This paper offers a display of the creation of a nation through literature in the complex circumstances of the 19th century, when it comes to the collation and creation of ideas of the modern nations we can imagine in Europe. Ideas were first started in literary and cultural intellectual circles, and so that everything would not stop at theory, ideas are realized with an established political idea and movement. In the first part of the paper, a presentation of Croatia and its creation through the ideas of the nation in the 19th century is offered. In Croatia, the idea of a nation manifested itself through the ideas of the illyrian movement and the croatian national revival. With inexhaustible preoccupation, aspirations and romanticization of ideas, thinking about the nation, with which they imagined their reality within that ideal national community, the Croatian revivalists began and formed our reality as well. In the second part of the paper, a presentation of Ukraine, the creation of the ukrainian nation through literature, in similar ideological processes, which affected Europe in the 19th century, is offered. Taras Shevchenko is also highlighted in the paper, as one of the founders of the ukrainian literary nation and one of the most important revivalists of ukrainian national consciousness. In the second part, after describing the circumstances in the 19th century, in which both croatian and ukrainian ideas of the nation were formed, the focus shifts to their mutual comparison, that is, the similarities and differences in these comprehensive processes of formation and becoming a national community.