Banket u blitvi: Roman u tri knjige

The story of the first two parts deals with the historical and political themes of Blitva and two prominent contemporary figures: dictator Kristijan Barutanski and the renegade intellectual Niels Nielson. The third part, written much later, focuses mainly on Nielson's life as a dissident, his personal dilemmas, and various questions from the past and present that begin to haunt him. The work is a critical account of the situation from the interwar period, when Europe was shaken by nationalist unrest, irredentism, the belligerence of state leaders, the suppression of civil liberties, and the decline of democracy in the face of growing totalitarianism. Although many readers recognize situations and figures from monarchist Yugoslavia in the story, Krleža explained in a text published on the occasion of the publication of the third part that the novel was inspired by the atmosphere that prevailed throughout Europe at the time, and the characters do not symbolize any real personalities, but rather typical representatives of certain social groups and worldviews. The novel is rich in essayistic passages that address various topics, not only from European history and politics, but also philosophical ones such as responsibility, morality, God, being, nature, art, the meaning of life, death, and human destiny. The work went largely unnoticed upon publication, but subsequently gained popularity and was translated into several languages.