Publicist Mihael Kunić and his contribution to the development of Croatian biographical studies

Abstract

Publicist Mihovil Kunić is little known to the Croatian cultural public. Of Slovak origin, by profession a retired educator and school supervisor in the countries of the Habsburg Monarchy, he resided in Croatia in the latter part of his life, actively participating in the social life of Zagreb, Karlovac, and Varaždin, as well as in the country life of the Croatian nobility, especially in Slavonia. He documented numerous interesting facts, now valuable for understanding bourgeois culture in the early decades of the 19th century. Many of his works in the German language on pedagogy, linguistics, history, and horticulture date back to the period before his arrival to the Croatian lands. Following and developing his own biographical method, Kunić achieved a significant lexicographic endeavour on a European scale by publishing a multi-volume biographical dictionary of notable individuals of the Habsburg Monarchy, Biographien merkwürdiger Männer der Österreichischen Monarchie (1805–1812). In Croatian literature, he is mostly known for his historical-topographical studies, along with his works on civic, noble, and public gardens and park architecture, which significantly contributed to the understanding of the history of garden art and cultural conditions in Croatia at the beginning of the 19th century. In line with the Enlightenment efforts to describe the lives of individuals working for the common good, he also published a series of biographical articles on prominent figures of pre-Illyrian Croatia and numerous occasional poems marking various public and private events. The paper provides a historical overview of the development of Croatian biographical studies, discusses the criteria for selecting individuals in Kunić’s opus, the motives and circumstances of his activities, and his contribution to the development of this discipline, with a focus on the biography of Josip Sermage, in which he described his methodological approaches, and the circle of individuals associated with the Zagreb Chapter as part of the emerging bourgeois class.