Mladen Leskovac

Mladen Leskovac, academician, literary historian, essayist, poet, (Stari Sivac, 1904-Novi Sad, 1990). In the fall of 1945, he was in charge of the Commission for the Restitution of Cultural Property from Hungary for the transfer of the Tekelianum

Library from Pest to Matica Srpska. In less than a decade of managing the Library

, he turned this institution into one of the leading national libraries (1945–1954). He was also a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad. He is the founder of the Selected Works of Matica Srpska for Literature and Language, which he edited for twenty-five years (1954-1979). At the same time, he was the editor of Letopis (1958-1964), and from 1955 he was a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia. During the time when he was the president of Matica Srpska

(1969-1979), several new projects were launched: Serbian Biographical Dictionary, Matica Srpska's Selected Works of Slavic Studies, Matica Srpska's Selected Works of History, Research on Fruška Gora. During his presidency, the first volume of the Lexicon of Writers of Yugoslavia was published, the Dictionary of the Serbo-Croatian Literary Language was completed, the undertaking of the first edition of Serbian Literature in One Hundred Books was completed, and the Work of Matica Srpska was launched. He translated extensively from Hungarian and French. Part of his literary and historical essays’ opus is included in three volumes of From Serbian Literature. His Anthology of Older Serbian Poetry, published in several editions, remained the main intermediary towards our older poetic tradition.