I viaggi europei di Ljubomir Nenadovic

Ljubomir Nenadović’s European Travels This paper examines the travels of Ljubomir Nenadović (1826-1895) and the letters he wrote from Switzerland in 1847, Italy in 1851 and Germany in 1870. They mark three phases in the literary biography of their author, who was the first travel writer in Serbian, but they are also evidence of the polyphonic nature of this genre. The differences that the author-traveller identified and observed in various ways between the countries visited and their cultures on the one hand, and his own homeland, Serbia, or the Slavs’ cultural and geographic space on the other, also determined the dynamics and the narrative texture of the literary text. The traveller’s movement, his openness towards others, as well as his closure, encapsulate the ‘truth’ on the surface and other explicit or less obvious elements in the hidden levels of the text and it confirms that the author-traveller is always conditioned by the historical, social and cultural contexts of his own origins, as are his text and the readers he addresses.