Victims of the Bidermeier

The protagonist of Victims of the Biedermeier, Vukašin Pomorišac, a sickly, elderly archivist, engages in a search for the paintings of Konstantin Danil, a renowned painter of the Serbian Biedermeier style. His wanderings around the nineteenth century are a way for him to escape from getting in touch with others and with his own life. In meticulously written meta-narrative work, the author explores the nature of creation and of the inability to face omnipresent failure in achieving the imagined. Only after the days of his life on earth pass does Danil realize that the ornaments and the decorative elements of his paintings seem empty to him, inapt to convey the truth of his vision. The different narrative voices of the novel, floating between the past and the present, life and death, here and there, merge into one in an incessant game of creation.