Svetozar Marković was a Serbian socialist, philosopher, and publicist. After prolonged uprisings between 1804 and 1815 had liberated Serbia from Turkey, a cultural revolution took place, led by the reformer of the Serbian language and orthography Vuk Karadžich (1787–1864), and socialist ideas began to spread. The first Serbian socialist writers were the economist and philosopher Živojin Žujović (1838–1870) and Svetozar Marković.

After technical studies in Belgrade, Marković continued his education in St. Petersburg, where he attended the lectures of Dmitri Pisarev and became acquainted with the ideas of the Russian revolutionary democrats. Marković went to France in 1869 and then to Zürich, where he became acquainted with the Western revolutionary workers' movement and with the works of Karl Marx. Marković became the correspondent for Serbia and the Balkans of the Marxist First International. In 1870 he returned to Serbia, where he gathered about himself a circle...