Branislav Nušić (, ; – 19 January 1938) was a Serbian playwright, satirist, essayist, novelist and founder of modern rhetoric in Serbia. He also worked as a journalist and a civil servant. Life Branislav Nušić was born Alkibijad Nuša (, ) in Belgrade on . His father, George Nousias (Thessaloniki, 1822 – Pristina, 1916), was a Serbianized Aromanian merchant with family roots in the village of Magarevo in the Ottoman Macedonia, while his mother, Ljubica (1839 – Belgrade, 1904), was a Serb homemaker from Brčko, Bosnia, then under Austro-Hungarian rule. Young Alkibijad completed his primary education in Smederevo, a port town along the Danube, before returning to Belgrade to complete his secondary education. In 1882, at the age of 18, he legally changed his name to Branislav Nušić. He subsequently enrolled in the Belgrade Higher School (later the University of Belgrade), graduating with a law degree in 1885. That year, at the age of 21, he was conscripted into the Royal Serbian Army. Nušić's service coincided with the two-week-long Serbo-Bulgarian War of November 1885, which he witnessed first-hand as a Serbian corporal in western Bulgaria. Nušić was quick to criticize the conduct of the Serbian Supreme Command during the war, which ended in a Bulgarian victory. He outlined his objections in the book Pripovetke jednog kaplara iz srpsko–bugarskog rata 1885 (The Stories of a Corporal from the Serbo–Bulgarian War of 1885), which was published in 1886. He went on to spend one year's study at the University of Graz in Austria-Hungary. In 1887, Nušić published a poem titled Dva raba ("Two Servants"), which ridiculed the Serbian King Milan for attending the funeral of an unpopular general's mother rather than that of , an officer who died of wounds sustained while saving his regiment's flag. Nušić was subsequently arrested, convicted of lèse-majesté and sentenced to two year's imprisonment. He served his sentence at a prison in Požarevac but was released after only one year due to good behaviour. In 1889, shortly after his release from prison, Nušić entered the civil service as an official in Serbia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Several years later, in 1893, he married Darinka Đorđević, the 17-year-old niece of the Serbian consul in Bitola, Dimitrije Bodi. The couple had three children, one of whom died in infancy. Between 1889 and 1900, Nušić worked as a clerk at the Serbian consulates to the Ottoman Empire in Bitola, Serres,