The upstart

J.S. Popović was born on January 1, 1806. His father was a merchant, Tzintzar by nationality and his mother was very educated women from an artistic family, Serb by nationality. Mother’s background and his poor health from an early age disabled him to fulfill his father wish and to takeover family business. Instead, he devoted himself to studies. He graduated from the University of Budapest, where he had first important contacts with theatre, which would soon after become his great love and obsession. In Budapest he has written and published his first poems that were followed by tragedies. On return to Vršac, as a graduated jurist, he became a professor of Latin language and after that a lawyer. During that period he was very much occupied with his literary career. His first comedy The Liar and the Archiliar revealed him to be a brilliant comoediographer.
His long-lasting wish to come to Serbia and to help his people in organizing the new liberated state was finally fulfilled in 1840. He was appointed as a professor at the “Liceum”, located in Kragujevac. There he helped his colleague Atanasije Nikolić, also Serb from Vojvodina, to start the student theatre company. At the same time he was caught by the idea to found the “Learned Society”. The following year, when the “Liceum” was relocated to the capital, he came to Belgrade where he deepened his cultural, social, and educational activities. He took part in founding of “Theatre at Djumruk”, and the theatre “At the Deer’s”. He wrote and translated texts, taught actors how to act, wrote critics and helped the theatres in administrative and juridical matters… He was deeply devoted to the improvement of school system in Serbia, he wrote schoolbooks, prepared guidelines for school administration system, set up founds, started to publish educational magazine “Prosvetne novine” and took part in bringing of the first education law… He was one of the most fervent promoters of the “Society of Serbian Letters” (later, the “Academy of Sciences”). Also, he was a great advocate of the idea to incorporate the native language into the literary one (although not so radical as it was the case with Vuk Karadžić). He was among the first who organized collection and preservation of the valuable antique subjects, and was one of the founders of the National Museum. He held the position of a Head of the Ministry of Education for several years... and all of this in eight years only. However, during the regime of so-called “Defenders of the Constitution”, when the first generation of Serbian students graduated from various European universities came back to their fatherland, the outcry at Serbs from Vojvodina, the so-called “pro-Germans”, who were the only educated group in Miloš’s Serbia, became even more louder. Sterija couldn’t bear such circumstances and pressed with the other difficulties as well, decided to resiqn from from his duty and in 1848 returned to his native town Vršac. Rather disappointed, tired and ill, he was primarily concentrated upon his literary work. His best bitter comedy The Patriots, as considered to be by most of the critics, was written at that time, as a reaction on a conflict between Hungarians and Serbs in Vršac at the time of the Hungarian rebellion against Austrian regime, in 1848-49.
J.S. Popović died on February 26, 1856, leaving behind himself everlasting influence in the culture of Serbia.

Jelica Stevanović

Instead of a word from the dramaturg: 
"Only the spirit of a small town knows the true small town, and only in it and for it does this kind of "worldly" world exist: in the reality of a small town there is no small town, just as there is no world in the world. The world is the vacillation of the spirit between a small town and the world, between the absolutely rational and the absolutely irrational which, in their absoluteness and "trueness", ideally separated, exist only in this spirit. If there is no escape from this vacillation, if to seek its resolution would be to return to the spirit of a small town as the spirit of salvation, and if, on the other hand, the ideal giving up the dream of salvation would mean giving up the movement, the spirit itself, falling into the world without hope of return, where being saved can mean only one thing: to be saved from oneself, to be dead, and where we exist only in the unsaved state, between two temptations; if there is no end to this dream about the end, to this dream which is pure unreasonableness, but unreasonableness with which one lives, and which is, again, a reasonable unreasonableness, - there cannot, however, be an end to this need of the spirit to see itself and to question itself. The spirit of a small town, as the spirit of the final answer, the one that heads the world and that questions everything except itself (and so that it would not question itself), only here, with this self-questioning of the spirit about the spirit, this self-questioning that neither ignores history nor tries to turn it into a way of suppression by "historicizing" its permanent trials, it really calls itself into question. The spirit of objectification in everything, as the exteriorization of one's own content into the world, from the attitude of dealing with the world, by which it remains sheltered in the shadow and darkness of inarticulateness for itself, here passes into the attitude of dealing with itself, which is never-ending and which is therefore, the ultimate obligation and everlasting inspiration."

Radomir Konstantinović, “A Small-Town Philosophy”, Nolit, Belgrade 1981, p. 196

A word from the director 
"Sterija is my favourite Serbian classic author. I find him inspiring because of his critical attitude towards the philistines, conservatism and dangerous prejudices of his time, as well as because of his empathy for the characters who yearn for a more fulfilling and noble life than the one offered to them by their lethargic community. I am fascinated by the language in his plays and I believe that it is a great challenge for any theatre director at any point of time to stage his comedies that at the same time contain the potential for provoking laughter, but also for warning recognition".
"I find it exciting to try to look at Fema's foolishness and the reactions of those around her as a brave and frantic aspiration of a person to reach a more beautiful and better way of existence than the one imposed on her. It is also my desire to illuminate the reaction of the society, which tries tooth and nail to stand in the way of this, as an aggressive, united reaction of the oppressive small-town spirit. The dark spirit of a small town is, unfortunately, a constant in our region and that is why Sterija is always relevant".
“I want our staging of “The Upstart” to correspond with the current feeling of reality and to be based on the sensibility of the present moment. I want the play to ponder about the possibility of changing aggression in communication and action that is deeply rooted by upbringing and heritage, both among those who are the pillars of everything that is primitive backward and intolerant in the provincial environment, and among those who, out of desperation, strive for a superficially understood sublime existence. I don't want a naively ironic Biedermeieresque enlightening play about our past, but a tragicomic look at the continuity of the provincial spirit in Serbia.”
Excerpts from the interview that director Iva Milošević gave to "Pozorišne novine" in April 2024. She was interviewed by Mikojan Bezbradica.