Ljubomir Maraković

Ljubomir Maraković (Topusko, June 17, 1887 – Zagreb, February 22, 1959) was a Croatian literary critic and historian, and one of the leaders of the Croatian Catholic movement.

He was the first editor of the literary magazine Luč and for a long time the editor of the periodical Hrvatska prosvjeta. He achieved the highest university education from literature in Vienna and later he wrote critics, essays, and works from the literature theory and history, more than thousand in 40 years of his public cultural work. He collaborated on the Croatian Encyclopedia from 1941 to 1945. His engagement was forbidden from Yugoslavian communists after 1945 due to his collaboration with the NDH. In his most important review, New Life (1910), he explains the idea of literary work as a result of synthesis of the national and social interests with the aesthetic categories. He is considered to be one of the inaugurators of comparative literary approach in Croatian academic writing and lecturing. He highly contributed to introducing writers such as Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, John Galsworthy, Florence Louise Barclay, G. K. Chesterton and others into Croatian cultural milieu. Among the first academic papers dedicated to Maraković were those written in the 1990s by our literary comparatist and author Helena Peričić. Maraković's work was neglected in the period after the Second World War and before 1990s, especially because of his Catholic orientation.