The literary work of Mihailo Lalić, one of the most important Montenegrin novelists of the twentieth century, was almost entirely devoted to a thematization of World War II and the cruel fate of an individual in the time of evil. In his last novel, Tamara (1992), published just before he died, Lalić approached a theme of war in a new way, without an idealization, showing the other side of the National Liberation Movement, the great mechanism of the revolution that “devours its children”.

After a minor traffic accident in which he got hit in the head, a retired President of the court, Djuras Vukčić, began a new life, filled with long dialogues with the ghosts of the past. By living in a parallel world of imaginary court proceedings, during which a reverse side of revolution and war was revealed, Djuras made a mosaic of “guilt” and the mysterious death of a student Tamara Godačić, convinced to have betrayed the ideals of the revolution. A gallery of witnesses parading in Djuras’s consciousness and an imaginary courtroom is convincingly pictures the tragedy of war and its companions – human hatred, envy, vengeance and betrayal.