In this sweet and sour image of both intimate and objective European history at the end of the 20th century, the writer offers us an omnibus novel in three parts, with two main characters (an elderly man and a young man) and many accompanying portraits. Using various narrative techniques, intelligent humor and subtle irony, the protagonists summarize the chances they have missed and talk about their premonitions of the new ones to come. In doing so, they live out their stories and those of other people, looking for meaning in the past in order to understand the present. We read about the main character leaving his bombed country, dabbling in a variety of odd jobs throughout Europe, composing and decomposing his own personality which becomes clearest in the gap between the thing expected and the things done.
For The Russian Window, Dragan Velikić received the two most important literary awards in Serbia and ex-Yugoslavia - the NIN Award and the Meša Selimović Award in 2007.
Dragan Velikić was born in 1953 in Belgrade. He grew up in the Croatian town of Pula on the Adriatic coast. From 1972 until 1976 he studied world literature at the University of Belgrade. From 1991 until 1995 he was a columnist with the independent weekly „Vreme", and from 1995 until the spring of 1999 he was editor-in-chief at the publishing house of the Independent Radio B92 in Belgrade. In March 1999 he began living in exile in Budapest and Vienna. He came back to Belgrade in December 2000. He was a DAAD scholar in Berlin from June 2001 to July 2002. From June 2005 to November 2009, Dragan Velikić was the Ambassador of Serbia in Austria. Now he lives in Belgrade as a freelancer. He has published eight novels: Via Pula (Via Pula, 1988), Astrakhan (Astragan, 1991), Hamsin 51 (Hamsin 51, 1993), The North Wall (Severni zid, 1995), Dante’s Square (Danteov trg, 1997), The Case of Bremen (Slučaj Bremen, 2001), Dossier Domaszewski (Dosije Domaševski, 2003) and The Russian Window (Ruski prozor, 2007), three books of short stories and five books of essays. His books have been translated into twelve European languages. All his novels have been translated into German. For his last novel The Russian Window (2007) he received the NIN Award and the Meša Selimović Award in Serbia and the Mitteleuropa Award in Austria. The Serbian version of The Russian Window has been published in 14 editions and it has sold over 22,000 copies. Dragan Velikic has published around a hundred political essays and articles in the European newspapers and magazines.
