Migrations

Crnjanski's melancholy masterpiece follows the Serbs of the Habsburg military frontier in the 1740s, colonists and soldiers of an empire not their own, dreaming of migrating to Orthodox Russia. Its ground is the Serbian frontier of the Vojvodina and Srem along the Danube: the frontier villages and the officer Vuk Isakovič's home, the great river that marks the border and the road to war, and the prosperous town of his merchant brother, while the campaigns of a foreign war and the far-off dream of Russia pull the exiles endlessly on.

Dafina

The frontier villages

The home

In the frontier village Vuk Isakovič's wife Dafina waits through the long absences of a soldier-husband forever marched off to the Empire's wars. The colonists' precarious life on the military border, tolerated but never quite belonging, is the ground of the book's great theme of a people without a country of their own.

The home chapters

inspired by The Isakovič family lives in the Serbian villages of the Habsburg military frontier in the Vojvodina and Srem; the villages are sited in that real region along the Danube, the specific settlement the novel's own.

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