| Abstract (english) | Antun Šoljan (1932-1993), Croatian poet, prose writer, playwright, columnist, and translator, left a significant literary work that not only permanently marked Croatian literature but also indelibly and timelessly enrolled in Croatian and European cultural space. This paper examines Šoljan’s identity code, based on the novels A Brief Excursion (1965) and Luka (1974), an identity code closely related to the Mediterranean, and travel as an essential part of this code is marked as a process without an optimistic end. Traveling through the Mediterranean is a search for meaning and encountering nonsense, a search for oneself and others in which one gives up on others and does not necessarily find oneself. Cultural, social, philosophical, existentialist, identity patterns, group and individual identities, consent and disapproval, betrayals, spiritual and social castrations, departures and returns, wanderings, doom, and loneliness are being questioned, because “there is never anything in the end”. The Mediterranean is offered here as a framework in which the identity of man and time is shaped in social, artistic, political, and worldview contexts, and the callous beauty and power of the sea, the permanence of the Mediterranean flora, the inexorability of stone, the lies of politics, political instability, are intertwined in Šoljan’s novels in a forever contemporary way. Considering the fact that these novels were a creative stimulus for generationally and worldwide distinct film directors to direct two films that are stylistically and conceptually very different – Luka (1992), director Tomislav Radić, and A Brief Excursion (2017), director Igor Bezinović. This paper also examines how these two Croatian directors approach Šoljan’s literary templates and creatively transpose Šoljan’s atmosphere and dramaturgical motives into audio-visual works. We also examine the way in which Šoljan’s vision of the Mediterranean as an identifier of Croatian social, cultural, and political relations presented and authorially shaped in another medium. |
