The return0% in

Philip Latinowicz

The provincial town

The return

Stepping off the train after twenty-three years, the painter Philip Latinowicz walks back into the drowsy provincial town that made him, its dust, its smells and its faces flooding him with the past he fled. The return, and the town's stubborn sameness, sets off the long interior reckoning with origins and identity that is the whole book.

The opening

inspired byPhilip returns to the small Pannonian town of his childhood, drawn from provincial Croatia; the town is invented and sited in the real Pannonian countryside of northern Croatia.

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The mother25% in

Kazimira

The mother's house

The mother

At his mother Kazimira's house, the wound at the centre of Philip's life reopens: his illegitimate birth, the identity of the father she will not name, the shame and coldness that shaped him. Their strained reunion, all silence and old grievance, is the psychological core of the book, the past refusing to be either healed or escaped.

The mother chapters

inferredPhilip's mother Kazimira keeps a house and tobacco shop in the town; the house is invented and sited in the real provincial town of the novel.

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The town50% in

Kyriales

The town square and church

The town

In the cafés and around the square, Philip falls in with the corrosive nihilist Kyriales, whose merciless talk deepens the painter's crisis of faith in art and life. The stagnant provincial town, its church and its idlers, is the backdrop against which Krleža stages a modern European crisis of meaning.

The town chapters

inferredThe Catholic church and square anchor the small-town society of priests, notaries and café intellectuals; sited in the real provincial Croatian town, the specific buildings the novel's own.

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The landscape75% in

Philip Latinowicz

The Pannonian plain

The landscape

The endless flat plain, its mud and mist and heavy skies, presses on Philip as both subject and symptom, the landscape of his depression and his painter's eye. Krleža makes the Pannonian mud a character in itself, the physical weight of a provincial, backward world Philip cannot paint his way out of.

The landscape chapters

explicitThe flat, muddy Pannonian plain around the town, a real landscape of northern Croatia, saturates the novel with its heavy, oppressive atmosphere.

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The passion100% in

Bobočka

The manor (Bobočka)

The passion

Philip is drawn into a destructive passion for the sensual, doomed Bobočka, whose decadent circle of provincial gentry ends in violence and death. The affair, and the manor world's rot, bring the painter's crisis to its bleak climax, Krleža closing on a Europe of the 1930s sliding toward catastrophe.

The passion chapters

inferredThe decadent gentry world Philip is drawn into, centred on the fatal Bobočka, plays out at a manor near the town; the manor is invented and sited in the real Pannonian countryside.

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