Written as first-person testimony, Levitan is a semi-autobiographical ac- count of the prisons of Tito’s post-war communist Yugoslavia. The novel (or maybe not) reveals the treatment of political prisoners, prison hierarchies and internal power relations, as well as author Vitomil Zupan’s rapaci...ous libido and his numerous erotic experiences, both in and out of prison. Le- vitan doesn’t wallow in self-pity or self-flagellation. He is an entertainer, a libertine who would rather talk about sex than about the mistreatment of prisoners. He is not even claiming to be innocent. He ended up in prison after drunkenly phoning one of the heads of the regime and telling him that he’d heard Tito had abdicated and left the country. It was 1948, the Inform- biro period, a time of purges and persecution by Tito, following his break with Stalin’s Soviet Union. When he woke up in the morning, Levitan found himself staring down the barrels of four handguns. In prison, he comes up with a strategy for survival. He entertains his fellow inmates and writes and writes and writes. He records the events that transpire in prison, as well as his own thoughts, his fight for survival and his battle with the institution. He is a student of ‘the school of prison’. He is internally free to study everything he wants, and finds erotic pleasure in his constant writing, which is then sneaked out through the prison bars.

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