The sketch recalls the personality and literary works of Sebastian Petrycy, a Polish Renaissance writer. The author recalls his volume Horatius Flaccus w trudach więzienia moskiewskiego na utulenie żalów in the context of Petrycy’s philosophical and pedagogical activity, analyzing his ode Studnia kolegiacka. The interpretation of Ode III 13 shows the sources of inspiration of the Renaissance poet. Petrycy, translating Horace’s odes in early 17th century, adapted elements of Aristotelism, Horatianism, stoicism and aretology to Polish conditions. Petrycy also used the rules of rhetoric and parenesis in a strictly humanist stylistics. A significant issue of the sketch are also discussions on the classification of Petrycy’s odes from the viewpoint of theory of literature. The text tries to remind Sebastian Petrycy’s poetry in a different and wider context than the one connected with research on Polish Horatianism, humanist versification or Russo-Polish relations of early 17th century

Jędrzej Świderski translated Olind et Sophronie, a prose play by Louis Sébastien Mercier, into Polish, in verse of thirteen syllables. This work references the event known to its contemporary readers, shown in Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso. However, Mercier had changed and expanded a thread of the Italian epos, introduced new characters and connected them with family bonds, e.g. the sorcerer Ismen turns out to be Sophronie’s father. The Polish version is slightly shorter, but all events and characters from the French play have been retained. However, Świderski arranged the accents in a slightly different manner. The events of military character are narrated in more detail, patriotic feelings have been expressed more prominently. The Polish author has also slightly toned down the negative traits of some characters, and on the other hand, paid less attention to the psychology of characters, and given rhetorical character to their dialogues. As a result, Świderski’s translation is closer to the tradition of heroic poetry.

The need to determine the canon of always relevant rules of style of a written statement is revealed in almost all Enlightenment texts undertaking theoretic reflections on language. The point of departure are the stylistic suggestions of Ignacy Krasicki, as made in the “Monitor” newspaper. Discussing the essential issue, of language as a reflection of thought, the Prince Bishop of Warmia does not hesitate to discuss the universal properties of a style characterized as clear, concise and simple. A discerning look at the rules mentioned above allows the author to make an analysis of the manner of linguistic formation of the Powieści wschodnie. Of special interest are those properties of style which enable a clear and natural manner of literary representation, as well as those that intensify the imagery of language, and the devices responsible for the persuasive function. Beside a characterization of important stylistic and  linguistic devices, there is also a reflection on gentle irony and perverse wit used by the author of the oriental stories.

The author discusses the textual traces of writings by Adam Mickiewicz in Józef Albin Herbaczewski’s Polish-language essays. In early 20th century, Herbaczewski, or Juozas Albinas Herbačiauskas (pen name: Junutis Vienuolis, born on 20 October 1876 in the Lithuanian region of Suvalkija, died on 3 December 1944 in Cracow) had published several books concerning – in general – the cultural dimension of Lithuanian-Polish relations (the most important in the discussion by the author of the sketch are: Amen, Głos bólu and I nie wódź nas na pokuszenie…). Years later, the disproportion, characteristic of this publicism, between the scale of political visions and the mediocrity of the cultural foundation on which the prophecies have been based, is striking. Herbaczewski made Mickiewicz the cornerstone of these weak foundations. In this case, the principle of reception is radical reductionism: the author of Głos bólu reduces the titan of Polish literature to the role of an executor-implementer of a single subject: freedom of the Lithuanian and Polish nation. In the present sketch, this issue is discussed in two perspectives: first, in its own right, and second, as an exemplification of something that can be called the literary imperative of freedom.

Przyboś’s meeting with Słowacki’s works resulted in some very interesting poems and texts of essay character. The first part of the article focuses on the lyrical works inspired by the poem W Szwajcarii: the most important thing are Przyboś’s efforts to “see anew” the images from Słowacki’s poem and transfer them into his own poetic diction. On the example of the poem Tęcza na burzy, the devices intended to extract Słowacki’s “realism”, concentration on the watched landscape and profound consciousness of its motion, are shown.
Another interesting issue seems to be the influence of Słowacki’s poetic idiom on Przyboś’s works. It is not limited to the poems directly dedicated to the Romanticist poet, but unquestionably influences the development of imagery of such cycles as the cathedral poems or Pióro z ognia. Słowacki’s mystical works inspire the 20th-century poet to reuse and transform the motif of light, motion, or fading in his texts, as well as to rewrite specific images appearing in Król-Duch and later lyrical works by Słowacki into the language of poetic prose.

