ZBORNIK - Matica srpska

correspondence I wish to talk about in this paper is still unpublished
and concerns two crucial figures of Third Humanism, namely Anica
Saviã Rebac and Hans Leisegang.
Before entering into it, I shall first recall who these two people
are.
Anica Saviã-Rebac (Novi Sad, 1892 — Belgrade, 1953) is a
great Serbian classical philologist belonging to the same generation
as the great German school of the beginning of the 20th century.
She was born the 5th of October 1894 in an aristocratic Serbian
family. Her father, Milan Saviã, played an influent part in the development
of classical culture in Serbia. We owe to Anica Saviã-Rebac
several studies regarding Eros as well as many translations of
poets like Njegoš, Keats, Shelley, John Milton or even Shakespeare.
As to Hans Leisegang (1890—1951), probably better known
today than Anica though unfortunately his name seems to sink into
oblivion, he is also one of the greatest classical philologist of the
twentieth century, descending from the German school of philology.
He was born in 1890 in Blankenburg (Germany) and was a pupil of
Wilhelm Dilthey and Edmund Husserl. He initially began his career
with works regarding the unity of the study of religion, philosophy
and philology during the Hellenistic period. In his twenties, he turns
towards the analysis of Denkformen or forms of knowledge. From
those studies came his background for books he dedicated to Luther,
Goethe, Lessing or Dante. We know that he suffered from
Nazi persecution. For instance, a rude remark about Hitler, on the
occasion of Hinderburg's funeral in 1934, owed him to remain six
months in jail.
As I have said, the correspondence between Anica and Leisegang
is still unpublished. For my part, I have been able to consult
some letters kept in the Matica Srpska Library, in Novi Sad, Serbia.
From what I read, it is possible to distinguish between two periods
in that correspondence: one starting in the end of the 1920s, where
discussions are generally about classics; the second period, starting
after the second World War and lasting till Leisegang's death in
1951, introduces themes about Early Christian writings. For now I
shall only talk about content of letters written in the late thirties,
and related to the topic of Orphism and Mystic. I will make use
also of Anica's study entitled Philon, die Cabbale, Njegoš, a study
from which Leisegang drew lots of inspiring thoughts for his own
analysis of Gnosticism.
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