Dragutin Ilić

These were sung plays, but with Vračara (Sorceress) of 1882 Jenko composed what is often regarded as the first Serbian operetta and with his music for Dragutin Ilić's Pribislav i Bozana (1894) he came close to a full-blown opera.

Also, in Pribislav i Bozana by Dragutin we find stylizations of folk motives appropriate to the very popular kind of Serbian singspiel such as Djido (The Village Playboy) by Janko Veselinvić.

It was critic Jovan Skerlić's lack of understanding the man himself, rather than the plays and novels he wrote, which was responsible for omitting Dragutin Ilić's name from among the premier writers and poets in his Istorija nove srpske književnosti (History of Modern Serbian Literature).

Today, however, his name stands among the noteworthy playwrights of that period such as Milorad Popović Šapčanin, Miloš Cvetić, Branislav Nušić, Laza Kostić, Đura Jakšić, and Janko Veselinović, people who constituted most of the intellectual and literary core of the National Theatre in Belgrade of the late nineteenth century.

It is necessary to keep this picture of Belgrade that shaped Dragutin Ilić and made him the dramatist and novelist that he came to be; it alone explains his strength and his weakness and gives a clue to the many contradictions and enigmas that surround him.

He left Belgrade for Sremski Karlovci, where he wrote articles for newspapers and periodicals such as Brankovo kolo, Bosanska vila, Zora, Nada, Zastava and Letopis Matice srpske.

At the time Belgrade was preparing for the First Balkan War (to rid itself of the Turkish occupier altogether), intellectuals were speaking of uniting all Southern Slavs into one nation.