The article presents Tennessee Williams’ play Suddenly Last Summer (1958) which is little-known in Poland. It was written while the playwright started to undergo a psychoanalytic therapy and is commonly considered as one of his most personal plays. The author of the article puts the play in the context of Williams family life, especially his sister’s mental disorder (which lead to unsuccessful lobotomy), his relationship with his mother and his father and his own mental health problems. An important theme of the play is cruelty, present as well in other Williams dramatic works (for example Orpheus Descending or Sweet Bird of Youth) and evident particularly in a short story Desire and the Black Masseur written shortly before famous A Streetcar Named Desire. Another theme is the sacred, often present in Williams’ work as a reference both to Christianity and ancient pagan rituals.

This article analyses the transformative influence of Marcel Proust’s fiction on early works of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1925–1927) in the light of the short story Nowa miłość [A New Love]. The article argues – on the basis of a reconstruction of the order in which Iwaszkiewicz read the volumes of In Search of Lost Time – that the date of its composition has be to revised and proceeds to explore the affinity between the two writers. The analyses, which draw on Harold Bloom’s infl uence theory, compare and contrast their handling of scenes and narratives, relations of analogy and visions of love. The article claims that Iwaszkiewicz was keen to enter into dialogue with the French author and adopted some of Proust’s techniques, yet without compromising his own creative autonomy. In the course of that dialogue he developed a notion of Proust’s literary art which, it is argued, provides the key to the interpretation of homoeroticism and narcissism in Nowa miłość.