Svetozar Marković (, ; 9 September 1846 – 26 February 1875) was a Serbian political activist, literary critic and socialist philosopher. He developed an activistic anthropological philosophy with a definite program of social change. He was called the Serbian Nikolay Dobrolyubov. Early life Marković was born in the town of Zaječar on 9 September 1846, the son of a police clerk. Marković's childhood was spent in the village of Rekovac and then the town of Jagodina. The family moved to Kragujevac in 1856. He reached adolescence at about the time Mihailo Obrenović became the Prince of Serbia. In 1860 he began to study at the gymnasium in Belgrade and in 1863 at the Velika škola of Belgrade, the highest educational body in Serbia at that time, founded in 1808. While at the Velika škola he became interested in literature and politics, falling under the influences of Vuk Karadžić and Vladimir Jovanović, a leading Serbian Liberal. Because of his outstanding record as a student at the Belgrade college, his professors unanimously nominated him for a post-graduate scholarship to study abroad. He chose to study in Russia, in St. Petersburg in particular, at the Alexander I Institute of Communication Engineers. Study abroad For the next three years, he lived in Russia and came under the influence of Russian radicals of the 1860s. These were followers of the agrarian socialist Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who wrote and edited Nikolay Nekrasov's The Contemporary magazine. There he also met Dmitry Pisarev and Lyuben Karavelov, who in the autumn of 1876 took part as a volunteer in the Serbian campaign against the Ottomans, and subsequently joined the Bulgarian irregular contingent with the Russian army in the war of 1877–78. Together with a few other men of birth and education, Mikhail Katkov, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, and Aleksey Suvorin, Marković began secretly to sow the sentiments of democracy among the peasants. His sympathetic nature was influenced by indignation against the brutal methods adopted towards activists, especially political prisoners, and by the stern measures which the authorities felt compelled to adopt in order to repress the revolutionary movement. His indignation carried him into accord for a time with those who advocated the acceptance of constitutional methods. In consequence, he exposed himself to danger by remaining in Russia for fear of being arrested by the Russian authorities for his socialist sympathies with the revolutionaries. He then left for Zurich, Switzerland to pursue political