Academy Members

Bogišić Rafo, F.C.A.

Academic titles:

• Fellow of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Institutions:

• Full Professor – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb

Membership in Academy:

• full member – Department of Literature (07/24/1991 – 10/06/2010)
• extraordinary member – Department of Literature (06/07/1977 – 07/24/1991)

Rafo Bogišić, F.C.A., literary historian, critic, and writer, was born in the village of Dubravka near Dubrovnik on March 2, 1925. He attended the Classical gymnasium in Dubrovnik and graduated from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in 1952 with a degree in folk language and literature and Italian language. From 1956 to 1957 he was an assistant at the Historical Institute of CASA in Dubrovnik, and from 1957 he began as an assistant university career at the Department of Yugoslav Languages and Literatures at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, and in 1966 he became an assistant professor defending his doctoral thesis Literary Work by Nikola Nalješković. In 1972 he became an associate professor and in 1977 full professor and head of the Department of Older Croatian Literature at the Department of Yugoslav Studies (now Croatian Studies) at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. He remains in that position until his retirement. Since 1970 he has been a member of the Croatian Writers’ Association.

In 1977 he became an extraodrinary member, and in 1991 a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

He received the State Lifetime Achievement Award in the field of humanities in 2005. He focused his scientific interests on several very relevant topics and problems of early modern Croatian literary culture. He devoted many studies to the issues of Croatian Petrarchism, the first out-of-state poetry school of love poetry. In addition to Petrarchism, Bogišić’s scientific interests were also focused on monographic studies on individual Croatian Renaissance writers, and his doctoral thesis on the literary work of Nikola Nalješković (Literary Work by Nikola Nalješković, «Rad» JAZU, Zagreb 1971) is particularly valuable. He also devoted a large number of authorial scientific books and individual studies to literary comparative research and studies in which he discovered the unseen literary-historical and cultural values of old Croatian writers (On Croatian Old Poets, Zagreb 1968; At the Sources; literary studies, Split 1976; Literary Treatises and Essays, Split 1979; Word Literary for Centuries, Zagreb 1982; The Footsteps of the Old Ones; literary studies, Split 1987; A Thousand Lives One Way; literary studies, Rijeka 1991; Mirror Spiritual, Zagreb 1997). The monograph dedicated to Croatian pastoral literature (Croatian Pastoral, Zagreb 1989) is the first monograph that fully covered the segment of pastoral care in Croatian early modern literature not only from the literary-historical but also from the cultural aspect. For the library “Five Centuries of Croatian Literature” he edited three important chrestomatias (Collection of Verses of the 15th and 16th centuries, 1958; Collection of Verses of the 17th century, 1967; Collection of Verses and Prose of the 18th Century, 1973). For the first time since Kukuljević, previously unknown, hard-to-reach and disperse texts of old Croatian writers were collected in them. He also prepared an anthology of the old Croatian lyric Leut and the Trumpet (1971), which has seen several editions.

Professor Bogišić significantly contributed to the popularization of older Croatian literature. He expanded the methodological framework of studying older Croatian literature and thus presented the corpus of older Croatian literary culture as permanently contemporary and current to today’s readers.