On the Road to Goal. Vjekoslav Kaleb’s Glorious Dust and Antun Šoljan’s Short Excursion

In the article a problem of mutual intertwining relationships between two Croatian short novels is taken into consideration. Although Vjekoslav Kaleb’s Glorious Dust (1954) and Antun Šoljan’s Short Excursion (1965) are set in a diff erent chronotope, namely the former in the Dalmatian hinterland during World War Two and the latter in the Istrian post- war Yugoslav reality, they possess some similar structural features. Among resemblances a motif of journey, taken allegorically as life (conceptual metaphor “life if a journey”), that binds together the two novels, is the most important. The author of this article attempts to investigate the problem of such a concept of journey referring both to the  philosophy of existentialism (notably Camus and Sartre) and literary preoccupations concerning the problem of meaningfulness and senselessness of human raison d’être.

In the article a problem of mutual intertwining relationships between two Croatian short novels is taken into consideration. Although Vjekoslav Kaleb’s Glorious Dust (1954) and Antun Šoljan’s Short Excursion (1965) are set in a diff erent chronotope, namely the former in the Dalmatian hinterland during World War Two and the latter in the Istrian post- war Yugoslav reality, they possess some similar structural features. Among resemblances a motif of journey, taken allegorically as life (conceptual metaphor “life if a journey”), that binds together the two novels, is the most important. The author of this article attempts to investigate the problem of such a concept of journey referring both to the  philosophy of existentialism (notably Camus and Sartre) and literary preoccupations concerning the problem of meaningfulness and senselessness of human raison d’être.