This article confronts the text of A Literary Prize, a comedy by Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, with its contemporary reviews. Staged by the experimental theatre Reduta (directed by Zofia Modrzewska) in April 1937 at Teatr Nowy in Warsaw (under the directorship of Jerzy Leszczyński), it fell into complete oblivion which lasted until the recent discovery of the director’s copy buried at the Academy of Theatre Library in Warsaw.

While contemporary reviewers found A Literary Prize to be one of the weaker works of an outstanding poet, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska in her letters contrasted the ‘violent attacks’ of the critics with a fairly warm reception of the general audience. The play was performed to capacity audiences until 19 May, and revived for a single occasion a year later in Poznań.

A Literary Prize juxtaposes two plots. One, with elements of comedy of manners, follows the fortunes of a young girl, Taida Serebrzycka, who tries to navigate between two men with literary ambitions, Klemens Niedzicki and Albin Niekawski, while the other explores the challenges faced by prospective writers, especially the role of prize-winning competitions in the discovery of talent and the building of reputation. This article is focused primarily on the character of Taida, who makes the impression of being somewhat scatterbrained and snobbish, but is in fact a strong-minded, independent young woman conscious of her sexuality. She wants an honest, equal relationship, and is ready to fi ght hard for her happiness, which does include sexual satisfaction. The analysis of the reception of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska’s play, and especially the characterization of Taida, the female protagonist, is complemented with an examination of the mechanisms of the critical discourse.

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.

Representations of loss, grief and mourning are have a prominent place in Mikhail Shiskhin's fiction. They coexist with other parathanatological themes such as funerals and reflections on life after death. As funerals provide the proper opening of periods of mourning, the first part of the article deals with the characters’ reactions to the scenes of death and burial. It is followed, in the second part, by a close examination of the internal life of selected female characters who experience grief after the loss of a person they love. On the whole, Shiskhin's characters seem to be less preoccupied with the funeral as a social institution, but rather tend to experience bereavement in a way which is typical of a melancholic. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's conceptualization of mourning, the article demonstrates how Shishkin's female characters conceal mourning by the act of incorporating the dead into their own bodies and allowing them their voice. At the same time, the activity of letter writing enables them to hinder or even deny bereavement, and in this way, hold off the admission of a complete loss.