The Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh (Croatian: Balade Petrice Kerempuha) is a philosophically poetic work by the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, composed in the form of thirty poems between December 1935 and March 1936.
The work spans a period of five centuries, focusing around the commoner prophet Petrica Kerempuh, who is a type of Croatian Till Eulenspiegel.
[1] Krleža did not typically write in Kajkavian, but decided to put the dialect into focus for the ballads.[why?]
argue that he succeeded in showing that — even if in his time Kajkavian was not used in formal domains of life — it was still possible to create a work of great literal expression in it and that the Kajkavian dialect was not a less valuable literary language.
[2] The Ballads have been translated (mostly only in part) into Slovene, Italian, Macedonian, Hungarian, Czech, French, Russian, and Arabic.