The Russian Window - FSK - forum slovanskih kultur

The Russian Window

Ruski prozor

Serbia

Dragan Velikić

For me, the only real home is a train carriage. Having a personal conductor who always tells you right on time when and where to get off, so you spend just a few moments in a place and then move on.

The Russian Window is a novel in which the Balkans and Europe merge into a vast Serbian Casablanca, which, in the inner world of the protagonist—the Bogart-esque Rudi Stupar—becomes the catalyst for his eternal search for himself, peace, and closeness. All of this, partly through his own fault, constantly draws near and recedes from him. Velikić follows the protagonist’s encounter with historical events at the end of the 20th century, his journey from a small town in Vojvodina, through Belgrade and Budapest, to other cities in Eastern and Central Europe.

Dragan Velikić was born in 1953 in Belgrade and grew up in Pula, Croatia. He holds a degree in world literature and has worked as an editor, columnist, and ambassador of the Republic of Serbia to Vienna. Velikić has published twelve novels: Via Pula (1988), Astrahan (1991), Hamsin 51 (1993), The Northern Wall (1995), Dante’s Square (1997), The Bremen Case (2001), The Domaszewski File (2003), The Russian Window (2007), Bonavia (2012), The Investigator (2015), The Address (2019), The Vienna Novel (2024), three collections of short stories, and six books of essays. His works have been translated into eighteen European languages, Arabic, and Persian, totaling eighty foreign editions.

For the novel The Russian Window (2007), he received the NIN Award and the Meša Selimović Award in Serbia, as well as the Mitteleuropa Award in Austria. The novel has been reprinted 16 times in Serbia and sold 30,000 copies.

For his novel The Investigator, he received his second NIN Award, and the book sold 50,000 copies. In 2013, Dragan Velikić received the City of Budapest Award for Literature, and in 2019, the Vilenica International Literary Prize.