While in Belgrade, Kočić met the writer Janko Veselinović, whose popular short stories and novels romanticized Serbian peasant life. Kočić shared several of his poems with Veselinović, who recommended that he focus on prose instead. Kočić's time in Belgrade was marked by dire poverty. "Although Serbian," he wrote, the city was "a foreign world." Kočić's behaviour became extremely volatile, as exemplified in a letter he wrote his childhood friend and future wife Milka Vukmanović, threatening to kill her and then himself if she married another man. Letters to his father, pressing for money, also struck an abusive and manipulative tone. The notion of suicide began to appear more frequently in his notes. "I will kill myself," he wrote, "to put an end once and for all to all the sufferings and torments that have pursued me from my birth. My life in Banja Luka was hard and dark, in Sarajevo still worse, and in Belgrade, it reached the very climax of suffering." The historian Robin Okey describes such passages as "a reminder of the stresses on young students in this first transition from patriarchalism, particularly without funding when illness and hunger were recurrent."