Today is Saturday, April 13, the 104th day of 2024. There are 262 days until the end of the year.
1519 – Catherine de’ Medici, the French queen of Italian origin, was born, the daughter of the lord of Florence Lorenzo II Medici, who ruled France after the death of her husband Henri II from 1560 as regent for the sons of Francois II, Charles IX and Henri III. During her reign, the religious-civil war between the Roman Catholics and the Huguenots raged, to the outbreak of which she contributed significantly. With the support of Pope Gregory the Third, in 1572, she organized the massacre of the Huguenots, known as Bartholomew’s Night.
1598 – The French king Henri the Fourth published the Edict of Nantes, with which the Huguenots were equalized in rights with the Roman Catholics, reports Srna.
1605 – The Russian emperor Boris Fyodorovich Godunov, who took over the throne in 1598, after the death of Fyodor the First, died. In 1591, it is assumed that he killed Fyodor’s younger brother, the heir to the throne Dimitri, which inspired Alexander Pushkin to write the play “Boris Godunov” and Modest Mussorgsky to compose the opera of the same name.
1695 – French writer Jean de Lafontaine, member of the French Academy, restorer of the fable, died. He wrote “Fables” vividly, plastically and wittily, and in poetry he created his own versification, masterfully mixing the most diverse verses. Other works: the poems “Adonis”, “Elegy to the nymphs of Boa”, “Philemon and Baucid”, the novel “The Love of Psyche and Cupid”, verse “Stories”.
1743 – American statesman Thomas Jefferson was born, founder of the Democratic Party, president of the USA from 1801 to 1809. During the War of Independence, he was the chairman of the committee that prepared the “Declaration of Independence”, accepted on July 4, 1776. He freed his slaves, but did not managed to achieve the abolition of slavery. He was the governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781 and the secretary of the first president of the USA, George Washington, from 1790 to 1793. He took advantage of the financial difficulties of the French emperor Napoleon I to buy Louisiana from him in 1803.
1832 – Birth of Serbian painter Stevan Todorović, member of the Serbian Royal Academy. He studied painting in Vienna and Munich. He began as a romantic with a fine sense of color, and ended as a cold academic. He made about 300 portraits of contemporaries, including Kornelij Stanković, Đura Daničić, Vladan Đorđević, Queen Natalija. He also worked on iconostases with compositions from national history in churches in Negotin and Smederevska Palanka.
1848 – Sicily declared independence from the Kingdom of Naples.
1869 – The Serbian newspaper “Pančevac” began to be published, edited by publicist Jovan Pavlović. The first translation of the “Communist Manifesto” into Serbian was published in “Pančevac”. It was banned in 1876, after which it was renewed and banned several times. The paper is still published.
1885 – Hungarian philosopher Đerđ Lukáč was born – the protagonist of “Western Marxism”. In his youth, in the “non-Marxist period”, he wrote “The History of the Development of Modern Drama” and the essays “Soul and Forms”. He became a member of the Communist Party of Hungary in 1918, and during the Soviet Republic of Hungary in 1919, he became the Commissioner for Education. The essays collected under the title “History and Class Consciousness” originate from that period, which significantly influenced the renewal of Marxist thought in Western Europe after the Second World War. After the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution, he emigrated to Austria, and in 1929 to the USSR, where he worked at the “Marx-Engels” Institute until 1931. Until 1933, he led a literary group of communist writers in Germany, after which he was again in Moscow until 1945, where he wrote the study “Young Hegel”. After returning to his homeland, he was a professor at the University of Budapest, and in 1956, a minister in the government of Imre Nađa, after whose fall he was deprived of his profession, removed from the Academy of Sciences and interned. From 1957 until his death in 1971, he retired from public life. Other works: “Destruction of Mind”, “Existentialism or Marxism”, “Aesthetics”, “Ontology of Social Being”.
1904 – The Russian painter Vasiliy Vasilevich Vereshchagin, who showed his mastery most by being inspired by war motifs, died. He studied painting at the Academy in Petrograd, and perfected it in Paris. His monumental compositions from the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878, sketches from military life and realistic studies of types and landscapes are especially noteworthy.
1906 – Irish writer Samuel Beckett was born, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, who in 1953 opened the era of the “drama of the absurd” with the play “Waiting for Godot”. He was preoccupied with the theme of the disintegration of civil society, the dehumanizing image of man and the hopeless situation of unusual beings at the end of the world and time, which symbolizes the absurdity of human existence. He lived in France and wrote in French, believing that one can write in a foreign language without style, which is his ideal. Other works: the novel “Murphy”, the trilogy “Moloa”, “Malone dies”, “The Unnameable”, the plays “Endgame”, “The Last Tape”, “Games without words”, “Happy Days”, “The Game”, “No me”.
