This article is a critical reappraisal of Juliusz Słowacki’s translation of Calderón’s El príncipe constant (1843), which acquired a place of its own in Słowacki’s oeuvre and continued to attract a lot of interest throughout the 20th century. Its lasting appeal is due to its extraordinary unity of tone, dramatic construction and stylized language, which in effect, as some critics have said, out-Baroques Calderón’s Baroque original. This article analyzes this contention in detail and tries to answer the question what were the sources and reasons of Słowacki’s fascination with the 17-th century Spanish poet and playwright. The second part of the article deals with two of the 20th-century stage productions of the drama and the adapters’ handling of Słowacki’s text. The summary includes a brief survey of the treatment Calderón’s heirs accorded to his key trope perigrinatio vitae (‘life is pilgrimage’).

The window is a recurring image in the imaginarium and the art of Tadeusz Kantor. Fixed in his memory at an early age, it resurfaced in the spectacle Wielopole, Wielopole (1980) as a plain object "of the reality of the lowest kind", and in the 'cricotage' A Very Short Lesson (1988) as a quasi stage prop charged with metaphysical meaning. The window motif is also a persistent feature of his graphic art. Most notably, it appears in the drawing Man and window (1971), a picture for the Dead Class (Window) from 1983, an autothematic cycle of paintings You cannot look inside through the window with impunity (1988-1990), and Kantor's last dated drawing of pigeons being watched through a window. Kantor's fascination with the window as an objet d'art can be explained by his philosophical aesthetics (especially the use of objects as markers of the 'spaces' of the stage action). This article analyzes the image of the window as a 'site' of special significance in Kantor's art (an object that encapsulates the antynomy of inside/outside, or a claustrophobic incarceration/a barrier to entry) in the context of Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht's theory of latency (i.e. the inability of throwing off the past, the suspension of time symbolized by artistic constructs of imprisonment).

This article tries to outline the history of the theater of the absurd in Poland by focusing on the metaphor of theatrum mundi (a device which is characteristic feature of this type of drama) and its use by Tymoteusz Karpowicz in his dramas Dziwny pasażer [A Strange Passenger], Charon od świtu do świtu [Charon from Dawn to Dawn], Kiedy ktoś zapuka [When Somebody Knocks], Człowiek z absolutnym węchem [The Man with an Absolute Sence of Smell], Przerwa w podróży [A Break in a Journey]. This metatheatrical device enables the dramatist to create a world of play-acting for its own sake, a world without God, with characters unable to look beyond the exigencies of their role and thus to express his disenchantment with the 20th century and his estrangement from the post-World War II reality. It also enables him to explore the mechanisms of theatrical performance and the role of language in the creation of reality.