ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes the shaping of the (Central) European worldview in the essay collections Sablast kruži by Ervin Sinkó and Srednja Evropa – Mit ili stvarnost i drugi eseji by Milo Dor, understood as a response to the simultaneous influence of the legacy of a (post)imperial past, the internationalist ideology of the communist movement, and a humanist orientation. These elements constitute essential biographical markers and foundations of political and social reflection for both authors, albeit with clear differences in how each of these features is positioned within their respective poetics. The aim of the paper is to examine how the overlap of the personal and the political manifests in the legacy of European humanism, within Šinko’s and Dor’s generationally marked experiences of exile and emigration.

KEYWORDS: Ervin Sinkó, Milo Dor, Central Europe, emigration, imperialism, exile, European literature

SUMMARY: This article offers a comparative analysis of the essayistic writings of Ervin Šinko and Milo Dor, focusing on their reflections on Europe, Central Europe, and the idea of homeland in the context of twentieth-century imperial collapse, exile, and mass movements and revolutions. Reading Šinko’s Sablast kruži Evropom and Dor’s Srednja Evropa, the study examines how both authors articulate a form of cosmopolitan patriotism grounded in humanist values rather than ethnic or national essentialism. Drawing on biographical experiences of emigration, political persecution, and cultural mediation, the paper explores the ways in which personal and historical displacements shape their respective understandings of Europe and its humanist legacy. While Šinko tends to identify Yugoslav socialism with a renewed European humanism, often in an uncritically affirmative manner, Dor retrospectively idealizes the Habsburg Monarchy as a lost model of supranational coexistence, despite its historical contradictions. By situating these positions within broader debates on Central Europe, imperialism, and post-imperial tensions between politics and culture, the article highlights both the productive insights and the ideological blind spots of each author. Ultimately, the paper argues that Šinko’s and Dor’s essays contribute a historically specific, experience-based perspective to discussions of European unity, revealing the contradictions between humanist imagination and political reality in post-imperial cultural thought.