The article is a review of the book: Koneczny. Teoria cywilizacji edited by Jan Skoczyński.

The horror fiction of the Romantic Age differs considerably from its contemporary descendants. While generally associated with scary entertainment (‘playing with fear’), the Romantic Gothic often enough crossed the line to explore the depths of genuine epistemological, existential or political fears. This would not have been possible without developing its own poetics which drew its strength from a variety of sources. One of them was the speculative philosophy of history in its pessimistic and optimistic variants. They both fed the sense of horror and its literary transpositions. Moreover, they formed a positive feedback loop: anxiety over the course of history led to the use of the devices and registers of the poetics of horror, which in turn led to the amplification of the effects of the historical vision on the reader.

This paper presents historiosophical insights of Stanisław Garfein‑Garski, a Polish philosopher and lawyer, who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The author puts together fundamental elements that constitute the structure of philosophy of history, as presented systematically in Garfein‑Garski’s Uwagi nad zagadnieniem dziejów powszechnych i polskich („Remarks on the Issue of Universal, and Polish, History”, 1924). He characterizes the concept of national philosophy as developed by Garfein‑Garski. As its main aim, this study undertakes to provide a comprehensive analysis of the status of messianic ideology in Garfein‑Garski’s philosophical and historical considerations. In addition, an attempt has been made to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the place and role of that construction in the dynamics of the historical dispute over Polish messianism.

This article is devoted to the presentation of the philosophical contacts between Andrzej Walicki and his contemporary Russian philosophers. On the basis of already published texts as well as archived correspondence, Walicki’s relations with Sergei Hessen and Dmitry Chizhevsky, and especially with Fr. Georges Florovsky, are discussed. Walicki and Russian thinkers deliberated about historiosophy, the history of Russian philosophy and even theology. In spite of their different perspectives (Florovsky was the founder of the so‑called neo‑Patristic synthesis, which had an exclusively historical significance for Walicki), they played a significant role in popularizing Russian thought in the West, especially in the USA.

This article deals with Makryna, a forgotten drama in five acts and a prologue pub-lished in 1929 by Antoni Waśkowski. The analysis focuses on the drama’s intertextual dialogue with the history, literature and mythology of Polish Romanticism and the mod-ernist reception of those issues in Stanisław Wyspiański’s Legion (1901). The article takes to task the critical consensus that sees Waśkowski as a second-rank epigone of Romanti-cism and the Young Poland movement. In fact, it argues, Makryna challenges the re-ceived historiosophic vision of Poland’s history embodied in the work of, among others, Stanisław Wyspiański, Waśkowski’s literary master. The author of Makryna is uncom-promising in his denunciation of the 19th-century revolutionary movements and some aspects of the Polish Romantic culture, especially the messianic commitment of ‘national prophets’ like Makryna Mieczysławska, Juliusz Słowacki (the poem Rozmowa z Matką Makryną Mieczysławską [ A Conversation with Mother Makryna Mieczysławska]), Adam Mickiewicz, Andrzej Towiański.