There may well be no better way to initiate our month-long exploration into the Arts and Cinema of the Balkans than with this collection of revolutionary works written by the former Yugoslavia’s most pre-eminent author.

Miroslav Krleža’s Harbors Rich in Ships: The Selected Revolutionary Writings features the very best selections from the Croatian writer’s early career, a time of great tumult and political change in the newly-formed Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Krleža penned over 60 books over his 98-year life, but almost none of his work has been translated into English; until now.

Krleža grew up attending military academies in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and graduated as a soldier in World War I. Having seen the mass-scale of industrialized carnage, Krleža came out the other side as a staunch anti-militarist. Establishing himself as a Modernist writer after the war in the newly-minted Soviet republic of Yugoslavia, Krleža rebelled against Stalin’s Socialist realism program which led to his ouster from the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.

Always singular and defiant, Krleža’s literary career saw him become a trusted voice on the always-complicated nuances of the Yugoslavian political system, earning him the presidency of the Yugoslav Writer’s Union, a faction of leftist literary and intellectuals who fought to define their national identity in the face of WWII and Yugoslavia’s eventual break with the Soviet Union.