Living Croatian novelists are under copyright, so the passage below is not a quotation. It is an original text written specifically for this page in the manner of a contemporary Croatian novel — the urban, first- and third-person, present-tense-inflected realism you find in writers like Zoran Ferić, Robert Perišić or Slavenka Drakulić. It is labelled as a pastiche so there is no doubt: no real author wrote these sentences. What it does faithfully reproduce is the grammar of modern literary Croatian — and the single most important fact about that grammar is what it leaves out. The aorist, alive in older prose and folk tale, has all but vanished from contemporary narration; the perfect now carries everything.
The text
(Original passage in a contemporary style — not a quotation.)
Vratila se kasno, kad je grad već utihnuo.
She came back late, when the city had already gone quiet.
U liftu je netko opet pušio, osjećalo se po hodniku.
Someone had been smoking in the lift again, you could smell it down the corridor.
Trebala je nazvati mamu još jučer. Sutra, sigurno sutra.
She should have called her mum yesterday already. Tomorrow, definitely tomorrow.
Skinula je jaknu, otvorila frižider i shvatila da opet nije ništa kupila.
She took off her jacket, opened the fridge and realised she hadn't bought anything again.
The perfect, not the aorist: modern narration's choice
Read older Croatian narrative prose or a folk tale and you meet the aorist — a synthetic simple past (dođe "he came," reče "he said," vrati se "she returned") that snaps each completed action into a single vivid word. Contemporary prose has almost entirely abandoned it. Our passage narrates a whole sequence of completed past events — vratila se, pušio, skinula, otvorila, shvatila — and every single one is in the perfect (je + l-participle), not the aorist. A nineteenth-century writer might have written vrati se ("she returned"); the modern novelist writes vratila se. The aorist survives in fixed exclamations (odoh! "I'm off!", rekoh "I said"), in folk and biblical registers, and as a deliberate stylistic colour — but the default narrative past is now the perfect.
Vratila se kasno i odmah legla.
She came back late and went straight to bed. (modern perfect: vratila se, legla — not the aorist vrati se, leže)
Skinula je jaknu i otvorila frižider.
She took off her jacket and opened the fridge. (chained perfects; one je can serve both participles)
Free indirect speech: the narrator borrows her thoughts
The most modern thing in the passage is free indirect speech (slobodni neupravni govor) — the technique where the narrator's third-person voice slides, without any she thought that…, into the character's own inner words. Look at Sutra, sigurno sutra ("Tomorrow, definitely tomorrow"). There is no tag, no quotation marks; grammatically it is just a fragment dropped into the narration. But it is clearly her thought, in her voice — the deictic sutra ("tomorrow") is anchored to the character's present, not the narrator's. The reader hears the character think without being told they are thinking. This blend is the signature of modern literary style: it keeps the third person and the past tense of narration while colouring it with first-person immediacy.
Trebala je nazvati mamu još jučer. Sutra, sigurno sutra.
She should have called her mum yesterday already. Tomorrow, definitely tomorrow. (free indirect: the second sentence is her thought, untagged)
Zašto se uvijek tako osjeća? Nije znala.
Why did she always feel like this? She didn't know. (the question is hers, free indirect; the answer is the narrator's)
Modern colloquial-literary register: lift, frižider, mama
The vocabulary places the passage firmly in the present day and in the city. lift ("elevator") and frižider ("fridge") are everyday international borrowings; a purist might prefer dizalo and hladnjak, but a contemporary novel reaching for a natural, urban voice uses the words people actually say. mama ("mum") is the warm, colloquial word for mother, not the neutral majka. opet ("again") and the impersonal osjećalo se ("you could smell it / it was felt") give the prose the offhand, lived-in texture of speech. This is the colloquial-literary register: literary in its control of free indirect speech and tense, but colloquial in its diction.
U liftu je netko opet pušio.
Someone had been smoking in the lift again. (lift, opet — everyday urban diction)
Otvorila je frižider, ali u njemu nije bilo ničega.
She opened the fridge, but there was nothing in it. (frižider over the purist hladnjak)
Impersonal se and clitic placement: the texture of casual narration
Two small grammatical habits make the prose sound modern and unforced. The first is the impersonal se-construction: osjećalo se po hodniku ("you could smell it down the corridor," literally "it was smelled along the corridor"). Croatian uses se + a neuter verb to express what English does with "you / one / they" or the passive — it removes the agent and reports a general perception. The second is second-position clitic placement: in U liftu *je netko opet pušio, the auxiliary *je jumps to the second slot in the clause, right after the fronted phrase u liftu, rather than staying next to its participle pušio. Getting these two things right is most of what makes written Croatian flow naturally.
