KRIŽANIĆ, JURAJ (CRISANEO). - Croatian missionary and man of letters, b. at Obrh in 1618. Enthused by the idea of reuniting all the schismatic Slavs around Catholicism, he first studied theology at Bologna and Rome, then went, completely alone, to Russia, where, after some initial success, he ended up being relegated to Siberia: there he wrote his most demanding works, in which he advocated not only the religious unity of the Slavs, but also their linguistic and political unity; in a grammatical work he threw out the first suggestions of a Slavic "interlanguage." Having managed to leave Russia, he died beneath the walls of Vienna, fighting against the Turks, among the Polish ranks led by Sobieski in 1683.
The few tranquil and serene moments of his life belong to the period of his stay in Bologna and Rome. His formula can be summed up thus: the Slavs with Moscow, Moscow and the Slavs with Rome; that all the Slavs should therefore be one with Muscovy, but that they should have Rome as their sole religious center. It is the position of an ardent Catholic and a fervent Pan-Slavist. In the Turks and the Germans he sees the enemies of the Slavic race. The Russian-Polish political quarrel is deplored by him with arguments that curiously anticipate the ideas and tendencies of the 19th century. The schism appears to him as exclusively the work of the Greeks, who rose up out of pride against Rome: the Slavic peoples, still ingenuous, would have been deceived by the Greeks. The Slavs, in any case, would not be conscious schismatics. Given the particular structure of Russia, according to K., it is necessary to win the Tsar over to the Catholic cause, to make him understand that among the Slavs he is the greatest and that it falls to him to free Europe from the looming threat of the Crescent. K.'s Christian and Pan-Slavic ideal produced no practical results, but the 19th century reworked several of his suggestions. In Russia, Vladimir Solov'ev (Solovjov) can, in a certain sense, be considered his spiritual heir. Among K.'s writings, mention should be made of the treatise Politika and the grammar Granatično izkazanje ob ruskom jeziku.