The Destiny of Zlatko Tomičić as a Participant of the cxroatian Spring and his travelogue Prose

This work studies fourteen travelogue collections by Zlatko Tomičić who was isolated from public literary life for a long period of time due to his participation in the movement called Croatian spring. His literary work was forbidden to be published. The stylistic and contentual analysis of the characteristics of Tomičić’s work indicates that the author’s ideas have completely opposite meanings from the political labels engrafted upon him. Within the Croatian travelogue prose, Zlatko Tomičić creates his recognisable structure of travelogues which represents a peculiar genre-bastard. Tomičić’s travelogue contains a wicker of different literary genres, and interweaves the form of the travelogue with elements of memoirs, literary essays, feuilletons, documentary structures, philosophic discourses, historical descriptions, legends and poetic expressions. We can conclude that all later travelogues written by Tomičić reflect a special spiritual capacity of accepting past times and sources of ancient cultures, which the author experiences as burdened mythical places from which the energy of past times emerges and reveals the meaning of the mythical cognition of the past. An important constant in Tomičić’s travelogue is the aspiration for polyphonic and polyhistoric models of experiencing the world. His rich narrative technique of interwoven associative comparative jumps (civilisational traces of different historical nations within Croatia and traces of Croatian cultural dwellers and artists in other countries) gives us a mosaic of connections between people and nations, as well as the richness of a spiritually spread poetic consciousness whose spiritual artistic cognition does not know the borders of real social-political barriers. In his best travelogues the author reaches the epiphanic moment of the declaration of humanistic connection with various positive civilisational heritages; and his work shows that a valuable literary thought cannot be permanently stopped by political repression and prohibition of publishing