Tmina zatvorskog sna

The book is based on diaries kept by Šeks during his six-month imprisonment in Stara Gradiška (known as one of the most notorious Yugoslav prisons for political prisoners) in the late 1980s. Šeks, then a human rights activist (member of PEN and Amnesty International), was sentenced to half a year in prison "for gold" – presumably in the context of politically motivated charges of economic misconduct or a similar "delict of thought", related to his earlier work on freedom of conscience and intimate diaries (e.g. "Intimate Diary and Reflections" from 1989). Before his imprisonment, Šeks had been expelled from the Communist Party, lost his job in the prosecutor's office and his lawyer's license, which led him to a "undertaker's competition" in Osijek – a symbolic "burial" of his career under the pressure of the regime.