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...