This article is an attempt at a narrowly-focused application of a critical approach labelled ‘a history of the history of creativity’, formulated by Magdalena Popiel in her study The World of the Artist: Modernist Aesthetics of Creativity (2017). The article highlights the domain of autopoietic narratives – stories told by artists about their own creative performance, which involves projecting one’s own somatic identity and positioning one-self in a given socio-cultural context (community) – and examines the discursive dimen-sions of the creative process in the metanarrations of Tadeusz Peiper and Józef Czecho-wicz, two major poets of the Polish interwar avant-garde. The resulting model of the creative process is then set into the context of contemporary philosophical, anthropo-logical and psychological theories of creativity.

The current article is an attempt at demonstrating the sacred in Tychyna’s poems translated into Polish by Czechowicz. The sphere of the sacred in the works of the Ukrainian poet mainly derives from Christianity and focuses around Biblical motifs and symbols. Pavlo Tychyna (1891‐1967) was one of those Ukrainian writers whose works attracted a lot of attention in the interwar period amongst representatives of Lublin’s literary circles, including Józef Czechowicz, who translated over twenty of his poems from the collections Clarinets of the Sun 1918, The Plow 1920 and Instead of Sonnets and Octaves 1920. The volume Clarinets of the Sun is dominated by man’s harmony with God and the Universe, while in the two subsequent ones religious motifs appear in apocalyptic visions.

The article is an attempt to present Józef Czechowicz’s relationships with the early works of Oleh Olzhych from the Камінь (1932) and Бронза (1932) cycles, preceding his debut collection of poems entitled Рінь (1935). Oleh Kandyba’s poems became the subject of interest of Polish literary circles as early as in the 1930s. His poems were translated mostly by writers associated with the Kamena magazine based in Chełm, a group whose member was also Józef Czechowicz. Kandyba’s poetry, described as “tragic optimism,” is to a large extent analogous with the works of the poet from Lublin. Both authors include apocalyptic and Arcadian motifs in their poems. Their compositions, based on contrast, are accompanied by Biblical and classical motifs, in which the imagery of stone played a special role. Both Olzhych and Czechowicz took care over the clarity of their poetry and focused on the right choice of words. Poems provided them with a means of escape from the realities of war and constituted a kind of an appeal to the nation.

This article is an attempt to present a comprehensive view of the poetry of Józef Czechowicz in the context of Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Czechowicz's poetic work, the article argues, is an exploration of mutual relations of the basic ontological categories of being and nothingness ( das Sein and das Nichts). They constitute the philosophical foundations of the purely literary tensions that can be detected in all comprehensive accounts of his work, such as the opposition of Arcadia and Catastrophy (Tadeusz Kłak) or the discussion of the ‘bright’ and the ‘dark’ strain in the poetry of the Second Avant-garde (Jerzy Kwiatkowski).