Vladan Desnica left an indelible mark in both Croatian literature of 20th century and Croatian literary production in general. His opus is composed of four short story collections, published in the following order: „Olupine na suncu”, „Proljeća u Badrovcu”, „Tu, odmah pored nas” and „Fratar sa zelenom bradom”. He also wrote two novels: „Zimsko ljetovanje” (1950) and „Proljeća Ivana Galeba” (1957); a play „Jakovljeve ljestve”, and published a few poems. In this work, the emphasis is on collective guilt as one of the basic components of the author’s poetics. The focus point is the hypothesis that the author uses a feeling of guilt as a perspective that creates an impossibility to resist human guilt as congential modus vivendum. The work aims to introduce Desnica’s primary contouring of the collective, and its guilt in comparison to other collectives or an individual. Guilt is defined somewhat as a Shakespearean question - to be or not to be gulity in comparison to the collective. The base of the research is composed of ten short stories from four mentioned collections and the novel Zimsko ljetovanje. The motif of guilt is presented from a psychological viewpoint too, and is classified according to the scale of eighteen points of codification that was described by Tilghman-Osborne, Cole i Felton, but is primarily approached to as a literary construct.