Ivo Vojnović

Ivo Vojnović (9 October 1857 – 30 August 1929) was a writer from Dubrovnik. Vojnović was born in Dubrovnik as the first son of Count Konstantin Vojnović (1832–1903) and Maria de Serragli (1836–1922) on 9 October 1857 in Dubrovnik, the Habsburg monarchy. He was a member of the Serbian noble House of Vojnović through his father. His mother was of noble Florentine descent. The city of his birth and its history had an important influence on his later literary work. Most of his childhood however he spent in Split. He had a famous younger brother Lujo Vojnović, who would later play an important political and cultural role in the late 19th- and 20th-century Dalmatia and Montenegro.

As a young man he moved to Zagreb with his family, where he graduated from the University of Zagreb Faculty of Law in 1879.

Until 1884 he served as a trainee of the Royal Court Table in Zagreb. After that he continued his judicial career in Križevci (1884–1889), Bjelovar (1889), Zadar (1889–1891).

In 1893, Vojnović wrote a short play Gundulićev san (lit. Gundulić's Dream) that was published in Dubrovnik at the time of the unveiling of the Gundulić monument, which explicitly advocated a unity of Croats and Serbs in Dubrovnik.

In 1899, he obtained employment at the court in Dubrovnik, then moved to Supetar on the island of Brač, then to Zadar, and again to Supetar. His career in the judiciary ended in 1907, when he was fired from the office in Supetar because of financial wrongdoing, and stripped of pension rights.

In 1907, he became the dramaturg at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb. At this time, Vojnović's pro-Serbian ideas were apparent from his work, in which he enthusiastically supported the unification of South Slavs under Serbia.

Prior to the Balkan Wars, Vojnović wrote plays that showed great pride in his origins, however, that would not augur well during World War I when war broke out between Austria-Hungary and Serbia.

In 1911, travelled to Italy, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade. In his 1912 visit to Belgrade he publicly claimed he had Serbian noble descent. In 1914, he went back to Dubrovnik where the Austrian-Hungarian government imprisoned him in a Šibenik jail under charges of being a Yugoslavian nationalist. After four months, on Christmas Eve 1914 he was relocated to a prison near Linz, Austria. He was detained without trial for three years by his Austrian captors.

In 1917 he was finally transferred to the Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Zagreb. There, unsuccessful attempts were made to cure some severe eye ailments that he had contracted while being incarcerated.

After World War I ended, in 1919 he moved to France, where he mostly lived in Nice until 1922, when he moved back to Dubrovnik.

Because of his claims of being a nobleman, and because of his unrestrained Yugoslavism, by 1924 Miroslav Krleža had engaged in a public feud with him, calling him a fake count and a drama dilettante.

In 1928, Vojnović's eye problems became acute, threatened with blindness, and in ill health, he went to Serbia to be treated in a sanatorium in Krunska street, Vračar, Belgrade. He died there in 1929. He was buried in Dubrovnik.