Written by Mladen Pupavac and Vanessa Pupavac.
He was tired of migrating, tired of the restlessness that plagued the people he led as much as it plagued him. If he left the army, he would have to join his brother and travel as a tradesman from town to town, his daughter in tow; if he remained in the army, he would still be forced to travel, his duty being to pacify the migrating populations. (Crnjankski, 1994, [1929], p. 196)
So reflects Vuk Isakovic in the 1929 novel Migrations by the Serbian writer Milos Crnjanski (1893-1977). Crnjanski, leading writer of Serbian modernism, was born just north of what is now the Serbian-Hungarian border. Crnjanski’s novel is set on the Hapsburg military frontier in the 1740s, an area which is now part of the Western Balkans migrant route north to Germany and other northern European Union countries.