Characters with split personalities in Nessuno torna indietro by Alba de Céspedes and the German-Polish history of the novel – This paper focuses on the Polish reception of Nessuno torna indietro, a novel by Alba de Céspedes. In Italy the novel was a bestseller between 1938 and the eighties, however it was impossible to publish it in Poland due to the fact that negotiations failed. Nevertheless, the book was translated into Polish on the basis of the German version and published in a newspaper in 1947. The presentation of the Polish history of this novel will be based on archival materials.

The Author presents the core of the idea of microhistory as developed in the works of Giovanni Levi and the group of Italian historians connected with the periodical "Quaderni Storici".

Life history is a term usually assigned in the history of historiography to the Italian school of microhistory. In fact, it is a concept typical for the natural sciences in the case of which it is a framework focused on studies of life history strategies as well as life cycles. Life history analysis has become the subject of numerous studies around the world and has been gaining in popularity in social sciences. The author presents life history as a certain research perspective for historical studies which is capable of incorporating both natural and cultural approaches. He draws inspirations of the life history perspective from recent research into history of modern Poland.

Micro-(h)istorical narratives by Claude Duneton and Jean Echenoz – The purpose of this article is a comparative study of two recent French novels, Le Monument. Roman vrai by Claude Duneton (2004) and 1914 by Jean Echenoz (2012), which, in spite of formal and ideological differences, approach the theme of the Great War in a way similar to micro-historical frameworks. Like historians representing this field of historiography, both writers depict the four years of the First World War by focusing on a small community and a geographical space limited to a small location on the home-front. Referring to the distinction between roman de l’historien (the historian’s novel) and roman du témoin (the witness’s novel) proposed by Emmanuel Bouju, the author of the article analyses the strategies used by the novelists to create an indirect witness’s point-of-view, juxtaposed with the perspective of the contemporary recipient of the events that happened a hundred years ago.