Novel
Migrations
Сеобе
Miloš Crnjanski · 1929
Synopsis
In the spring of 1744, Major Vuk Isaković, a Serbian officer in Austrian service, leads a few hundred men of a Slavonian-Danubian regiment to fight France towards the Rhine, and leaves his wife Dafina and their daughters in Zemun, with his younger brother Aranđel, a rich and unscrupulous merchant. While the soldiers cross Styria and Bavaria without knowing why they are fighting, despised by the army they serve, Aranđel conceives a passion for his sister-in-law.
Context
The author completed the novel in 1929, a little over ten years after the war in which he had himself worn the Austrian uniform, and gave it a sequel, the Second Book of Migrations, in 1962. The filmmaker Aleksandar Petrović made a film from it. The author's singular punctuation, which sets the rhythm of the narrative, is one of the hallmarks of the book, and critics have studied what translators have made of it.
Who it is for
A slow, rhythmic prose, in which war is experienced in the march and the camp more than in battle. It helps to know that in the eighteenth century thousands of Serbs had made their way into the Habsburg empire.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the masterpiece of its author; its French translation received the Best Foreign Book prize in 1986.