The aim of this article is to interpret Maria Anto’s painting in a new light and compare it with the art of women associated with the international Surrealist avant-garde. The Polish painter shared a similar sensibility with the Surrealists. Creating very personal, atmospheric works, they took up common themes and motifs in their works.

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.

The aim of this article is to present the fantastic literature of J.-P. Bours, one of the least known representatives of the Belgian uncanny. His oeuvre is remarkably rich: Bours practices all the sub-genres of the fantastic and remains a master of the short form. In this article, I analyze the distinct characteristic of this fantastic literature: ambiguity. In order to produce this effect, the writer uses a vast array of techniques (like the unsaid and ellipsis), as shown in La Mort du juste.

In 2006 Maria Janion wrote in The Uncanny Slavdom that “the new narrative of the humanities can tell the story of our culture differentlyˮ. Since that time such 'new narratives' have multiplied literally right in front of our eyes. While in the late 2000s the existence of a distinct Slavic fantasy subgenre was a matter of controversy, hotly debated by both authors and academics, today its presence and popularity is too conspicuous to leave any room for doubt. Each year the market is flooded with dozens of new Slavic fantasy books, which are then discussed in countless blogs, vlogs, discussion groups, and podcasts. The growth of interest in Slavic fantasy is phenomenal and seems to be part of a larger trend gaining ground not just in Poland but also in other Slavic nations. This gives rise to a number of questions which this article tries to address: What is Slavic fantasy? What place does it occupy in modern popular culture? What effects, beneficial or less so, will it have?

This is a critical reading of two Polish science-fiction novels of the post-Apocalypse subgenre, Cassandra’s Head by Marek Baraniecki and The Old Axolotl by Jacek Dukaj, with the help of concepts borrowed from the philosophical toolkit of Jacques Lacan. Each of the two books envisages an apocalyptic catastrophe and its consequences as well as the subsequent attempts to rebuild human civilization. The action in either novel is shaped by tensions between the Symbolic and the Real. The latter, though suppressed and shut out, keeps resurfacing, usually when it is least expected, leaving an indelible marks in the life of the survivors. An analysis of the handling of this conflict in the two novels offers a number of insights into the way these two fundamental modes (or, Lacanian orders) of human perception are integrated into the worlds of post-Apocalyptic fiction.

This article questions the consensus view of The Invincible (Niezwyciężony) as one of Lem’s classical sci-fi fictions. The author contends that in this novel the familiar conventions (later rejected in His Master’s Voice) coexist with a structural design characteristic of his late novels. An analysis of two pieces of the world of The Invincible, usually disregarded by the critics because of their sketchiness, i.e. the story of the extinct Lyrans and the account of the ancient biosphere of Regis III, reveals that in either case Lem no longer cares for the realist credentials of his fiction and does not put the two planets on the astronomical map (which is no doubt deliberate choice). Moreover, in contrast to his earlier novels, his outline histories of the two biospheres contain hidden (but nonetheless unmistakable) parallels to the prehistory of the biosphere of the Earth (though he was no believer in evolutionary repeatability). As this article tries to demonstrate the two peripheral facets of the world depicted in the novel are clearly related and subordinated to the central story line (concerned with the ‘necrosphere’ and humanity). This structural dependence as well as the way in which key aspects of the world depicted in the novel seem to illustrate the theses articulated in Lem’s essays justifi es the conclusion that The Invincible should be treated as the first novel of his late phase, represented – on account of its form – by His Master’s Voice.

This essay is a new reading of Jan Barszczewski's collection of stories Szlachcic Zawalnia czyli Białoruś w fantastycznych opowiadaniach [Nobleman Zawalnia, or Belarus in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination] in the context of the 19th-century reception of the Arabian Nights and, more importantly, as an example of a genre which combines the oral and the literary traditions to express the identity-fostering experience of living at a time of upheaval and epochal change. This approach has little interest in revisiting the connections between Barszczewski's tales and Belorussian folklore. Instead, it places his stories in their direct historical context, i.e. a series of famines in Belarus the first decades of the 19th century, and the significance of 1816, the year in which the action of the stories is set. It is no coincidence that it was also the Year without a Summer, a catastrophic global climate anomaly, which made a great impact on the Romantic imagination.