8vo. Engraved frontispiece, viii, 252 pp., 8 ff. Publisher's printed wrappers, somewhat stained and worn. Glue stain from the library label pasted on the back of the title-page, some browning.

Vidakovic’s "Kassia Carica" is a representative example of the adventurous, moralising prose that helped establish the novel as a popular Serbian literary form in the decades before the full triumph of language reform. The book opens with an engraved frontispiece and is otherwise a plain but direct reading copy, issued in the publisher’s wrappers, as intended for a wider, non-elite audience.

Vidakovic (1780-1841), often styled the father of the modern Serbian novel, wrote at a moment when print in Cyrillic was serving as an instrument of cultural consolidation for South Slavic readers within the Habsburg sphere. Today, Vidakovi is best remembered as a strong opponent of Vuk Karadžic's language reform and a proponent of the Slavonic-Serbian language as a literary language of Serbs.

This copy is further distinguished by its ecclesiastical provenance, preserved with institutional stamps from Przemysl.

Provenance: from the library of Iwan Snihurkyj (1784-1847), bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Przemysl, with his library stamp to title-page; Greek-Catholic Chapter of Przemysl with bookplate pasted to verso of title-page.

Novakovic 673. OCLC 314892077. S. B. Kimball, "The Serbian 'Matica'-prototype of Austro-Slav literary foundations: the first fifty years 1826-76", East European Quarterly 3 (1969), pp. 348-370, at p. 358.