Ellen Elias-Bursac teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard University and is co-chairman of the Southeast European Study Group at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.Antun Šoljan was born in Belgrade in 1932. Throughout his life he took an activist role in defining the tasks of the writer and the writer's relation to society. His politics, dissenting from the Communist line, made him persona non grata in public life from 1974 until his death in 1993, but his ideas and views became ubiquitous on the Croatian cultural scene. Šoljan's stature in Croatian literature and the popularity of his writing have prompted the translations of his novels, essays, poems, and plays into a growing number of languages.