Laza K. Lazarevic was a leading realist in Serbian literature in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although he came from a small town and wrote mostly about the townsfolk, he also wrote about village people, thus contributing to a prominent genre of that time, the "village short story," practiced by other leading Serbian writers such as Milovan Glisic and Janko Veselinovic. What sets Lazarevic apart is his tendency to probe deeper into the psyche of his characters, thus making him a founder of psychological prose in Serbian literature. He wrote only a few short stories, but the small quantity is offset by high artistic quality unequaled in all of Serbian literature up to his appearance.

Lazarevic was born on 13 May 1851 in Sabac, a middle-sized town near the Sava and Drina rivers in western Serbia. His father, Kuzman, an immigrant from the neighboring village and a merchant...