Gullo Gullo

The novel Gullo Gullo by one of the most famous Yugoslav novelists, Miodrag Bulatović, published in 1970, is the culmination of his creative world in which the combination of madness, magic and brutal reality turns into a powerful allegory of human evil. The title of the novel, derived from the onomatopoeia of screams and animal sounds, symbolizes the primal cry of a man deprived of reason, meaning and soul.

At the heart of the story is a series of characters—warriors, losers, criminals, and fanatics—moving through an apocalyptic dreamlike landscape. Through their destinies, Bulatović shows the dehumanization and moral collapse of a world where madness and violence have become everyday. The author creates an atmosphere of strong symbolism and the grotesque, mixing the real and the fantastic, the sacred and the demonic.

The themes of the novel include the absurdity of war, collective madness, religious and ideological blindness, as well as the senselessness of human suffering. Bulatović's expression is explosive and picturesque, full of metaphors, brutal images and a rhythm reminiscent of an oral epic. His characters are no longer realistically depicted people, but archetypes — bearers of evil, fear or remorse.

Gullo Gullo closes the trilogy begun with the novels Devils Are Coming and Rider of Riders, in which Bulatović develops his poetics of grotesque and existential anxiety to the extreme. The work remains a powerful literary vision of the collapse of humanity and of a man who, faced with his own demonic face, utters the last cry of civilization.