Published in Venice in 1774 in the first volume of Viaggio in Dalmazia, the ballad appeared simultaneously in the Serbo-Croat original ( Xalostna pjesanza plemenite Asan-Aghinize) and in Italian translation by the monk Alberto Fortis. Fortis' book — and not least the Hasanaginica itself − was received, read, disseminated and further translated with such enthusiastic interest that it may justly be compared to a modern “bestseller”. It is, therefore, not surprising that the dramatic “Hasanaginica”-ballad with its grand passions of love and pain, obedience, shame and pride has served as a pretext for a number of Serbo-Croat dramatisations: I. 1909, under the title of Hasanaginica, by the Croat Milan Ogrizović; II. 1976, also under the title of Hasanaginica, by the Serb Ljubomir Simović; III. 1991, by the Croat Tomislav Bakarić under the significantly altered title of Hasanaga. In comparison, it is to be seen that the reception and the processing of the ballad pretext in the three drama texts discussed here are very varied and extend even into the realms of current politics. Motif-constants in all the dramas are the unjust rejection of the wife on the grounds of unsuccessful, since paradoxical communication and her death of a broken — and not as her husband accuses her a petrified — heart. And it is certainly this connection of force, destruction and death, but also of transgression, communication and utopia (in the sense of Georges Bataille), which lends the Hasanaginica its general significance and its ageless fascination.