This article presents an overview of a literary sketch The Bathing Beaches on the Baltic Coast in the West Guberniyas… by Faddei Bulgarin (1789-1859), first published in Russian in 1827 (“Severnaya Pchela”, № 122-125) and in 1828 in Polish (“Kolumb”, vol. 1, № 4). The interpretive context for the story is founded on author’s journeys across the Baltic region and his stay in Karlov near Dorpat as well as development of the resorts by the Baltic Sea. Bulgarin’s sketch was the first description of Palanga (Polish: Połąga) as a seaside resort town. Among other elements of the writing the article discusses its composition and style, focusing primarily on a number of descriptive features concerning: the sea, the land, the nature, entertainments, local inhabitants and travellers and their customs.

The article integrates the 18th century vampire discourse with problems and approaches of postcolonial studies on the one hand, and with the Galicia research in historical and cultural studies on the other hand. For this purpose, vampirism and postcolonial studies are defined at first, while the change of the vampirism discourse – passing from the revenant image to the one of bloodsucker – is analysed in the next step. Finally it is shown how the vampire’s character and discourse have been adjusted and narratively transformed in 18th-century travel literature on Galicia

Se non la realtà, published in 1960, collects travel stories written by Tommaso Landolfi during the 1950s. Among the texts contained in the collection you can find stories, articles, micro-reports on various – also less known – Italian cities. The writer chooses alternative routes to mass tourism, which he strongly criticizes. Anti-tourism practiced by Landolfi is also reflected in his literary style, adopting strategies unusual for travel literature, such as combining literary and non-fiction fiction, numerous allusions and quotes, and esoteric illuminations. Unlike other authors of travel reports from the 1950s, such as Pasolini or Piovene, Landolfi criticizes the euphoria associated with the development of Italy during the economic boom, anticipating some of the topics of Guido Ceronetti’s Un viaggio in Italia.

The article presents selected literary texts of Russian Romanticism, which can be classified as utopian or dystopian literature. Attention was drawn to the fluidity of borders between the species of positive and negative utopia. Works by Utopian writers were divided into two groups: those sympathizing with decay (A. Ulybyshev, W. Küchelbecker) and those representing the Pushkin era: J. Senkovskij and V. Odojevsky. The analysis of utopian texts showed that they belonged mainly to escapist utopias, and Russian Romanticism significantly influenced the development of negative utopias, which were open to the literary experiment. It was also shown that the works in question are related to the genre of travel literature and scientific fantasy.

This article deals with the ekphrastic text/image (photography) relationships in Eli, Eli, Wojciech Tochman and Grzegorz Wełnicki's 2013 reportage from the slums of the Philippine capital Manila. The photos and the ekphrastic texts form a compact whole intended to produce the effect of unvarnished truth. It is this quality, the insistence on bearing witness to the truth, no matter how shocking, that determines the genre of Eli, Eli. The counterpointal arrangement of the images and the accompanying texts open the possibility of aesthetic and ethical discord between the testimony of the photographer and that of the reporter. However, in the end such tensions reinforce and validate the truthfulness of their report. This article discusses the strategy and the techniques deployed by the authors of Eli, Eli to establish a foolproof authenticity of their work.