Dobrica Cosic participated in World War II as a partisan and afterward wrote a novel about his experiences, Distant Is the Sun. Subsequent novels steadily enhanced his reputation as a skillful writer able to transform his engage subject matter (all Cosic's novels are politically tinged) into genuine artistic accomplishments. At the same time Cosic steadily alienated himself from the power structure, to which he himself had contributed, becoming one of the main dissidents among Yugoslav intellectuals. His ambitious tetralogy, This Land, This Time, is an account of the tragic ordeal and eventual triumph of Serbia, a small nation of peasants that "defeated three empires"---the Turkish, Austro-Hungarian, and German---in World War I. Another series of novels beginning with The Sinner (1985) debunks the myth of infallibility of the Communists before and during World War II.
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