This paper is devoted to one of the currents of the Montenegrin contemporary drama – the phenomenon of “black drama”. Director Niko Goršič, which is actively working in Montenegro – recognized the potential of texts that were formed in this spirit and he briefly characterized their specificity. “Black drama” shows first of all connection with women’s playwriting which is involved, emerging and evolving since the 90s of the twentieth century. In these dramas are present current issues concerning the redefinition of identity, sexual freedom, breaking taboos, economic and political changes. Playwrights describe restrictive practices in culture of patriarchy and customary law of Montenegro viewed from the perspective of women. High sensitivity to any confounding psychological and social woman, her position and function in society and culture appears not only in women’s playwriting. Confrontations between history and present, tradition and modernity, femininity and masculinity, hope and disillusionment, micro- and macrostory are most fully reflected in the tragedies by Radmila Vojvodić (Princess Xenia of Montenegro, Montenegro blues), Nataša Nelević (Eggs) and Ljubomir Đurković (Tobelija, Cassandra. Clichés).
 

The paper deals with the opera The Bacchae from 1991, a collaboration between Swedish composer Daniel Börtz and Ingmar Bergman. It was one of the three operas Bergman ever directed. The paper examines The Bacchae in a broad context of modernist reception of Greek tragedy and mythology – an especially important frame of reference is the Dionysian, post-Wagnerian opera – and against the backdrop of Bergman’s other film and theatre productions that deal with his highly ambiguous relation to religion.
Bergman incorporated some major themes of European Modernism in his staging. The Bacchae can be read as a part of the “invented tradition” of the black, antilogocentric, violent, obscene antiquity, created around 1900 as an opposition to the bright Winckelmann – inspired version of the past. This dark vision of the archaic roots of human culture corresponds with other modernist topics such as the crisis of language and the attempt to create alternative, body-­-based modes of expression, the blurring of gender identities, the transgressive nature of art and religion and the conception of music as a representation of the “oceanic” unconscious.
 

The significance of Byron’s presence in Polish culture and its diverse aspects have been widely noted. Not much has been said, however, on the representation of Byronism as a disease. The rumours of Byron’s madness were spread by Annabella, but the very cult of Byron as a celebrity and in particular the attempts of many men who tried to model their life on that of Byron could have been seen as a mental disorder. A fictional study of Byronism as a disease was offered in Zygmunt Kaczkowski’s novel Bajronista (The Byronist, 1855–1856; 1857), which used as its epigraph the memorable lines from Słowacki’s poem Beniowski, in which the poet declares himself to be a “Byronist”. The aim of this paper is to discuss the representation of Byronism in Kaczkowski’s novel in the context of the Polish reception of Byron. Kaczkowski attempts to present Byronism as a destructive social and cultural phenomenon; hence he uses the image of a disease, which eventually results in actual illness and death. Kaczkowski’s portrayal of Byronic madness is expressive, on the one hand, of the critical tradition represented by Friedrich Schlegel’s charges of atheism against Byron and by Kazimierz Brodziński’s warnings against dangers of following models of English and German poetry, and on the other hand, of the novelist’s disillusionment with the ideology of Polish Romanticism.
 

In the first part of the novel Crime and Punishment, waking up after sleeping on exhausted horses, Raskolnikov refuses to commit the murder of Alyona Ivanovna, but then for some unknown reason goes by the house on Sennaya square. This inexplicable act was fatal for him: on the square, he learned that tomorrow Alyona will be home alone and took the final decision to put into action the axe. The article substantiates the assumption that the “topographic error” of the hero is closely connected with the mythical reputation of the Haymarket and nearby alleys as places where the devil confuses people the right way. More Alexander Pushkin (Secluded Cabin on Vasilievsky Island) tied the motif of wandering through the labyrinth streets of St. Petersburg with the intervention of the devil, and Nikolai Gogol (Diary of a Madman) put the phrenetic Poprishchin in the Zverkov’s house, in the Stolyarny lane, near Kokushkin bridge. In the same Stolyarny lane Lermontov places the house titular counselor Stoss of the eponymous story. Right there on the corner of the Sredniaya Meshchanskaya street and Stolyarny lane, settled Dostoevsky and Raskolnikov. The hero of the story Stoss, the painter Lugin, wandering in these places, following the absurd instructions of the boy, offering him to go to the roundabout, just as it does Raskolnikov, going home through Sennaya square. Thus, Dostoevsky accurately taken into account the literary reputation of this place that goes back to Gogol and Lermontov.