„My Books are my Sons” The library of Mihály Vitkovics

Mihály Vitkovics (1778–1829), of Serbian descent, was a renowned attorney of his time, a Hungarian poet and an outstanding personality of both the Hungarian and Serbian history of literature. He wrote poems, theatre plays and essays in Hungarian (these latter describing mainly the customs and life of Serbians), and also translated Hungarian works into Serbian.

He had regular correspondence with the leading figure of the Hungarian language reform movement Ferenc Kazinczy and also with István Horvát and Pál Szemere, his two fellows to found the Kazinczy “Triad of Pest” to support Kazinczy’s endeavor. As a matter of fact, one of the starting points of the struggle for reforming the Hungarian language was a poem by Kazinczy addressed to Vitkovics who was one of the founding members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Purchasing books to acquire knowledge of contemporary literature and natural sciences was a real passion for Vitkovics. His library of 1077 items can now be browsed by readers and researchers for the first time in this volume that presents the reconstructed index of books added to the list of the Vitkovics legacy. The library is a remarkable episode in the history of Hungarian private libraries both for its size and linguistic variety. Vitkovics spoke Hungarian, Serbian, German and Latin, and could read ancient and modern Greek, Russian, French and Italian.

At the beginning if the 19th century, the work of Mihály Vitkovics and his fellows set an example for the relation and cooperation between Serbian and Hungarian cultures.