Author: Vladan Desnica [Vladan Desneetsa]
Book title: Zimsko ljetovanje [Zeemskoh lyetovanye] (Winter Holiday)
Narrator: Vesna Jaćimović [Vesna Yatchimovich]
Duration: 8 hours and 40 minutes
No. of pages in black print: 239
Publisher: Vulkan izdavaštvo [Voolkahn is-davashtvo]
Place and year of publishing: Belgrade, 2024
About the book:
This novel begins near the end of the summer of 1943, with the Allied bombing of Zadar during the Second World War, and ends in the village of Smiljevci [Smilyevtsi]. Through his depiction of the horrors of war, the author shows that what remains after them are fragmented lives of individuals, in which only the outlines of human faces and questions can be discerned: “Why war?” and “Why all this evil?” Although seven decades have passed since the publication of this book, people today are still faced with the same questions. This is precisely what demonstrates the necessity of the struggle we all share – the struggle for the triumph of light over darkness.
Vladan Desnica [Vladan Desneetsa] was born in 1905 in Zadar. After studying law in Zagreb and philosophy in Paris, he graduated in 1930 from the Faculty of Law in Zagreb. He worked as a lawyer, spoke five languages, and translated works from Italian, French, and Russian. He explored almost all literary genres. This was his first novel, published in 1950. Vladan Desnica died in 1967 in Zagreb. He was buried in the Serbian Orthodox Church of St. George, located next to the Janković Stojan [Yankovich Stoyan] manor in Islam Grčki [Islam Grchki].