The novel is a deeply moving sequence of stories, a firsthand account of a national and state tragedy by a writer who shared that tragedy with his people and his country, all the way to the end, including its bloodshed and victims. In the year when it seemed that Serbia was disappearing from the historical and geographical map, Branislav Nušić’s son Strahinja-Ban was killed as a soldier in the army of the Kingdom of Serbia. The writer dedicated this novel to his prematurely lost child.

Depicting both collective and personal tragedy, Nušić begins the novel in the autumn of 1915 and concludes it with events in the winter of the same year, shortly before the people and the state, exhausted by war and suffering, began their retreat across the rugged mountains of Albania and Montenegro. Writing the “Afterword” to the novel in March 1920, the author states: “Although this book is quite extensive, I never intended it to encompass the entire tragedy of 1915. I recorded, observed, and empathized with the events that took place around me or reached me, because, being myself a participant in this great ordeal, I could not see any further. My book ends in Peć, because that is where the tragedy of the people ends. From there onward begin the tragedies of individuals, each of which, on its own, deserves a book of this size.”

The premiere of the play 1915, the Tragedy of a Nation took place on June 28, 2013, in Kruševac, at the closing of the “Vidovdan 2013” cultural event, as part of the central state commemoration of Vidovdan. The performance was staged outdoors at the amphitheatre of the Slobodište Memorial Complex before an audience of more than 4,000 people, in the presence of the highest representatives of the Government of the Republic of Serbia, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and the cities of Kruševac and Niš.