For an Albanian view, turn to "The Albanians: Europe's Forgotten Survivors" (1977), by Anton Logoreci. While the Serbs see their defeat by the Turks in Kosovo in 1389 as the end of Christian enlightenment and the beginning of Muslim barbarism in the Balkans, Mr. Logoreci sees the medieval Serbian army as a feudal rabble that was defeated by "the more disciplined and better trained" Turkish troops. His theme is that the Albanians have always been victims of aggressive neighbors, especially the Greeks and the Serbs, forcing his people to turn to Hapsburg monarchs and Ottoman sultans for help.

In their age-old battles with the Albanians, the Muslims and the Croats, the Serbs have drawn psychological sustenance from Russia, their big, Slavic Orthodox neighbor to the north. In the first section of Milovan Djilas's "Conversations With Stalin" (1962), appropriately called "Raptures," the former Yugoslav Vice President under Tito described his first visit to Russia, in 1944, as being like "returning to a primeval homeland, unknown but mine." Mr. Djilas wondered: "Was this not the homeland of our ancestors, whom some unknown avalanche had deposited in the windswept Balkans?" As he writes about how the "limitless gray steppes" of Russia released "unknown inner urges," Mr. Djilas suggests the irrational but real impulses that have brought the Serbs and the Russians together through the centuries.

Blood ties and hatred can be tricky. On a recent television talk show, a Croatian American and a Bosnian Muslim both attacked me for failing to note that in Sarajevo, at least, Muslims, Croats, Serbs and Jews had usually got along. I recommend that they and others read "The Damned Yard: And Other Stories" by Ivo Andric. A Bosnian Croat, Andric won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961, mainly for his novel "The Bridge on the Drina." In one of his stories, "A Letter From 1920," first published 73 years ago, Andric explained:

"Yes, Bosnia is a country of hatred. That is Bosnia. And by a strange contrast . . . there are a few countries with such firm belief . . . so much tenderness and loving passion . . . or with such a thirst for justice. But in secret depths underneath all this hide burning hatreds, entire hurricanes of tethered and compressed hatreds. . . . Thus you are condemned to live on deep layers of explosive, which are lit from time to time by the very sparks of your loves and your fiery and violent emotion."

Andric said that the people of the region denied this hatred, and consequently hated outsiders who mentioned it to them. The often invisible border between hate and love, and unity and disunity, is further explored in Andric's novel "The Days of the Consuls" (1945), about the small Bosnian town of Travnik in the early 19th century, and the political atmosphere found there by the French and Austrian consuls.

Sorting out all these passions in a clinically objective fashion is what Misha Glenny, a BBC correspondent, has done in "The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War" (1992). He describes how an awful history is now made worse by morally corrupt and incompetent regimes in Serbia and Croatia that are the legacy of Titoism. In addition to "Conversations With Stalin," Milovan Djilas has written a number of books exposing Tito, who imprisoned Mr. Djilas for the crime of advocating glasnost three decades before Mikhail S. Gorbachev did. Particularly readable is Mr. Djilas's "Rise and Fall" (1985), about the author's own tragic career in the Yugoslav Communist Party and how it mirrored the fall of Titoism, the rotten system in which economic war between the regionally based ethnic groups substituted for a shooting war -- until 1991, that is.

THE Yugoslav conflict impinges on neighboring Balkan countries, which in this decade will face dangerous historical reckonings following the collapse of Communism and the false division of Europe. Since national character will write the script in these places, too, look again to history -- and therefore to good books -- as a guide. The best survey of the historical personalities of the region's peoples, in my opinion, was originally published in 1915. "The Balkans: A History," by Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany and D. G. Hogarth, is particularly good on Yugoslavia. Forbes explained that the Serbs and the Croats were one people, divided by religion and history, not by race and language -- whatever Croats and Serbs today may tell you. The book was written before the collapse of Ottoman Turkey, and its advantage is its emphasis on earlier history in the development of ethnic identity.

Greeks may be the best known and least understood of the Balkan peoples. They are a nation whose political personality flows from two millenniums of Byzantine rule and Ottoman despotism, rather than from Periclean Athens five centuries before Christ -- or, for that matter, from the superficial and contentious period of American tutelage following World War II. The finest book I know about the Greek political character is the British journalist David Holden's "Greece Without Columns: The Making of the Modern Greeks." Holden painstakingly stripped away the fantasies of the university classicists, enamored of the ancient Greeks, and described an authentic Greece, one built on Eastern Orthodox ritual and political intrigue. Published 21 years ago, the book is more relevant now than ever.