The presentation has a literary-historical, a comparative-literary and a literary-theoretical component. The modernist movements, which at the same time distinguish themselves from certain modern traditions, Młoda Polska and Mlada Hrvatska, will be examined in the light of analogous innovative aspirations in other European literatures (eg French and Russian Symbolism, Viennese Secession) as borderline phenomena (in) of literary history and its historiography. As borderline phenomena they are conceptualized with regard to Polish and Croatian literary and artistic development, but also as a reconceptualization of the relationship between literature and the world and as formation of groups with a pronounced profiling of the generation-boundary. Thereby differences emerge when comparing these two movements: While Młoda Polska (A. Górski) was operating in a multimedia(l) manner as a movement against literary positivism,  Hrvatska mlada showed a strong inclination to the single medium of poetry (поэзия) (see Hrvatska mlada lirika  (1914) and Grič (1919). Seen in a literary theory perspective the question arises whether this example shows that national-philological revisiting of literature is necessarily defective.