Osjećalo se po hodniku da je netko pušio.
You could smell down the corridor that someone had been smoking. (impersonal se = a general, agentless perception)
U liftu je netko opet pušio.
Someone had been smoking in the lift again. (je in second position, after the fronted u liftu)
Vocabulary gloss
| Word | Form | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| vratila se | perfect of vratiti se, fem. sg. | (she) came back, returned |
| utihnuo | l-participle of utihnuti | fell silent, went quiet |
| lift | noun, masc. (loan) | lift, elevator (purist: dizalo) |
| osjećalo se | impersonal se, neut. | could be smelled / felt |
| hodnik | noun, masc. | corridor, hallway |
| trebala je | perfect of trebati, fem. | (she) should have / needed to |
| nazvati | infinitive (pf.) | to call, phone |
| skinula | l-participle of skinuti, fem. | took off |
| frižider | noun, masc. (loan) | fridge (purist: hladnjak) |
| shvatila | l-participle of shvatiti, fem. | realised, grasped |
A register note worth stressing: lift and frižider are (informal) / (colloquial) loans that the standard tolerates but the purist tradition would replace with dizalo and hladnjak (see purism and doublets). In a contemporary novel the colloquial forms are a deliberate choice; in an official document or a school essay you would meet the purist forms instead. mama is (informal) against the neutral majka.
How the grammar serves the passage
The whole effect of contemporary Croatian realism comes from grammatical restraint and one quiet substitution. By narrating in the perfect rather than the aorist, the prose sounds like a person telling you what happened, not like an epic or a fairy tale. By slipping into free indirect speech (sutra, sigurno sutra) it lets us inside the character's head without breaking the third-person frame. By choosing lift over dizalo and mama over majka it sounds like the city it describes. And by handling the impersonal se and second-position clitics without strain, it reads as natural written Croatian. The grammar is doing exactly what literary grammar should: disappearing, so the voice comes through.
Common Mistakes
❌ Vrati se kasno i shvati da nije ništa kupila.
Register clash — narrating a modern scene in the aorist (vrati, shvati) sounds archaic; contemporary prose uses the perfect.
✅ Vratila se kasno i shvatila da nije ništa kupila.
She came back late and realised she hadn't bought anything. (perfect, as modern narration wants)
❌ Skinula jaknu je i otvorila frižider.
Clitic error — the auxiliary je must sit in second position, not buried after the object: Skinula je jaknu.
✅ Skinula je jaknu i otvorila frižider.
She took off her jacket and opened the fridge. (je in second position)
❌ Mislila je da sutra, sigurno sutra.
Tagging error — free indirect speech has NO 'mislila je da' tag; adding one forces a subordinate clause and kills the effect.
✅ Sutra, sigurno sutra.
Tomorrow, definitely tomorrow. (untagged free indirect thought)
❌ Osjećao se po hodniku (with a masculine participle).
Agreement error — the impersonal se-construction takes the neuter: osjećalo se, not osjećao se.
✅ Osjećalo se po hodniku.
You could smell it down the corridor. (impersonal neuter osjećalo se)
Now practice Croatian
Reading grammar gets you part of the way. The exercises are where it sticks — free, no signup needed.
Start learning Croatian→Related Topics
- The Perfect Tense (perfekt)A1 — The everyday past: l-participle + clitic auxiliary biti.
- Reported (Indirect) SpeechB1 — Turning statements, questions and commands into indirect speech — with the crucial rule that Croatian does NOT backshift tenses.
- Literary Style and DevicesC1 — The grammatical toolbox of Croatian literary prose and verse — the aorist and imperfect, verbal-adverb clause reduction, marked word order, the vocative, ellipsis, and dialect for voice.
- The Aorist (aorist)B2 — The simple past still alive in Croatian narration and speech.
- Literary Excerpt: KrležaC2 — A grammatical close-reading of a passage in Miroslav Krleža's characteristic dense modernist manner — original composition, since Krleža remains in copyright — used to show how long periodic sentences, heavy nominalisation, the literary aorist and imperfect, deeply embedded clauses, and Kajkavian lexical colour work together in elevated Croatian prose.