Environmental Topics in Contemporary Croatian Dystopian Proseand Prose with Dystopian Elements

Important ecological topics: climate change, pollution of air, water and soil, extinction of plant and animal species and food as a basic human need are in the corpus of dystopian texts and those with dystopian elements. The dystopian component in all of them belongs to the second wave of dystopian fiction (Matus 2009: 7). The corpus consists of a novella “White Promenade” (“Bijela promenada”, 2016) by Ed Barol and eight novels: Battlefield Istria (Bojno polje Istra, 2007) by Danilo Brozović, Centimeter from the Happiness (Centimetar od sreće, 2008) by Marinko Koščec, 2084: House of Great Misery (2084: Kuća Velikog Jada, 2012) by Ivo Balenović, Planet Friedman (2012) by Josip Mlakić, Romeo at the End of the History (Romeo na kraju povijesti, 2015) by Aljoša Babić, War for the Fifth Taste (Rat za peti okus, 2015) by Veljko Barbieri, Dedivination (Dedivinacija, 2018) by Jelena Hrvoj, and Crab’s Children (Rakova djeca, 2019) by Dalibor Perković. The theoretical perspective in the paper is ecocritical: aspects of the relationship between man and the nature that surrounds him are investigated, i.e. to what extent man perceives nature and its inhabitants as equal to himself. The last chapter gives an insight into the results and solutions that some authors offer as a way out of cataclysmic situations, and the meaning and efficiency of these solutions are valued from an ecocritical point of view.