This article examines the position of Cervantes' Don Quixote in the intertextual network of Juliusz Słowacki' digressive poems, closely bound up with Schlegel's conception of Romantic irony. The article analyzes in turn direct references to Don Quixote; the use by the Polish poet, often with an ironic twist, of Cervantes' narrative strategies; the influence of Cervantes on the creation of the world of the poems (not least their central characters) and on Słowacki's extensive use of parabasis in all its varieties – from authorial commentaries and addresses to the reader, through characters who step out of their role to speak to the reader, to the foregrounding of the problems involved in the act of reading – to highlight and disrupt the illusion of fictional truth. The analysis shows that the Spanish classic was in many ways Słowacki's literary model and an aesthetic inspiration.