Ludwik Bohdan Grzeniewski (1930–2008) was Polish essayist, poet, critic and novelist. He was born and died in Warsaw, where he spent all his life. Well known as varsavianist, he was also master of literary miniature. It is not a literary genre in the strict sense. “Literary miniature”, coherent artistic statement, as short as possible, combines elements of poem, essay, short narrative and others. Grzeniewski always highly valued precision, he preferred condensed form of expression. I therefore think, that the books of this writer (Igły w stogu siana, “Drobiazgów duch, wspaniały i powietrzny…”, Taniec z mufką and others) deserve attention.

The given article is an analysis of Władysław Wężyk’s Travels to the ancient world taking into consideration the most important problems and components of the 19th century Romantic worldview. Particular attention will be paid to the great Romantic themes such as folklore, art, music, spontaneous literary works and concepts of new humanity. Wężyk’s memoir reveals his openness towards the Other and the understanding of foreign cultures which is by far the most important feature of a Romantic intellectual.

The aim of the article is an attempt to reconstruct a description of the image of Arab World on the basis of selected (yet representative) writings from the second half of the 18th century. In that period, due to the trending Enlightenment orientalism understood as a fascination with the Orient and references made to it in the culture, the Arab world appeared among Polish representatives of the Age of Reason. These trends were expressed in art, customs, literature and – in the form of various concepts and images – in social consciousness. These images differed between each other both in terms of content and form. Some of them aimed to depict the Arab world objectively and extensively, whereas the other, on the contrary, were merely delineations focused on particular elements of the Arab world, depicting only one or a few aspects. Some of them, such as the image of Arabia Felix or utopian reminiscences refer to the tradition and update it. Some of them were created for the time being. Nevertheless, each of them reflects the topics, problems and questions which concerned the minds in Enlightenment Poland. Moreover, relatively high correlation between European archetypes and the image of the Arab world which occurs in the writings of the Polish Enlightenment confirms that Poland belongs to the Old Continent cultural group, which was crucial for the promoters of Polish Enlightenment.

Paul Valéry (1871-1945) was considered in the 1930s one of the greatest French poet and essayist. He was the author of the famous poems: La Jeune Parque (The Young Fate) and Le Cimetiere marin (The Graveyard by the Sea). Many times in different situations he spoke very highly of Poland and Poles. Wednesday, October 28th 1936, Valéry arrived in Warsaw. He delivered two lectures during his brief stay. They met with great interest, they were in the papers, they have been mentioned by Polish writers: Wacław Grubiński, Zofia Nałkowska, Tadeusz Breza. Also, Czesław Miłosz and Ludwik Hieronim Morstin have written about meetings with Paul Valéry. Poet`s visit, although very short, was a significant event in Polish cultural life.

The article examines Leopold Tyrmand's attitude towards the Poles and Polishness on the basis of, primarily, his journalism, interviews and correspondence. It picks up a broad range of themes, among them, the reasons of Tyrmand's leaving Poland in 1965, his relations with other exiles and expatriates, in particular the Polish community in the United States, his opinions on the virtues and vices of the Polish national character, his attitude towards the Polish language, his decision to write in English and his search for national identity. The article argues that Tyrmand's views on Poland and things Polish kept changing and this evolution was closely connected with various phases of his life. While acknowledging the heterogeneity of Tyrmand's sense of identity, the conclusion notes that the dominant element of his self-awareness was a sense of belonging to the Polish nation.

The author refers to Roland Barthes’s early concept of mythology in analyzing the films of Jerzy Kawalerowicz, one of the most outstanding Polish directors of the twentieth century. He interprets three of Kawalerowicz’s films, Pociąg [Night Train], Matka Joanna od Aniołów [Mother Joan of the Angels] and Faraon [Pharoah], which are read in the mythological register and in the political context. First the statements of the director in regard to each film are presented, then the judgments of film critics are provided, and finally the author gives his own interpretation. Night Train is shown as a film addressing the wrongs of the Stalinist era, and the problem of a totalitarian state. Mother Joanne of the Angels questions the sense of ideology in a totalitarian world, and is partially the director’s search for political identity, while Pharoah is a look at the post-October reformers and the reasons for their failure. Pharoah also provides a new vision of the state.

This article combines a general introduction to the crime fi ction of Walery Przyborowski with a study of the structure of the plot of his novels. The analyses of ten of his novels conclude with a typology of their narrative schemes, shown in the context of certain invariant patterns and the conventions of related literary genres. While the main objective of this study is to outline the structure of crime story and the social issues depicted in Przyborowski’s crime fi ction, it also pays some attention to the ways in which it refl ects his concerns about contemporary life and the condition of Poland under foreign rule. Basically, Przyborowski’s formula is to make use of the staples of the genre – mystery, adventure, romance – and the techniques of the popular novel. Moreover, his novels, like all of the 19th-century crime fi ctions, are clearly indebted to the conventions of the historical novel.

This article takes up Adam Dziadek’s somatic approach to literature to explore the theme of erotic experience in two poems by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, ‘L’amour Cosaque’ and ‘Amore profane’. With the help of inputs from gender studies and the contemporary theories of the subject it has been possible to profi le the ‘I’ of the poems as a deeply fragmented and sexually ambiguous subject, and, upon the evidence of the elusive autobiographical details woven into the text, as a subject suspended in a liminal space, between the real and the fi ctive world. After analyzing the body represented in the text, both perfect and decrepit, as well as traces of the poet’s carnality that interfere with the text and the reader’s sense of his own soma the article arrives at the following conclusion: in Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s lyrics the body seems to project its impressions and experiences onto reality, thus blurring the border between the inside and the outside.

In the last phase of Franciszek Karpiński's life as a writer (the first quarter of the 19th century), he practically gave up poetry and concentrated instead on writing memoirs. This article tries to find out to what extent his autobiographical work, especially his Historia mego wieku i ludzi, z którymi żyłem [A History of My Century and the People with Whom I Lived], is influenced by an attitude characteristic of the sentimentalism of the previous century. As this analysis shows Karpiński's narrative exhibits both a sensitivity much indebted to Rousseau's autobiographical method and skilful shifts of tone, from satire and irony to various shades of melancholy. For sentimentalist aesthetic and poetics the continual manipulation of tone is a means of alerting the reader to the world's complexity. As in the novels of Lawrence Sterne, that complexity is experienced by way of careful observation of fragments of reality, defined by the subjectivity of the observer and the truth of his emotions.

This article examines Bolesław Prus's use of futurology and utopia in his short story Phantoms (Widziadła). A closer look at the story's images and their sequence not only gives us an insight into the author's philosophy of history but also reveals a utopian vision which can hardly be squared with the realism of his previous work. Thus ‘Widziadła’, written in 1911, can be seen as an important piece of evidence of a change in the writer's beliefs and worldview. It was at that late stage of his life that Prus, a hard-nosed realist and critic of the Romantics, turned into an impassioned idealist who, disillusioned with the world around him, sought refuge in literature. It was to be, however, a fiction like ‘Widziadła’, looking beyond the conventions of realism, unashamedly eclectic and visionary.