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.

The article discusses the book Roizman. The Ural Robin Hood by Valery Panyushkin (2014). The author of the article points out that the novel, which belongs to a non-fiction literature, contains typical features of a reportage (i.e. the category of a participant and the category of a witness). This book also seems to be taking qualities of a narrative prose. The writer uses virtual reported speech form or presents reality from the perspective of his characters’ awareness. Such a narrative method does not lead Panyushkin to blur the boundary between referentiality and fi ctionality in his book but inclines cognitive skepticism. Neither does it neglect the “truth” of facts, nor does it interpret them, but it indicates various ways of interpreting certain events or phenomena.

We talk to Prof. Stanisław Filipowicz, Vice-President of the Polish Academy of Sciences, about the significance of truth, the role of fiction, the consequences of living in a culture of excess, and the crisis of democracy.

The article examines the relationship between Russians and Stalinism through the Polish lens. The analysis centers around the issues of remembrance and oblivion, two thought processes that are merely superficially contradictory. The author is interested in problems of “power over memory” and “erasing memory” characteristic of non-democratic orders. Within the scope of interest, there is also the cultivation of the heroic myth associated with World War II, including the attitude towards Stalin-the-Victor. Another point of focus is the Russian society’s remembrance/forgetfulness regarding Stalin’s Great Terror and the atrocity of Gulags, as well as its collective reluctance towards founding a national community on the remembrance of Stalinist repressions. The author refers to many authors, among which there are Jacek Hugo-Bader, Mariusz Wilk and Wacław Radziwinowicz.

The study aims to contribute to research on the onomastic-stylistic diversity of Polish prose in the late 20th century. In focus are those onomastic properties of literature that reveal connections between names and language in the process of creating non-mimetic, literary-style fiction. These properties also point to the nature of proper names as they function in a literary work of art — that work being a post-modern intellectual-literary game. The names used in the novel (anthroponyms, toponyms, chrematonyms, also zoonyms) mainly derive from the author’s linguistic creativity: they contribute to the world-view projected through the text. That world-view is “purposefully and totally unusual”, different from the real world.

After leaving a GDR prison, in the 60s, Erich Loest started to write crime stories under the pseudonym Hans Walldorf. His series of only a few novels finishes with the short story collection entitled Oakins macht Karriere. In his stories, presenting the investigations by a London detective Pat Oakins, Loest did a specific kind of travesty of a classic genre convention, going away from a socialistic-didactic character of crime stories in Eastern Germany.

The paper takes under scrutiny Michael Köhlmeier’s novel Abendland, which portrays the history of the twentieth century in the form of oral family stories based on the biography of the main protagonist of the work, Carl Jacob Candoris, written down by his godson Sebastian Lukasser. Authentic historical events and actual characters are intermingled with fictitious figures and events. The article poses questions on individual and collective memory as well as the significance of oral history in the life of an individual.

The conversation concerns mayor questions in the theory of historical writing, both raised or elaborated in Hayden White’s work. It focuses on the relation between history and its closest others: science and literature, as well as the issue of the function of historical studies. Conversation includes the discussion of the concepts of fiction, figure, fullfillment, figurative and conceptual language, modernism.

Stefan Grabiński, a famous Polish author of weird fiction, who is known especially for his collection of short stories Demon ruchu (The Motion Demon, 1919), lived and worked in a period marked by a new artistic style – expressionism. Although Grabiński came from Lviv, often regarded as a province in Poland after the Great War, he could have a contact with the latest ideas concerning art and philosophy. Indeed, both in his short stories and in his novels may be found some traits typical for the expressionist poetics as, for example, a subjective perspective, a color sensitivity or a tendency to violent and dynamic use of formal elements. Grabiński was fascinated by a German literature – he read Gustav Meyrink, E.T.A. Hoffmann and an expressionist magazine “Der Orchideengarten”. Moreover, he liked going to the cinema where he could watch, for example, a famous German expressionist film – The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The only text by Grabiński which was adapted into film in his life was a short story Kochanka Szamoty (Szamota’s Mistress, 1922). Although this seemed to be a great material for an expressionist film, the director – Leon Trystan – decided to realize it in an impressionist poetics.

Professor Jerzy Pelc was the creator and long-time manager of the Department of Logical Semiotics, University of Warsaw. He also founded the Polish Society of Semiotics. He published six own books, among others Studies in Functional Logical Semiotics of Natural Language (1971; in English); he edited also dozens of volumes of Semiotic Studies and Library of Semiotic Thought. As Kotarbiński, his master, and Twardowski, the master of his master, Professor Pelc was a radical rationalist. This radical rationalism has linked him to atheism, anti-communism, a distance to politics, and a frown on the falsehood of public life. He was a great patriot – in his life and in his work. He considered himself a successor of the Lvov-Warsaw School tradition. In the field of metaphysics, Professor Pelc combined theoretical minimalism with anti-rationalist attitudes, including the postulate of precision and the requirement of criticism. The main field of his interest was logical – and broader: theoretical – semiotics. He advocated and largely developed the functional concept of signs. To traditional paradigms of research: historical, teleological, causal and prognostic ones – Professor Pelc has added a semiotic paradigm, determined by the question “What does it mean that p?”. Referring to the interdisciplinary fashion for interdisciplinary research, he conducted an analysis of the notion of INTERDISCIPLINARITY. In ontology, he analyzed the notions of OBJECT and CAUSALITY. In his approach, aesthetics was treated form a semiotic point of view: he sought mainly ways to logically rewrite its terminology. In particular, he reconstructed the main aesthetic notions: FORM and IDEOLOGY (of literary works), THEME, MOTIVE, METAPHOR and (literary) FICTION – as well as semiotic notions essential to the description of literary arts, namely the notions of ASSERTION and INTENSIONALITY. In the field of ethics, Professor Pelc declared himself as an advocate of the ideal of trustworthy guardian, which he took over from his teacher, Kotarbiński. In metaethics, he analyzed the notions of NORM, EVALUATION and HUMANITY. A master of Polish: beautiful Polish – he was certainly a true humanist.

This article combines a general introduction to the crime fi ction of Walery Przyborowski with a study of the structure of the plot of his novels. The analyses of ten of his novels conclude with a typology of their narrative schemes, shown in the context of certain invariant patterns and the conventions of related literary genres. While the main objective of this study is to outline the structure of crime story and the social issues depicted in Przyborowski’s crime fi ction, it also pays some attention to the ways in which it refl ects his concerns about contemporary life and the condition of Poland under foreign rule. Basically, Przyborowski’s formula is to make use of the staples of the genre – mystery, adventure, romance – and the techniques of the popular novel. Moreover, his novels, like all of the 19th-century crime fi ctions, are clearly indebted to the conventions of the historical novel.