Stanisław Wyspiański (1869–1907) was the Polish dramatist, the poet, besides the illustrator and the painter, one of the best known artist of the Young Poland movement. His journey to Europe (particulary to Paris) became very important experience in his life. He discovered the value of loneliness, he had to be alone – as an artist and as a man. He was called “a hermit from Cracow” and for this reason his genius was not always appreciated. However, at the end of life, Wyspiański undergoes a significant transformation: he feels a strong connection to community, as a member of the nation and society, as well as a host.

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 Of special value are twelve poems which had been dropped in the process, and for most part remained unpublished.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.

This article examines the relationship of Maryla Wolska with the poets and artists of the Young Poland in Lwów and, more broadly, with the literary community of the early 20th century. She was a leading light of Płanetnicy (The Rainmakers), an informal group of artists who met at her house in Lwów. The role of a friend and mate, someone who was treated equally as a writer, did not sit well, however, with her role as mistress of the house, hostess of a literary salon and representative of a family which occupied a high position in the social hierarchy. To ride on the crest of the wave she strove to combine two strategies, a modern jauntiness and a studious attention to 19th-century proprieties. Although she did well for herself, her success was by no means complete.

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 presents a new reading of the spoof poetic manifesto ‘Chamuły poezji’ [‘The Cads of Poetry’] written by Julian Przyboś in 1926. His use of the apocalyptic tones of early modernist poetry to lampoon a trio of acclaimed poets associated with Young Poland (especially Jan Kasprowicz) suggests a complex nature of Przyboś’s rejection and dependence on that movement. In general, the influence of Young Poland, though quite conspicuous in is juvenilia and early publications, tends to fade away. ‘Chamuły’ is a pejorative nonce word which alludes to the Biblical Ham as well as a Polish word for a cad or ill-bred bumpkin. This article adds to it another layer of meaning, based on Derrida’s interpretation of the Apocalypse, with allusions to sexual and genital imagery. And more generally, it reframes the whole Przyboś’s poetic work (not just his early poems) using Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity. Seen in a broader historical perspective, Przyboś’s struggles to break with Young Poland are not unlike the predicament of many eighteenth-century writers caught in the dispute between the Moderns and the Ancients, satirized in Swift’s Battle of the Books. The overall conclusion of this study is that at all times the avant-garde and the arrière-garde remain in a continuous dialogue and the innovators never lose sight of those left behind. Poetry is, after all, metamorphic and cannot be contained within within the bounds of manifestoes and artistic programmes.

This article deals with the first phase of Jerzy Jankowski’s severing ties with the Young Poland movement and his access to the futurist avant-garde. His conversion to the new poetic worldview, which he pioneered in Poland, was reflected in his articles and poems published in Widnokrąg [Horizon], a magazine he founded in 1913 to replace Tydzień [The Week], of which he was the main publisher. The rebranding came on top of disagreements between the magazine’s contributors. The divergent views focused on the assessment of Tadeusz Miciński’s novel Xiądz Faust. In May 1913, in his former magazine, Jankowski heaped praises on it. However, the following year, when it came up for debate in the Widnokrąg between Miciński’s aficionado Zygmunt Kisielewski and the skeptically-minded Leon Choromański, Jankowski sought to distance himself from both the emotionalism and the intellectualism of his colleagues. By that time he was absolutely adamant that the antinomies of Young Poland’s high art were a trap. Now that the worship of art striving for timeless perfection would have to give way to an unpretentious concern for ‘fugitive art’, the time was ripe for working out a new aesthetic, centered on the thrilling ‘beauty of big cities’, cabaret, cinema, and modern machines. Jankowski broke with his erstwhile mentor Ferdynand Ruszczyc and Zenon Przesmycki-Miriam, to follow the incomparably more exciting Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Meanwhile, Choromański made one last attempt to bring the young man back on track by writing an article, in which he argued that Futurism was crude, and shallow, a throwback rather than a modern breakthrough. However, his warnings made no dint in Jankowski’s faith in futurism. For him its triumph was a matter of historical necessity. And, he had already thrown in his lot with the new movement by publishing his first futurist poems, ‘Spłon lotnika’ [‘Pilot in flames’] and ‘Maggi’.