Matija Antun Relković


Matija Antun Relković was Habsburg military officer and a Croatian writer.

Early life and military career

Born in the village of Davor in Croatian Military Frontier as a son of a Military Frontier officer, Relković too enlisted in the Austrian army at the age of 16. He fought in the Seven Years' War until he was captured by Prussians in Wrocław, and spent a few years of rather "relaxed" imprisonment at Frankfurt. Relković's prison years became his Lehrjahre, his educational period: a voracious but unsystematic reader, he studied many works by leading Enlightenment writers, as well as Polish poet Jan Kochanowski's didactic epic Satir- which became the model for his most famous work. After the release, Relković spent a few more years on war campaigns, but eventually sated and bored with military life, he asked and got pension from Austrian emperor Joseph II in the rank of captain, as well as the title of hereditary noble. Having spent the rest of his life as a writer and social reformer, Relković died in Vinkovci, Military Frontier.

Legacy

Relković's enduring legacy is, even more than in the content of his didactic epic, contained in his linguistic idiom and grammatical and philological works. Having spread the Croatian neo-štokavian idiom in the second half of the 18th century, he is, along with Adam Tadije Blagojević and Andrija Kačić Miošić, a Dalmatian friar, considered to be one of the most decisive influences that helped shape Serbo-Croatian standard language. Although modern Croatian linguists sometimes squabble about the range and actual value of his opus — no one denies Relković's popular appeal that was, at least, the final touch that helped neo-štokavian dialect to prevail as the basis of the Serbo-Croatian language.