The article considers Lesya Ukrainka’s analytical and review work (born Larysa Kosacz – 1871‑1913) Notes about the Latest Polish Literature, published in the Russian magazine “Life” (1901, № 1). The writer chose not an analytical, but an analytical‑ironic “tone”, emphasizing the merits of Polish romantic poets headed by Adam Mickiewicz, as well as poets of the “Ukrainian school” of Polish Romanticism along with outstanding positivist writers (Bolesław Prus, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Henryk Sienkiewicz), without limiting these writers to populism, and stating their aesthetic tastes and ideological positions. The author pays most attention to the new Polish poetry, which had awoken “after thirty years of half sleep” in the age of modernism, in which she saw echoes of various “pessimistic movements” of world literature. At the same time, Lesya Ukrainka believed that Polish modernism had also its own ground, its appearance was prepared by the tragic contradictions of the Romantics, the collapse of the Polish szlachta ‘noble‑gentry’ ideals, and the degeneracy of positivist‑populist literature. The author pays most attention to the new aesthetics of Stanisław Przybyszewski and his manifesto of Polish modernism with its slogan of “art for art’s sake”.