Along with Vladan Desnica and Vjekoslav Kaleb, Petar Segedin is one of a generation of Dalmatian-born Croatian writers whose works filter the cataclysm of world war and the particularly Balkan upheavals of wartime and postwar Yugoslavia through the reality of provincial Roman Catholic Adriatic culture. The wartime context of his first published prose is transfigured but preserved elsewhere in his writing by the atmosphere of confrontation between ignorance and enlightenment, moral lassitude and rectitude, and tradition and innovation. His creative writing, as opposed to his essays, usually formulates an argument without imposing a solution. Segedin's philosophical questing and modern narrative technique offered an alternative to the aesthetically and intellectually crude tenets of socialist realism. During the years when literature in the former Yugoslavia was expected to be tendentious, writing such as Segedin's served to hold Croatia afloat in the current of modern world literature.

Segedin was born on...