DIVAN · Genres
Satire
25 published works. Explore books by literary genre and discover new works.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court — Mark Twain. A nineteenth-century American mechanic finds himself in King Arthur's world and uses practical knowledge to gain power. Mark Twain's time-travel satire examines monarchy, superstition, technological progress, and the violence beneath romantic images of the past.
Mark TwainNoveleBookA Modern Uprising
A Modern Uprising — Radoje Domanović. A dream carries the narrator a century backwards, but the people and institutions he finds are those of his own day. Ottoman rule and modern bureaucracy occupy the same streets. This deliberate mismatch turns a historical question, how a people might rise against oppression, into an examination of habits that make action endlessly postponable.
Radoje DomanovićShort storyeBook · AudiobookA Trick for a Trick
A Trick for a Trick — Jovan Sterija Popović. A purse changes hands in a garden, and neighbourly advice becomes a weapon. A Trick for a Trick needs only two people and one hiding place. Its action is small enough to follow at a glance; its arguments expand to take in marriage, learning, commerce and conscience. Both men are gifted explainers, especially when an explanation makes self-interest sound respectable.
Jovan Sterija PopovićDramaeBook · AudiobookAutobiography
Autobiography — Branislav Nušić. Nušić looks back on childhood, school, first romances and growing up with a sharp sense of humour. His recollections also expose the vanity of education, social ambition and the way people polish their own life stories.
Branislav NušićAutobiographyeBook · AudiobookI Do Not Understand
I Do Not Understand — Radoje Domanović. The narrator wants to become a soldier. He imagines that patriotic enthusiasm will open the barracks doors and earn him a warm welcome. Instead, his living presence becomes a problem for a military administration whose records say otherwise.
Radoje DomanovićShort storyeBook · AudiobookIn a Village Inn
In a Village Inn — Radoje Domanović. A traveller caught in a winter storm finds shelter in a village inn. At first the place seems to promise warmth, food and company. The conversations he overhears gradually reveal how the village is governed, how its leisure is paid for, and whose labour keeps everyone else comfortable.
Radoje DomanovićShort storyeBook · AudiobookNo Escape
No Escape — Radoje Domanović. Every editor in Nigde spasa (No Escape) has only a small request. An article on vines, a contribution on raising foals, a brief patriotic story: surely an educated writer can oblige. Their courtesy makes refusal harder, and the narrator’s attempt to find a subject becomes more oppressive than the work itself. What begins with a ruined afternoon grows into a pursuit through streets, shops and finally the countryside.
Radoje DomanovićShort storyeBook · AudiobookPrince Marko Among the Serbs Again
Prince Marko Among the Serbs Again — Radoje Domanović. What happens when a nation gets the hero it keeps asking for? Domanović gives the question an embarrassingly literal answer. Prince Marko, exhausted by centuries of appeals to rise from the grave, obtains permission to return.
Radoje DomanovićSatireeBook · AudiobookStradija
Stradija — Radoje Domanović. A traveller enters Stradija and finds arbitrariness, hypocrisy and idleness behind its fine speeches and liberal laws. Domanović’s imaginary country exposes the gap between public promises and lived reality.
Radoje DomanovićNovellaeBook · AudiobookSympathy and Antipathy
Sympathy and Antipathy — Jovan Sterija Popović. Agnica reads a story and decides to turn it into a performance. Her parents dislike the man she wants to marry, so she devises an illness that only his presence can relieve. The audience hears the plan before the household sees its effects. This difference in knowledge is the play’s engine: each new sign confirms a theory to the doctor while revealing a piece of stagecraft to us.
Jovan Sterija PopovićDramaeBook · AudiobookThe Abolition of Passions
The Abolition of Passions — Radoje Domanović. A country has ten good men and a population seething with dangerous passions. Reading newspapers, building schools, helping the poor and buying flowers all appear in its catalogue of misconduct. Domanović lets the accusations accumulate in the sober language of official reports until ordinary civic life itself looks like a conspiracy.
Radoje DomanovićShort storyeBook · AudiobookThe Badger Before the Court
The Badger Before the Court — Petar Kočić. Peasant David Štrbac takes a badger to court for ruining his maize. His apparently absurd complaint exposes poverty, official arrogance and the struggle for dignity in Petar Kočić’s satirical drama.
Petar KočićSatirical dramaeBook · AudiobookThe Brand
The Brand — Radoje Domanović. A man who bows to a police uniform's discarded button is an unusual guide to a dream. Yet the narrator of The Brand offers this incident as proof of his good character. Before he reaches the strange country where most of the story takes place, his own account has already made obedience look involuntary: hand, head and mouth salute almost without consulting their owner.
