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