Lagum is a Turkish word that, in a figurative sense, means “a place of darkness.” Svetlana Velmar-Janković chose it as the title of her novel as a carefully considered metaphor expressing the atmosphere of the entire narrative. The writer lent her voice in this fictional narrative with a strong autobiographical foundation to the heroine Milica Pavlović. As her alter ego, Milica, in old age, recalls the past and reconstructs individual events from her life.

The deeply moving and intricately woven story of a respected Belgrade bourgeois family becomes dramatically entangled during the years of the Second World War and reaches its fateful resolution immediately afterward. Yet Lagum is not only a novel about “darkness and evil,” which inevitably accompany great social changes and upheavals. It is also a novel about human strength and weakness, love and contempt, fateful words and silence, political opportunism and ideological blindness, the “right” decisions made on the “wrong” side, the “old morality,” and the “new justice.”

The decline of the Serbian bourgeoisie and the emergence of a new “society of equality and justice,” as reflected in the family microcosm, are powerfully illustrated on the linguistic level as well. In a stylistically demanding yet distinctly rhythmic narrative—filled with expressions that have almost disappeared from postwar speech—the author captures the rupture between the “old” and the “new” times, creating one of the peaks of contemporary Serbian prose.