[Measured] against classic war novels Dobrica Ćosić's massive work [A Time of Death], a shortened version of an even vaster cycle of novels about Serbia's struggle for survival during World War One, hardly qualifies as a masterpiece.

The author may have had War and Peace in mind all along; he may have wanted to communicate the reality of war even more graphically than Tolstoy did—in one battle scene a student soldier hears the screams of men hit by shrapnel, and exclaims: "I don't remember anything like that from War and Peace."—but the novel lacks Tolstoy's luminous and urgent realism. It, too, paints a broad canvas and fills it with a host of representative types, but Tolstoy's willed randomness is missing. There is too much crucial dialogue and revealing interior monologue here; too many neatly described scenes. Of course, it may be unfair to compare every realist war novel to War and Peace, though Ćosić invites comparison, not only by making pointed references to the Russian masterpiece, but by reaching conclusions about war that are remarkably close to Tolstoy's views. For Ćosić, as for Tolstoy, war becomes a metaphor for the human condition. (p. 412)

Perhaps it is because A Time of Death is such a perfect example of national literature that its significance wanes when read in translation, in a different cultural milieu. Even though Ćosić is too sophisticated an artist to exploit nationalist feelings—the book is not so much a paean to Serbian fortitude as a study of a people in mortal danger—there are a great many names, places, dates in the novel that resonate with meaning only for the Serbian reader. The outsider may vaguely sense the reverberations, but he can not be moved by them.

Nevertheless, as a historical novel A Time of Death documents convincingly the ordeal of a small nation overrun by a powerful neighbor and abandoned by her allies. (pp. 412-13)

When the peasants are made to talk too much like peasants; when too many students are portrayed as disillusioned idealists; when conversations between generals and junior officers are interlarded with clichés and stock responses, the reader wearies of the novel, and of the author's compulsion to tell all. But when the immense destruction and dislocation of war are concentrated in comprehensible tragedies—a father mourning his son, a soldier desperately searching for his horse, a student rushing to his death to prove he is not a coward—then A Time of Death becomes a poignant tribute to human dignity and perseverence. (pp. 413-14)