Miodrag Bulatovic was one of the most interesting and original of the writers who arose in Serbia during the 1950s and 1960s. His best works are of lasting value and typify the upsurge in prose writing, and of literature generally, after Yugoslavia's break with Joseph Stalin in 1948 and the gradual relaxation of the dictatorship of ideology over literature.

Miodrag Bulatovic was born in 1930 in the village of Okladi near the ancient town of Bijelo Polje, now in northern Montenegro but originally in the twelfth century the capital of Hum (the ancient Hercegovina), which was ruled by Miroslav, the brother of Stefan Nemanja; the town was the place where the monk Gligorije produced the renowned Miroslavljevo evandelije (The Miroslav Gospel) around 1180 and where Miroslav's Church of Saint Peter still exists. Bijelo Polje on the river Lim was the background for most of Bulatovic's writings and the center of his...