Radoje DomanovićSatireeBook · AudiobookThe Dead Sea
The Dead Sea — Radoje Domanović. The narrator begins with his anxious aunt, a woman capable of discovering mortal danger in a stone, a meal or a trip to church. Her solicitous voice becomes the starting point of a much larger inquiry: what happens when caution ceases to protect life and instead prevents it from being lived? Schoolroom lessons, political procedure and everyday conversation gradually acquire the same stifling rhythm.
Radoje DomanovićShort storyeBook · AudiobookThe Enchanted Donkey
The Enchanted Donkey — Jovan Sterija Popović. The donkey in this comedy never speaks. Everyone else speaks a great deal, and their eloquence makes the animal seem increasingly sensible. Three students discover a sleeping peasant and a donkey they would like to turn into money. Their solution depends on a theatrical substitution: one student stays behind in the animal’s place, ready to explain the miracle when the owner wakes.
Jovan Sterija PopovićDramaeBook · AudiobookThe Fate of a Mind
The Fate of a Mind — Jovan Sterija Popović. A Doctor of Philosophy has misplaced his mind. His servants look for it as though it were an object left in a room, and the Doctor eventually advertises a reward for its return. The joke grows out of the language he teaches: once a mind can sit at home, a river can have shoulders and a school can float, figures of speech become things that can walk, quarrel and get lost.
Jovan Sterija PopovićDramaeBook · AudiobookThe Leader
The Leader — Radoje Domanović. The Leader is a satirical short story about people who leave a barren homeland in the hope of finding a better life. They choose an unknown man to guide them, taking his silence as proof of wisdom. Domanović follows the process by which ordinary hope becomes unconditional obedience, and a community learns to justify each new disaster.
Radoje DomanovićShort storyeBook · AudiobookThe Liar and His Accomplice
The Liar and His Accomplice — Jovan Sterija Popović. Two hungry adventurers stop before a respectable house and invent a social position for themselves. Aleksa becomes Baron Golić, Mita his servant. Yet skill in lying is not all that opens the door: within the house is already a desire to hear exactly what they offer.
Jovan Sterija PopovićDramaeBook · AudiobookThe Marriage of Peter Carrington
The Marriage of Peter Carrington — Svetozar Ćorović. Peter Carrington’s friends send him on a search for a wife, leading him into one comic entanglement after another. Ćorović brings vanity, friendship and small-town life into the marriage quest.
Svetozar ĆorovićNoveleBook · AudiobookThe Miser or Kir Janja
Jovan Sterija Popović’s Tvrdica ili Kir Janja (The Miser or Kir Janja) turns a merchant’s household into a counting house. Bread, a hat, a servant’s wages and a daughter’s marriage all pass through Janja’s private arithmetic. His thrift repeatedly destroys what it should preserve. Yet his attachment to money also makes him vulnerable: a promising return can overcome the caution that governs every ordinary expense.
Jovan Sterija PopovićDramaeBook · AudiobookThe Patriots
The Patriots — Jovan Sterija Popović. A cockade can be taken off in a moment. In The Patriots, that small action becomes a political system. The same men discover first that freedom requires Hungarian colours, then that Serbian colours are indispensable, then that both may be worn at once. Their explanations grow more elaborate as their principles grow cheaper.
Jovan Sterija PopovićDramaeBook · AudiobookThe Quarrelsome Husband
The Quarrelsome Husband — Jovan Sterija Popović. Maksim can find fault with a clean room because too much cleaning wears out the floor. An untidy room would condemn his wife just as surely. The trouble in The Quarrelsome Husband is therefore more stubborn than a disagreement about housework: any answer can be made wrong by a man determined to complain.
Jovan Sterija PopovićDramaeBook · AudiobookThe Singer’s Easter
A singer can turn private sorrow into public pleasure, but what happens when the sorrow becomes too great to sing? In Pevačev Uskrs (The Singer’s Easter), Radoje Domanović follows Pera through the preparations for a holiday that other households can afford to celebrate. Lambs, new clothes, cakes and painted eggs are ordinary comforts to the people around him.
Radoje DomanovićShort storyeBook · AudiobookThe Slava
The Slava — Radoje Domanović. A rider returning to his village meets a child watching three sheep in the rain. Their conversation turns from work and taxes to the next day's family celebration. The boy expects his mother's preparations to be understood at once; the adult narrator hears in them the effort required to keep a poor household within the circle of ordinary social life.
Radoje DomanovićShort storyeBook · AudiobookTheatre in a Small Town
Theatre in a Small Town — Radoje Domanović. A small town notices everything: a missing rooster, a badly played card, a neighbour's talent for preparing radishes. Its narrator treats this vigilant attention as proof that provincial life nurtures talent. What follows tests that claim by bringing a theatre into the town's ordinary routines.
Radoje DomanovićShort storyeBook · Audiobook