The article connects two issues: the city as text and neoclassical trends in urban design in the second half of the 20th century. These issues are presented on the examples of ideal cities: Washington 2000 – a design of Leon Krier, Nowa Huta and the residential complex of Ricardo Bofill in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. As a continuation of the ideal European city Shanghainese Lingang is presented designed by GMP.

Belarus is a typical borderline country featuring multi-ethnicity, including various cultures, denominations and languages co-existing one near the other. Current socio-linguistic situation in Belarus may be defined as socially conditioned diglossia. Russian is the language of the governing elites, all-level education, popular culture and mass-media. Urban inhabitants speak almost entirely Russian, and the majority of village inhabitants speak Belarusian dialects. When, during Lukaszenka’s rule, Belarusian language fell once again in disgrace, it once again became a symbol of national revival and a fighting tool of opposition. Representatives of democratic elites speak Belarusian, but only when they hold informal meetings or political events. Based on biographic interviews held with the representatives of the Belarusian intelligentsia in Belarus, the Author has revealed a process of the narrators’ discovering an importance of a mother tongue as a sign of national identity. The process of realizing the importance of the Belarusian language in the life of an individual, as well as ethnic community, as well as a process of conscious learning of the language is, for contemporary Belarusians, one of the stages of shaping national identity. Learning the language is followed by participating in Belarusian symbolic culture and remembering history and reviving common memory, which finally leads to conscious identity with a mother land in a symbolic sense, which is broader than purely territorial reference.

The word ‘narrative’ is used unusually often in the social sciences. The basic aim of this article is to draw the attention of social researchers, particularly sociologists, to problems with narrative theory. Narratology constitutes an important source of inspiration for sociologists. There are many perspectives and analytical approaches to the theory of the narrative. In this article, it is viewed from the perspective of sociological thought inspired by phenomenology and hermeneutics. Narration should certainly not be perceived as synonymous with other notions, as it has its own history and meaning. The author points, however, to the possibility of a link, on sociological grounds, between narrative and life history (biography) as two different but mutually interacting ideas.

This article is an attempt to represent the aspirations of the Polish aristocracy during the First World War by imagining the dreams of Maria Lubomirska – wife of Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski, arguably the most important Polish politician in Warsaw at the time. Lubomirska and her circle attended séances led by a popular medium, and they saw what they wanted to see, just as they perceived the changing political tides in the same way. Though aristocrats were in some sense already anachronistic at this time, they still wished to maintain their superior social and political position into the future. Lubomirska in particular envisioned an independent Poland led by a king. The idea of Poland becoming a monarchy may seem absurd in hindsight, but as the article shows, if we return to this moment in history without teleological presumptions it was a likely outcome until the last days of the war. Text in italics comes directly from Lubomirska’s diary.

The paper aims to analyse the relationship between the city space and the art present in public spaces and narrative located therein. Analysis of selected examples of contemporary art in urban space and literature allows the conclusion, that interdisciplinary narrativity descending from a literary work, allows for the transfer of meanings from public art objects to the city space and individual narratives of recipients. Not just the meanings, that the artists intend to convey, but also the meanings individually interpreted by those, who observe the work.

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 article examines the language biographies of two generations of a family of German origin in the Czech Republic from the end of World War II to the present day. The content analysis of the biographies is based on the application of the narrative interview method developed in qualitative sociology. The analysis of the data obtained by this method follows the stages in the language use of the two informants in coping with the challenge of the language policies of the state.

The main goal of this paper is to present a fully developed concept of Paul A. Roth’s philosophy of history to the Polish reader. Of course, it is just an introduction, but with the interview it should be a good starting point for further analysis. These seem desirable given Roth’s very ambitious programme, which in addition is based on “old facts”; that is, an analytical philosophy of history and science. The rapprochement between the two “visions” is not only a philosophical consideration, but also responds to the often-raised voices of practitioners. This introduction refers primarily to Roth’s latest book, indicating a possible interpretation. This “reading” is conducted by indicating the historical context, recalling philosophical analyses and determining the validity of the proposed solutions in order to decide how much science there is in history and vice versa.

The author asks about the applicability of postcolonial criticism to the study of the culture of Central and Eastern Europe, especially Galicia. She presents the voices of Polish and Ukrainian proponents of this method, as well as those who are sceptical about the possibility of adapting it to the analysis of Central European culture. She indicates the factors which complicate transferring the theory of postcolonial studies to the Habsburg monarchy and the peoples living there, and defines the conditions that should be taken into account for the use of postcolonial theory to be persuasive. She presents the benefits of postcolonial criticism as applied to the analysis of literature created in Galicia, noting the hegemonic historiography contained in the literature and the narrative forms establishing the hierarchy of cultures, and protecting the value and superiority of one’s own culture – a phenomenon that has not been investigated.

The article aims to prove that the narrative structure of The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz by Ilya Ehrenburg can be viewed as a starting point for understanding the overriding idea of the novel. In the material for interpretation among other things analysed what follows: the similarity between the narrative of the fi rst few chapters and the skaz narrative (Russian oral form of narrative) based on the defi nition of formal mimesis, the introduction to a “foreign word” narrative (the protagonist using reported speech and free indirect speech), the restriction of the storyteller’s role (which is the overriding element of the skaz narrative) and simultaneously putting the protagonist at the forefront, the language markers used in order to mask the convergence between the storyteller’s and the protagonist’s points of view. As a result, the article implies that the presence of a skaz storyteller allows analysing the fi gure of Lasik Roitschwantz not as a character from a book or of a certain type, but rather as a human being in a universal sense.

The following paper, in its sense, is a summary of the broad qualitative and quantitative authorial research on the historically-themed materials from the social media video platform YouTube. The main research problem dealt with the matter of the meaning of the historical narrative for the contemporary polish society and the specificity of its historical consciousness. 635 videos from 6 channels since 2013 till 2019 were analyzed. Authors point out the relation between the quantitative analysis of the videos’ topics with the current trends of interests in history present in the society. Functioning of the most popular videos’ trends were emphasized and its connection with their qualitative layer of the historical narrative. Further research on the hypothesis on the ethnocentric interest in history was conducted. Slightly advantage of the political and military narrative was observed and a little less advantage of the factographical and processual perspective in history which is the matter for the further analysis. Conducted research showed that interest in history on the YouTube platform confirms the special status of the XX century and II World War narrations in the historical consciousness of the Polish society.