence over Cyrillic, on the South Macedonian dialectal basis of Cyrillic translations. He already gained a reputation in the world during his lifetime. Thanks to him, Slavic studies experienced a great upswing, and he remained one of the greatest Slavists.