This article examines two collections of manuscripts (previously unanalyzed) with poems which make up Leopold Staff’s debut volume The Dreams of Power. The poet offered them as a gift to Maryla Wolska who deposited them in the Michał Pawlikowski Archives at Medyka. With access to the fi rst, nearly complete, collection we can get an insight into the process of selecting poems for the version that was to go to print (1899–1901). As most of the poems are dated, we are able to establish their sequence and reconstruct the changing concept of their selection. Of special value are twelve poems which had been dropped in the process, and for most part remained unpublished. Each of them is presented briefl y in the article. Apart from making this discovery, the article demonstrates that Leopold Staff’s debut volume as we know it had an earlier version with a set of poems, different from the one that was earmarked for publication under that title.

This is an analysis of the literary expressions of fear in the poetry of Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer. Intense fear is not only one of the dominant emotions depicted in his work but it also underpins his poetic technique. The article examines the manner in which he communicates the somatic experience of dread, his use of bodily metaphors in descriptions of nature, his poetic landscapes of fear, the records of his nightmares, the modernist phobophobia as well the sources of the high anxiety (to do with the mysteries of life, death and man’s inner life) that dogged him at all times. In its readings the article draws on the studies in affect theory, somatopoetics and psychoanalytic criticism.

This article examines the relationship of Maryla Wolska with the poets and artists of the Young Poland in Lwów and, more broadly, with the literary community of the early 20th century. She was a leading light of Płanetnicy (The Rainmakers), an informal group of artists who met at her house in Lwów. The role of a friend and mate, someone who was treated equally as a writer, did not sit well, however, with her role as mistress of the house, hostess of a literary salon and representative of a family which occupied a high position in the social hierarchy. To ride on the crest of the wave she strove to combine two strategies, a modern jauntiness and a studious attention to 19th-century proprieties. Although she did well for herself, her success was by no means complete.