In his lecture on Adam Asnyk’s poetry delivered in 1896 Jan Kasprowicz came up with the term endymionism to refer to a relatively small portion of the poet’s work characterized by a tone of extravagant egotism and narcissism. Exemplary for this extravaganza was, according to Kasprowicz, the poem ‘Endymion’. It belongs to a sequence of poems voicing the poet’s trauma after the suppression of the 1863–1864 January Uprising, and is closely connected with the ‘A Dream of the Tombs’, his most opaque and depressive poem. In the Polish literary tradition – from Słowacki’s calling Krasiński the Endymion of poetry, through Norwid and Faleński to a number of Young Poland’s poets (Rydel, Wyspiański, and Lange to mention but a few) – the figure of Endymion marked a situation of the poet being misunderstood or flouted by critics and readers. But with Asnyk’s ‘Endymion’, who, despite the appearance of a lonely dreamer is in fact a guardian of the tombs of heroes who fell in an unequal fight, this mythological figure acquired a new meaning. It became a symbol of loyalty and a noble idealism making no concessions to mundane pragmatism. In the following decades endymionism of that kind would often blend into Parnassianism, a poetic movement committed to the idea of art independent of all practical concerns and obligations.

Metal nanoshells are a type of nanoparticle composed by a dielectric core and a metallic coating. These nanoparticles have stimulated interest due to their remarkable optical properties. In common with metal colloids, they show distinctive absorption peaks at specific wavelengths due to surface plasmon resonance. However, unlike bare metal colloids, the wavelengths at which resonance occurs can be tuned by changing the core radius and coating thickness. One basic application of such property is in medicine, where it is hoped that nanoshells with absorption peaks in the near−infrared can be attached to cancerous cells. In this paper, we study the changes of optical response in visible and near infrared wavelengths from single to randomly distributed clusters of nanoshells. The results were obtained using a novel formulation of Mie theory in evanescent wave conditions, with a finite−difference time−domain (FDTD) simulation and experimentally on BaTiO₃−gold nanoshells using a scanning near−optical microscope. The results show that the optical signal of a randomly distributed cluster of nanoshells can be supplementary tuned with respect to the case of single nanoshell depending by the geometric configuration of the clusters.

In the article we described the evolution of optical technology from lens-type microscopes working in far-field to SNOM (Scanning

Near-Field Optical Microscopy) constructions. We considered two systems elaborated in our laboratory, namely PSTM system (Photon Scanning Tunelling Microscope) and SNOM system. In both systems we obtained subwavelength resolution. Some details about optical point probe technology in both systems are given and experimental results presented.

The aim of this analysis of the oneiric representations of phantom women in the poetry of Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer and Bolesław Leśmian is to compare and characterize the workings of the poetic imagination of a pair of poets who represent the first and the second generation of the Young Poland movement. Their poems are read and interpreted within the framework of Young Poland's conceptualization of dreams and its use of the dream motif so as to explain the functioning and the ontological status of the oneiric female characters. The analysis shows that both Przerwa-Tetmajer's and Leśmian's apparitions belong to more than one category. While some are wholly imaginary, others are known to have existed as real persons and have merely been transposed into an image of a man's mind.

This article examines two collections of manuscripts (previously unanalyzed) with poems which make up Leopold Staff’s debut volume The Dreams of Power. The poet offered them as a gift to Maryla Wolska who deposited them in the Michał Pawlikowski Archives at Medyka. With access to the fi rst, nearly complete, collection we can get an insight into the process of selecting poems for the version that was to go to print (1899–1901). As most of the poems are dated, we are able to establish their sequence and reconstruct the changing concept of their selection. Of special value are twelve poems which had been dropped in the process, and for most part remained unpublished. Each of them is presented briefl y in the article. Apart from making this discovery, the article demonstrates that Leopold Staff’s debut volume as we know it had an earlier version with a set of poems, different from the one that was earmarked for publication under that title.

The aim of the paper is to shed light on the theoretical background of the inclusion of health in the standard of living studies, and the use of two of its specifi c measures — life expectancy at birth and body height. Hence, the article describes the idea of capabilities and functionings developed by Amartya Sen as a proposed solution to the limitations of the classic measurement of the standard of living.