The author returns to Sól ziemi regarded in the mythical and ritual context, shows the characteristic plot elements allowing to interpret the story of the protagonist through the lens of an initiation scheme, yet her interpretation of the novel is different than earlier ones. She comes to a conclusion that the writer, using poetics of myth and the initiation model, not only demythologizes the war but also diagnoses the situation of the European civilization on the eve of the disaster of World War II. Moreover, Wittlin puts to judgment the fascination with the myth of primordiality and the oversimplifying concepts of return to the state of untainted nature as an antidote for the dangers of civilization of his age. The author also discusses the meaning of creation of the protagonist, Piotr Niewiadomski, as an innocent simpleton. Using the context of an initiation ritual, one can regard Niewiadomski’s journey as a road to recognition of his own situation in the world, through rebellion to cognition and selfconsciousness, however, the protagonist fails to fully reach these goals. Thus, he remains unable to bear the knowledge on the world and to participate consciously. Therefore, Wittlin in Sól ziemi asks a question about the responsibility of us all for the evil, including the one resulting from simplification and mythologization.

The author of the sketch shows that the poem Piero della Francesca – during the first reading, seemingly an austere, restrained description of paintings by a 15th-century artist – is actually one of those Jastrun’s poems in which the poet creates the vision of his metaphysics, discussing such issues as time, human fate and the sacred. The analysis of a special way in which Jastrun describes Piero’s paintings leads the author of the article to a conclusion that the poet creates a reality in his poem, corresponding to the specifics of the artist’s paintings, characterized by immobility, essentiality, constancy, immortality. Such world (understood as the reality of art) is opposed in the works of the author of Punkty świecące, to the human reality, often shown as a space of permanent time flow, destruction of life, and loss of the loved ones, places and own identity, as well as hope to reach fulfillment, to reach the secret of existence, the sense. The article also interprets the religious meaning present in the poem. Metaphysical feelings arise in it – as in many other poems by Jastrun – resulting from the experience of delight, recognition of a Mystery given in a momentary glimpse of consciousness

The article is another attempt to deal with the problem of so-called “musicality” of the story Martwa pasieka by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. The main question under discussion is how much the narrative of the story is connected with Sonata for solo piano by Igor Stravinsky. The proposed conclusions are based on the findings of Józef Opalski, who has noticed the general connection between the idea of the sonata and the story by the Polish writer, and Maria Woźniakiewicz-Dziadosz who superimposed the model of a sonata form and the type of twelve-tone music over the story. These research suggestions are a point of departure to the discussion on the literary way of realization of the musical method of “separate sounds” composition, connected by Iwaszkiewicz, in the foreword to the story, with the Russian composer’s sonata. The main subject of the study are literary strategies intended to make the narrative similar to the musical manner of composition.

The article presents an attempt to discuss the approach to characters of saints (Myron, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Cecilia, Dorothea) in assorted lyrical works by Miron Białoszewski. It has been shown that the author of Rozkurz refers to the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also renews it in a creative way, transposing the religious symbolic to modern reality. An existential and anthropologic perspective is predominant in the presentation of the saints, which has been expressed in the analysis of the referenced works. In Tryptyk pionowy, special emphasis has been put to physical work as a source of sanctification of a human.

A pretext for the article is a book Moja Europa [My Europe], published jointly by Yuri Andrukhovych and Andrzej Stasiuk in 2000, subtitled Two essays on the Europe called Central, while Andrukhovych’s essay has the title Środkowowschodnie rewizje [Central-Eastern Revisions], and Stasiuk’s essay – Dziennik okrętowy [Ship’s Logbook]. This literary project has an almost ostentatious borderland nature and excellently fits in the literary and general humanist fashions of recent years. Two writers, a Pole and a Ukrainian, friends for a long time, decide to show their viewpoints of Europe – their own, private, different than the official one, drawn anew on personal maps of cultural fascinations. The subtitle comments the title, provides it with a narrowing and simultaneously a negation, declares the presence of an object called Central Europe, taking it instantly into quotes, since its existence is limited to the use of the name. Reaching for this book, we wind up in the very middle of problems connected with definition of this strange land – the more attention we pay to it, the more it becomes elusive and vague. Central Europe only exists because we keep writing about it.