1919 – British troops massacred 380 Hindus in Amrikar, supporters of the leader of the Indian independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi.
1922 – Born statesman Julius Kambarage Njerere, prominent leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, first president of Tanganyika from 1962 to 1985, when he resigned, a rare example in Africa. Thanks to his great intellect, but also his origin – he is the son of the chief of the Wazanaki tribe – he studied history, political science and law at the University of Edinburgh and became the first black man in the history of Tanganyika with a university degree. Soon after, “Mwalimu” – as his countrymen called him – founded the African National Union of Tanganyika in 1954, the forerunner of the ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi. He was one of the founders of the Organization of African Unity in 1963, and three years after the end of the struggle for independence from Great Britain in 1964, he was a key figure during the unification with the island of Zanzibar, after which the country was named Tanzania. His “Arusha Declaration” of 1967 designated socialism and economic self-sufficiency as the basic goals, followed by accelerated nationalization and a controversial attempt to organize peasants into “Ujames”. He achieved considerable success in education and health, but social achievements were overshadowed by the economic crisis and critics accused him of turning a potentially rich country into one of the poorest in Africa. In 1979, he ordered the Tanzanian army to intervene in neighboring Uganda to overthrow the dictatorial regime of Idi Amin. He rejected the IMF’s request to authorize a major currency devaluation and loosen state control over the economy and in 1985 handed over the post to Ali Hassan Mwinji, after which he had a prominent political advisory role in Tanzania and a number of African countries, including mediating to end a civil war in neighboring Burundi.
1922 – English writer John Brain was born, who introduced into English literature the type of ambitious young opportunist of proletarian origin, ready to do anything to achieve success and material gain. Works: novels “The Road to High Society”, “A Place in High Society”, “The Jealous God”, “The Crying Game”, “Stay with Me Until Morning”, “Pious Advocate”, study “Writing a Novel”.
1941 – During the Second World War, Hungarian fascists started terror in Bačka and in a few days killed around 3,000 civilians, mostly Serbs.
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1961 – The UN General Assembly condemned the policy of apartheid in South Africa.
1963 – Russian grandmaster Harry Weinstein, known as Garry Kasparov, was born, who became the world champion in 1985 at the age of 23, the youngest in chess history. He snatched the title from his compatriot Anatoli Karpov, winning the match with a score of 13:11. This was preceded by a match started in September 1984, in which Karpov led 5:3, with 40 draws, but on February 15, 1985, the World Chess Federation stopped the match played until the sixth won game, violating the rules, due to “player exhaustion”.
1964 – American actor of African origin Sidney Poitier won the “Oscar” award for the main role in the film “Poland Lilies”, as the first black man to win that award.
1966 – President of Iraq Abdul Salam Arif died in a helicopter crash.
1975 – A member of a Christian militia in the suburbs of Beirut killed 22 Palestinians on a bus, which is considered the beginning of the civil war in Lebanon.
1976 – An explosion at a munitions factory in Finland kills 45 people.
1979 – Two days after the entry of the Tanzanian army and opposition forces into Kampala and the fall of dictator Idi Amin Dada, the Ugandan interim government was formed. Amin overthrew President Milton Obote in 1971 and liquidated at least half a million compatriots during his reign. In October 1978, he attacked Tanzania, but got away with it.
1990 – In a futile attempt to prevent the secession of Lithuania, USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev threatened the Baltic republic with an economic embargo if it did not withdraw its declaration of independence in two days.
1999 – In an attack by NATO aviation, the ground satellite station “Yugoslavia” in the village of Prilike near Ivanjica was severely damaged, and on Kopaonik, the hotel “Bačište” was razed to the ground with 11 missiles and several bridges were destroyed, including the bridge in Biljanovac near Kraljevo, the bridge in Dedina near Kruševac and the bridge on the river Kosanica on the road Niš – Priština.
2001 – IPTF Commissioner Vincent Kerdroy suspended 17 Croatian police officers in Herzegovina-Neretva Canton due to their refusal to recognize the authorities of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
2003 – American soldiers entered Tikrit, the hometown of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
2015 – German writer Ginter Grass died. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. His most famous work – The Tin Drum belongs to the genre of magical realism. When in 2006, after decades of concealing the truth, he admitted that as a young man he had been in the elite Nazi SS units during the last few months of World War II, there were proposals to strip him of the Nobel Prize, which is not possible.
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