Slovo. Journal of Slavic Languages, Literatures and Cultures ISSN 2001–7395 No. 55, 2014, pp. 60–76 Time and the Vanities of Existence in Antun Šoljan’s Fiction Denis Crnković Russian & Eastern European Studies, Gustavus Adolphus College
[email protected] Abstract This paper explores the theme of hope and hopelessness in a selection of Antun Šoljan’s stories and novels and how the author creates in his heroes an interior atmosphere of inquiry that is paradoxically laden with uncertainty and the human instinct to move forward. A “parabolic moralist” (as Davor Kapetanić has called him), Šoljan depicts the world as more than a simple continuity of events, political, personal, private or public. His major concern is to make sense of man’s existence in a universe that confronts him with both linear time and a repetitive or circular series of events. Examining the apparent contradictions of linear vs. circular existence, the author often places his characters “out of time” and analyzes any given life by finding its important events, actions and desires. While Šoljan’s heroes often conclude that temporal things are of little lasting value, he leaves his philosophically and psychologically battered heroes with at least a small possibility of hope. Antun Šoljan, the undisputed voice of conscience in Yugoslav and Croatian literature for four decades after World War II, was a tireless writer of essays, plays, translations, novels and short stories. Because of its preoccupation with human existence in the midst of an oppressive political and social regime, his fiction is most often associated with that of the great existentialist writers of the mid-twentieth century.