The Masterpiece

The golden 1980s in the Socialist Yugoslavia were a curious time, a time when the country undoubtedly already began its descent into disintegration, but when the bloody years that would follow still seemed inconceivable. A time of unprecedented freedom of thought and travel; a time of dissident movements and heady music and literary scenes. And yet it was also a time when the state still had a tight grip on the lives of its citizens, not least through its security services and its web of informants. We enter the story in 1985, and meet Adam, a professor of literature at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana who is trying his hand at writing again.