The Historical and The Remembered in Krleža’s Travel Memoirs

The paper discusses problems which in relation to the treatment of time, define a literary text, its genre, effects of events as well as cultural aspects owing to which the text is self-sustaining or identifiable with the author. Travel structures as implicated but rarely readily defined by Krleža, have gradually lost their authenticity due to adaptations and changes in reception, thus enabling new topoi of the genre and new conceptual topoi, or have lost their authenticity in general. Although Krleža treated his own texts as a creative procedure implicated by the strategy of memory, even during his lifetime he was not able to avoid questioning canonic and (literary) historiographic authenticity of his texts. Hence, impression, even from this posthumous glance that Krleža himself was responsible for this strange blend of accents and forms, which could at least be identified by their comparative reading, should not come as a surprise. In conclusion the paper argues that the credibility of the act of traveling defines the genre of travel writing; but as much as it differentiates this genre from prose fiction in which travel represents the kernel thematic unit, it also refers to the credibility of the traveler-reader speaking from a literary text as a specific type of credibility: the sole act of traveling as well as that of reading, even when the author is implied on the expression plan (as narrating subject) does not guarantee privileged legitimation