This article presents the concept of fate in the stories of the poet and literary sketches of twentieth-century Russian writer Jurij Dombrowski. The writer creates psychological portraits of Romantic poets, including George Byron, Alexander Gribojedov, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, focusing on selected episodes from their lives. In the article attempt is made to prove that the fate of the nineteenth-century artists serve as an excuse to explain the problems of contemporary author. Characteristics of historical fi gures are made through the prism of Dombrowski’s biography. The combination of biography and autobiography allows Dombrowski to present the subjective concept of the poet: a man condemned to loneliness and misunderstanding, confl icted with the epoch, trying to overcome the tragic dependence on historical conditions through art and creativity.

The text presents the procedures and techniques of the research method aimed at “evoking the historical source”, which is understood as the researcher’s prepared and implemented scientifi-cally rigorous participation in the creation by a witness of history of such a reminiscence material that could be a carrier of information and would be subjected to rudimentary historical analysis. The text presents the defined assumptions and subsequent stages of the research procedure.

: The article takes up the problem of autobiographical threads in the prose of Elena Dolgopyat. Although her work lacks a classic autobiography, most of her works are clearly connected with the writer’s biography. In this work I juxtapose two short, unpublished autobiographies of Dolgopiat, which are in my possession, with the writer’s prose works, trying to show the influence of the events in her life on her work. The theoretical basis for my considerations are the works of Małgorzata Czermińska, Katarzyna Citko, Georges Gusdorf as well as numerous reviews and critical texts by Russian literary scholars. In analyzing Dolgopyat’s stories, I also try to prove the thesis that her hometown – Murom – can be considered an autobiographical place.

The article is devoted to study of the structure of the artistic expanse in Marina Tsvetaeva’s autobiographical essay Mother and Music. This structure is rich and complex; containing the following elements: concrete-geographical, spatial-physical, archetypal, emotional-psychological, sacred‑spiritual as well as others. Each of them, to one degree or another, reflects the peculiarities of the writer’s worldview, her creative manner, as well as her subjective attitude to the objective phenomena of surrounding reality. In the holistic context of this essay, the author contrasts two grandiose Universes – the mother’s world with her music and the daughter’s world with her poetry. The relativity and variability of the relevant spatial, psychological and other parameters emphasize the absoluteness of those eternal values of existence, on which the masterly organized system of Tsvetaeva’s prose is based.

Artykuł zawiera analizę jednego z kierunków przemian praktyk autobiograficznych prowadzonych w Internecie, czyli spadek znaczenia utrwalania i archiwizowania treści autobiograficznych, który następuje wraz ze wzrostem popularności przekazów efemerycznych, na przykład wiadomości usuwanych automatycznie po jednokrotnym wyświetleniu. Wskazany kierunek przemian praktyk autobiograficznych w środowisku sieciowym zilustrowano przykładami takich formatów, jak internetowe strony domowe, blogi, platforma społecznościowa Facebook czy aplikacja Snapchat. Przedstawiono kolejne stadia procesu ewolucji praktyk autobiograficznych online, jednak należy nadmienić, że proces ten ma charakter ciągły i jego poszczególne etapy się przenikają. Zarysowany kierunek przemian praktyk autobiograficznych w internecie jest w niniejszym artykule analizowany w odniesieniu do procesualnej teorii mediów i koncepcji zwrotu efemerycznego.

There is a general agreement that remembering depends not only on the memory processes as such but rather that encoding, storage and retrieval are under the constant influence of the overarching, metacognitive processes. Moreover, many interventions designed to improve memory refer in fact to metacognition. Most attempts to integrate the very different theoretical and experimental approaches in this domain focus on encoding, whereas there is relatively little integration of approaches that focus on retrieval. Therefore, we reviewed the studies that used new ideas to improve memory retrieval due to a “metacognitive intervention”. We concluded that whereas single experimental manipulations were not likely to increase metacognitive ability, more extensive interventions were. We proposed possible theoretical perspectives, namely the Source Monitoring Framework, as a means to integrate the two, so far separate, ways of thinking about the role of metacognition in retrieval: the model of strategic regulation of memory, and the research on appraisals in autobiographical memory. We identified venues for future research which could address, among other issues, integration of these perspectives.

The discovery of some hitherto unknown documents relating to Bolesław Leśmian’s family has made it possible to re-read his autobiographical poems as responses to circumstances and events from the poet’s real life. An analysis of his poems in the light of the information supplied by the newly-discovered source shows that they provide a thoroughly accurate record of events as they happened, especially deaths. Not only do the deaths of his mother, father and his siblings hurt him deeply and foreshadow the end of his own life, but also make him feel guilty for not being able to remember them properly: as his memory fails him, they are condemned to a ‘second death’.

This article deals with the issues of the creative process explored by Adam Zagajewski in his writings, especially in his poems forming the cycle of Autoportraits. Indeed, he revisited the subject on numerous occasions, pointing to the importance of inspiration, which, he regretted, received too little attention in today’s world. Be it as it may, in the end it all comes down to the question about how he actually wrote his poems. This article is the first attempt to reconstruct the methods of Zagajewski’s creative work; it also retraces the process of writing a single poem from a poetic note to its final version.