ZORAN GAURILOVIĆ

Vreme smrti (Time of Death) strikes a new path in the development of the Serbian novel because it opens many hitherto unknown areas, offers new esthetic values and demands new answers to the old questions….

It is not easy to say what the basic virtues of the novel are, simply because there are so many. The book has many layers and meanings; it is closed inwardly and yet open to ideas, so it is hard to make more definite judgments. For, to take for a subject an entire country under extremely dramatic historical conditions, to compress its fate into a novel, to place that fate and drama firmly within the European framework and within even larger questions of the meaning of national sacrifice and resistance—all that represents much more than what we are accustomed to in our fiction. Vreme smrti belongs to those exceptional works in which time distances are artistically bridged.

Vreme smrti is not a chronicle nor is it a pathetic description of great events. It is a work of art through which these events are presented as fateful moral and intellectual decisions which at that time were not yet quite clear. For everything is here: the actors of the drama, the question of Serbia's place in Europe, the problem and vision of Yugoslavism, the relations with the Allies and also the moral sense of the sacrifice and endless meanings of the victory. Therefore Vreme smrti offers a singular truth about events that are strongly felt even in our day. At the same time the work contains ideas, strong antiwar accusation, problems, doubts, love and dilemmas. Passionately immersed in the very being of the nation, the novel brings that being to light and to a wider and more universal level. Through this the narrow framework of time, so prevalent in the Yugoslav novel, is widened. The randomness and coldness of real facts are formed into a dialogue with the meaning of historical existence.