Throughout its history, the essay has often been interpreted as a form characterized by formal and conceptual openness and resistance to thought systematization and completion. Prolonged debates related to the definition of the essay as a genre and often diametrically different theoretical conclusions related to its potential (e.g. Lukács's Hegelianism in relation to Adorno's anti-systemic utopia) lead us to assume important differences between the subjects that appear during the history of the essay discourse. In the first part of the thesis, we tried to theoretically define these differences, opening up some of the key questions related to the essay as a genre: Can we single out the peculiarities of essayistic subjectivity in relation to other literary genres? How to describe the status of truth in an essay? We concluded, based on the texts of Milivoj Solar and Branislav Oblučar (as well as other theorists), that essayistic subjectivity is defined by a specific scientific/philosophical interest that resists systematicity, completeness, and strict definitions, and as such is characterized by a specific relation to cultural and scientific movements that we tried to describe using the concept of post/modernity. In the second part of the thesis, we tried to examine the status of the essayistic subjectivity in relation to specific texts by Croatian essayists (Tin Ujević, Danijel Dragojević, Vlado Gotovac, and Dubravka Ugrešić). "Modernist" and "postmodernist subjectivity", constructs we described/created in the first part of the thesis, helped us to depict the essayistic subjectivity of the mentioned authors more easily, whereby we noticed, for example, more modernist elements in Ujević's subject (an introspective version of the "quest", elements of modernist Bildung, features of aestheticism, etc.), while in the subject of Dubravka Ugrešić's essays we noticed a greater number of postmodernist features (metatextuality, encouraging the fluidity of identity, emphasizing the ludic function of the text, eclecticism, etc.). We concluded that in the analysis of the essayistic subjectivity, many categories can be applied that are used in the approach to other literary (primarily prose) genres, whereby the particularity of the essayistic subjectivity often leads to a discourse in which the characteristics found in other genres are more clearly outlined.