The question of parallelism of past events and their account in literary discourse, legitimation of oral accounts as historical facts and appreciation of oral preservation of antiquities has been studied on the literary text Last days in the life of Nikola Zrinjski Jr., Croatian Viceroy, written as a historical narrative by Franciscan Robert Kauk (Vukovar, 1848 - Zagreb, 1900). We observed traces of fact and degree of referencing of what has been written relying on the positivist and mimetic approach to text and the dominating rationalist tradition. Then we continued with observing traces of fiction with non-historical elements referring to the achievements of narratology and linguistic inversion which place the center of interpretation on the role of language and narration, thus unburdening referential verification and text value, and emphasizing the narrative identity and symbolic structure of the story. The different ending of Kauk's story, as a deviation from the official story of the death of Nikola Zrinski in a boar hunt near Cakovec on November 18, 1664, indicates an awareness that the textual legacy contains historical and linguistic structures indicating differences between faction and fiction.
