The blood of the sun between the hills of agony Slobodan Džunić's early prose: The story books Zrna, Njiva u Rudinju and Gladi and the novel Vinograd Gospodnji

This paper is positioned in the gray "zone", between a hermeneutic essay and a contribution to the history of literature. The author's intention is to deal with the work of Slobodan Džunić as unquestionably the best, and in the history of Serbian literature, the most acknowledged prose writer from Pirot. The analytical focus of this work is the early or the earliest phase of Slobodan Džunić's prose writing, i.e. three books of stories (Zrna, Njiva u Rudinju and Gladi) and one novel (Vinograd Gospodnji) that were published in the 1950s. In addition to the extensive interpretation and incidental evaluation of each of Džunić's early prose books, the intention was to highlight the shift or transfer of Slobodan Džunić's poetic model and narrative inter-est from socialist to psychological realism, from prose that glorifies partisan resistance in the Second World War and criticizes the class relations of the pre-war period as exploitative, to prose that focuses on the phenomenon of growing up -on socially motivated conflicts within the family and rural COM-munity, and especially on the position of women whose striving for independence in the expression of love or life without a husband poses a challenge to traditional morality. Džunić's prose books also depict the transition of the literary imagination inspired by the homeland as an idyllic place (locus amoenus) or a nostalgic refuge to the motifs of contemporary urban life. It also de-scribes the transition towards the genealogical type of novel on the downfall of wealthy families, which is an integral part of the strong prose tradition of Serbian realism and modernism.