The paper deals with the literary activity of the Croatian writer Josip Baričević formed in the beginning of the twentieth century. Baričević published only one collection of stories in his lifetime under the title Novels and Portraits (1910), while several others were published in newspapers, of which, along with Savremenik, the Rijeka Novi list stands out, with which Baričević had a long collaboration. Baričević's emigrant life began with his departure to Serbia in 1912, which lasted until 1919, when he returned to Zagreb and died shortly thereafter. In that seven-year period, the issue of authorship and availability of his works became significantly more complicated, as was, after all, an attempt to faithfully reconstruct his life as an emigrant. Baričević's later-found political feuilletons give an insight into the atmosphere and events surrounding the First World War and bear witness to his political activity, but the paper only touches on them superficially. Greater emphasis is placed on Baričević's novelistic work, along side its reception. In spite of the fact that Baričević writes in the period of Croatian modernity, from a poetic point of view, his work is not only limited to that definition, but in some places even goes beyond it, anticipating the upcoming poetics of expressionism. Nevertheless, as the dominantly used form, the paper highlights the grotesque, giving a brief overview of its development and typology without going too deep into its issues. The rest of the paper is based on an overview of the grotesque elements and structures used in Baričević in representative examples.