Oral epic poetry collected from the Croatian lands includes the tragic ballad Hasanaginica, set in 17th-century Muslim circles in the Ottoman-ruled Dalmatian hinterland. Published in bilingual Italian-Croatian form by the Venetian scholar Alberto Fortis in 1774 as part of a geographical survey, it awakened great interest across Europe, where it was seen as a Balkan counterpart to Ossianic poetry. Goethe’s translation was included in Herder’s collections of folk-songs, and in turn inspired Romantics from Walter Scott to Charles Nodier and Prosper Mérimée, and from Puškin to Adam Mickiewicz. It also prepared the Europe-wide interest in the later, Serbian-focused works of oral epic by Vuk Karadžić (who included Hasanaginica in his collections), and it is through this reception channel that the ballad later became a Yugoslav, and Croatian, canonical classic.
Within 19th-century Croatian literary culture, the collection of proverbs goes back to the 18th century. The first Croatian literary journal, Danica horvatska, slavonska i dalmatinska, recycled some 130 of these from earlier collections in 1835 and 1839; similarly, proverbs recorded in 18th-century collections and dictionaries were used in later lexicographical work. The current term for “proverb”, poslovica, adopted from Russian (and replacing the earlier priričje), was established in the 19th century; it was first used in Joakim Stulli’s Rječosložje iliričko-talijansko-latinsko (“Illyrian-Italian-Latin Dictionary”, 1801-10).
Under the onset of Romanticism, the status of proverbs changed: they were prized as authentic items of the vernacular-national heritage; as such, they entered into 19th-century literary-theoretical discourses and poetic anthologies, e.g. August Šenoa’s Antologija pjesničtva hrvatskoga i srbskoga sa uvodom o poetici (“Anthology of Croatian and Serbian poetry with an introduction on poetics”, 1876), Vilim Korajac’s Filozofija hrvatskih i srpskih poslovica (“The philosophy of Croatian and Serbian proverbs”, 1876) and Franjo Marković’s study Etički sadržaj narodnih poslovica (“The ethical content of traditional proverbs”, 1889). Consequently, proverbs were present in all literary genres, lyric, epic, narrative and dramatic.
The most important 19th-century proverb collections were Ivan Ambrozović’s Proričja i narečenja, [...] sa serbskoga jezika na ilirički prevedena (“Proverbs and sayings [...] translated from the Serbian language into Illyrian”, Pest 1808; this was also the first publication avowedly translating from Serbian into Croatian); Vuk Karadžić’s Narodne srpske poslovice (“Popular Serbian proverbs”, 1836), which also contained material collected in Croatia; Mijat Stojanović’s Sbirka hrvatskih narodnih poslovicah, riečih i izrazah (“Collection of Croatian traditional proverbs, words and sayings”, 1866); Đuro Daničić’s Poslovice (“Proverbs”, 1871), a collection of almost 6000 proverbs from older written sources; and Vicko Juraj Skarpa’s Hrvatske narodne poslovice (“Croatian traditional proverbs”, 1909).
Riddles often appeared alongside proverbs, usually printed in calendars or other publications geared to a wide readership. In Ignjat Alojzije Brlić’s Ilirski kalendar (Budim 1836-55), riddles appeared for several years. They were also included in the Narodni koledar, published by the Zadar-based Matica dalmatinska from 1863, which catered for a more demotic reading constituency of “common people”. Marijan Vuković published a collection of more than 1600 riddles in the 1890 collection Sbirka zagonetaka, and a theoretical disquisition on the topic by Antun Barac appeared in the 1910 article O zagoneci (“About the riddle”).
