This article draws on the refined techniques of literary interpretation brought to the Cervantes studies by John J. Allen's Don Quixote: Hero or Fool (1969), but refocuses its attention from the problem of Quixote's character to ‘bizarreness’ – an aesthetic category that can be found at the root of the confused, incongruous perception of reality in the fictions of Cervantes and the contemporary Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. In Chapter 18 of Part Two of Don Quixote Don Lorenzo calls the knight errant ‘ loco bizarro’. The translations of this phrase reveal a striking polyvalence of the Spanish adjective bizarro when compared to bizzarro (in Italian) and bizarre (in both French and English). A close analysis of the following chapter shows that the author contextualizes the preceding events within a narrative perspective marked by empathy and understanding rather than authoritative categorization, i.e. a type of narration discussed by Olga Tokarczuk in her 2019 Nobel Lecture “The Tender Narrator” and identified as ‘bizarreness’ in her Opowiadania bizarne [ Bizarre Stories].

This article examines the position of Cervantes' Don Quixote in the intertextual network of Juliusz Słowacki' digressive poems, closely bound up with Schlegel's conception of Romantic irony. The article analyzes in turn direct references to Don Quixote; the use by the Polish poet, often with an ironic twist, of Cervantes' narrative strategies; the influence of Cervantes on the creation of the world of the poems (not least their central characters) and on Słowacki's extensive use of parabasis in all its varieties – from authorial commentaries and addresses to the reader, through characters who step out of their role to speak to the reader, to the foregrounding of the problems involved in the act of reading – to highlight and disrupt the illusion of fictional truth. The analysis shows that the Spanish classic was in many ways Słowacki's literary model and an aesthetic inspiration.