Lazarus used to fascinate cultures mostly as the one who managed to return from the dead, the one who was called back from death, the only one who came back. He became an icon of return. Not only in painting but also in literature, including works by Dostoyevsky and Eliot. It is tempting to trace the  Lazarus of late modernity. Among others, he appears in a poem by Przemysław Dakowicz. This whic could be connected with the character of the “Historical Lazarus” or “Lazarus of the Gospel” – his function of an “icon of resurrection”, a witness to God’s power – is outlined in the poem not as a fact but as an unfulfilled project. The poem reveals a painful split between the mission of a person and its actual existence. This which can be perceived by this person as a moral obligation, a kind of an imperative of conscience, remains something painfully unfinished in his life. Although resurrection appears in the character’s horizon of experience, it is mostly the experience of the Mystery, while the emphasis is put on the painful tremendum rather than ecstatic fascinosum. The poet portraits the protagonist during his attempts to work through a boundary experience evasive to empiricism, unable to be tamed and interiorized. The poem is an image of a struggle of a post-modern seeker of sense in an obvious nonsense of the thing we know as death.

In the sketch Spotkania, two fields of Wojciech Kudyba’s writing are presented: a critical reflection on the literature and original poetry are connected with each other by topics, philosophical ideas, axiology and language. In the book Rana, która przyzywa Boga…, the discussion by a literature expert is focused on such problems as search for the sacred in the poetry by J. S. Pasierb, passing on of spiritual values, tragic and melancholy of “difficult faith”. On the other hand, in the collection of interpretation essays Wiersze wobec Innego, on the example of works by Polish poets of different generations, Kudyba shows the multiplicity of realizations of the subject of an encounter with otherness  – tamed, subject to attempts to understand. The category of “Otherness” refers to a hidden God, but also to another human, in various personal creations and social roles. Poetic works of Wojciech Kudyba correspond to his literary essays. The poet associates the sensitivity to nature and landscape studies with reading of the signs of transcendence. In Kudyba’s poems, traces of the supernatural order are revealed in the real topography, a traveller in the real space simultaneously travels on the roads of spiritual experience. In this poetry, an important role is played by the symbolism of fire, home, city, road. An original artistic solution in this case is combination of the tradition of Polish folklore with religious meditation. It is worth paying attention to incantations and adorations, to the rhythm which, in Kudyba’s poetical works, indirectly expresses the joyful faith and passes on the belief about purposeful arrangement of the world.

The article presents an attempt to trace, in the tradition of Christian hermeneutics, the origin of an idea which plays an important role in the entire modern hermeneutical discourse, namely – the idea of infinite interpretation. Today, it is regarded as a feature of radical (Vattimo), post-structuralist (Foucault) hermeneutics which questions, in many ways and starting from different traditions of thought and with different premises, the belief that the meaning of a text is univocal, given once and for all, closed, and the work of an interpreter is only limited to its extraction, unambiguous understanding, reconstruction.
However, in early Christian tradition of Patrology, e.g. in the works of St. Gregory the Great, one can find traces of such approach to the interpretation of the Scriptures, in which the reading does not mean discovery of a given sense but its active development: Scriptura cum legentibus crescit, Scripture grows with those who read it. This approach seems to be especially close to Vattimo’s concept of productive interpretation, i.e. an interpretation which contributes to the meaning of the text in the act of interpretation, multiplying the senses of human experience.

As it turns out, a grave (often incurable) disease can be a kind of a modern taboo. An attempt to break the silence is made by persons known from the media (especially women) who are suffering from illness or have had a contact with death (their own or of their loved ones). They are often actresses, painters, journalists or writers, sharing their experiences, openly speaking on what they have survived, presenting visual works (painting, photography, films, etc.) dealing with such topics, or publishing autobiographical texts (diaries, memoirs, feature articles, fictionalized prose, etc.) Testimonies of struggle against breast cancer, as analyzed in the article, include texts of autobiographical character by Katarzyna Grochola, Krystyna Kofta and Anna Mazurkiewicz. The writers have recorded a moving depiction of their experiences in an actual diary (K. Kofta), a pseudo-diary (A. Mazurkiewicz) and an autobiographical popular novel (K. Grochola). In case of K. Kofta, the diary account has been additionally supplemented with later drawings by the author. In case of all three writers mentioned above, speaking about disease, suffering and death contributes, to a lesser or greater degree, to breaking of the modern taboo.
In extreme situations, and struggle against a lethal disease can surely be regarded as such, questions on the meaning of life arise inevitably. For many people, death means the end of their world, with no hope for anything after. A modern human has been left on his own and became completely helpless in view of empty heaven, deprived of hope, indifferent to his own fate. Only extreme experiences, extreme situations, sometimes wake him from his  umbness. Amazing statements by authors of the texts under discussion seem to confirm the thesis on their experiences, perceived as experience of the entireness of human nature (Anna Mazurkiewicz), incredible enrichment and awakening of faith (Katarzyna Grochola) or appreciation of what you have got (Krystyna Kofta). Therefore, contrary to what the present, post-modern world might want, they are not just traumatic experiences which should be quickly forgotten and never returned to.