Dragi Mihajlovski made his name with the books of short stories and he managed to become one of the most published Macedonian writers of the middle generation. His novel Smrtta na dijakot – The Death of the Scrivener takes place in the 14th century, under the stone walls of the town Bitola which is under siege of the Ottoman conquering armies. This is a novel in which the author makes an attempt to reinvestigate human nature where crime and cruelty mix with honourability and holiness. In reference to individual characters in the novel these two extremes can be used only relatively, because the characters are most often shown as a mixture of both or are masked into one another. Under various circumstances holiness is being forced to manifest as crime, while the criminal nature may gain the appearance of undoubted honourability. This novel calls upon two of the greatest and most famous works of literature on the fall of holiness and the persistence of the demonic: Goethe’s Faustus and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
