A young professor of art history is pressed by communist superiors to write a positive review to an amateur scholar. He plays with an old man as well as with a young worker girl until he realizes he has lost everything.

Originally published in 1865, the novel's plot was inspired by Shakespeare's famous play Romeo and Juliet, and is set in Turopolje after the recent abolition of Bach's absolutism, i.e. when the Croats in the Habsburg Monarchy began to exercise political rights that long had been denied to them.

Despite the ongoing WW2, most of the people were just minding their own business. But everything changes when police arrests the group of youths under suspicion of being resistance sympathizers. Outraged townsfolk organize the siege of police station.

Radovan Orlak Orao fell off a skyscraper on the day when four of his old friends waited for him to celebrate his birthday. They had been friends since childhood, but now at middle age they see each other only occasionally. Faced with the fact that they actually knew very little about their friend’s recent life, they start meeting more regularly and try to find out the circumstances that led to Orao’s suicide or possibly even murder…

A monotonous life of a timid clerk from Zagreb takes an unexpected turn when an easygoing slacker from Bosnia deliberately moves into his apartment.