This article is a tribute to the late Milan Ǵurčinov, a literary critic, historian of literature, and comparative scholar. Apart from the main aspects of his literary activities, the focus of attention is on Ǵurčinov’s special sphere of interest, methods of writing a history of literature in the South Slavonic cultural context. It is pointed out that over the period of several decades Ǵurčinov repeatedly studied ideological commitment in literature, proportion of ethic content and aesthetic form in a literary text, ways of ideological impact of the literary word in a specific literary space, and, most importantly, understanding of modernism as a manifestation of acute perception of reality. Ǵurčinov sought answers to the problem of how literature relates to a certain time, how it operates in a linguistic and cultural space, how it exhibits idiosyncrasies of the writer, how it defends national identity and cross-cultural vision of things, how it can serve one and many.