TO MEET AND CONTINUE ON THE SAME LINE The Új Symposion writer’s attitude to Antun Šoljan’s literary concept

The Croatian author Antun Šoljan (1932–1993) came to the attention of the emerging generations of writers and artists in Vojvodina in the first half of the 1950s. His sensibility as a poet, storyteller, and literary translator, as well as his activity as a newspaper editor and his commitment as a critic, influenced the Symposion generation mostly by encouraging them to follow in his steps, but also by stimulating discussion. My article discusses the multi-directional reception of this attitude, which regards high-quality aesthetic performance and commitment as a function, not of social status, but of free artistic creation, detailing those mutual ideological reference points, connections, or collision surfaces, that are characterized by intellectual self-representation that avoids the false heroism of national myths and continuity of tradition freed from the manic import and/or epigonism of recent trends in world literature.