The text is an analysis of motifs of fire and water in Roksolanki by Szymon Zimorowic and in a cycle of erotic poems attributed to Mikołaj Sęp Szarzyński. They are discussed in their original cultural context, corresponding with the aesthetic postulates of Baroque, serving realization of a known literary topos of aegritudo amoris and describing the motif of death out of love, popular in this era. The analysis, conducted in reference with findings of Paweł Stępień, Jan Błoński and Mirosława Hanusiewicz, ends with a conclusion according to which most issues present in the texts of both authors correspond with the conventions, but they also contain original content, connected with specific associations in the imagination of the poets. In Zimorowic’s works, it is a vision of two kinds of fire – a flame of God’s love and the Cupid’s fire – corresponding with the biography of the author of Roksolanki. For the author of the collection of erotic letters, the most important thing is showing water as an emblem of misfortune (which is also characteristic to those texts by Sęp, the authorship of which raises no doubts).

The sketch A question of questions, or on scholasticism and dialectic in Sebastian Petrycy’s Addenda recalls the figure and achievements of Sebastian Petrycy, the first Polish Aristotelian philosopher, author of the first translation of Aristotle’s works into Polish, this time in the context of analysis of the scholastic scheme of both composition and style of Addenda to Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics. The article emphasizes Petrycy’s innovative solutions in this regard, taking into consideration the literary tradition of scholastic commentaries of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Using the example of selected questions of the Addenda, the multi-layer scholastic structure is analyzed. The article discusses in detail the structure of the Polonica layer, constituting an interesting record of Petrycy’s considerations and observations regarding events or figures of his era. The role of dialectic and induction in construction of scholastic questions by Petrycy is also discussed. It is worth stressing that the author of the Addenda departs from an exclusively exegetic character of his commentaries. Petrycy created a multi-layer text in which Greek, Roman, Biblical and ecclesiastical elements are supplemented with references to his contemporary era. The Aristotelian does not limit himself to translation of the Stagirite’s philosophical substance into Polish. The literary form adopted by Petrycy emphasized the multitude of his interests. The Addenda comprise the substance and reflections constituting an interesting subject of study for a historian of both philosophy and social and political sciences, education or literature.

The subject of criticism in Ignacy Krasicki’s satires is, apart from an array of phenomena of his contemporary society, such use of language which results in falsification of the described reality. As a result, instead of naming negative phenomena and attitudes directly, by their proper names, the language is used to justify them, e.g. through various euphemisms or positively valuating epithets (Złość ukryta i jawna), or even to invert the value of misdeeds, shown as something good (Palinodia). Krasicki often shows environments (such as a court in the satire Życie dworskie) where appearances are predominant, where “politeness” means more than truth and good. The language loses its normal communicative ability, serving hollow conversation, game or manipulation. This problem is of universal character, appears to a varied degree and in various forms almost always and everywhere, and this, to a large degree, makes Krasicki’s satires still relevant.

The article concerns the works of Jan Paweł Woronicz (1757–1829). It touches upon the reception of his literary activity by readers who were contemporary to the author.
The post-partitions works of the Primate of the Kingdom of Poland were dominated by issues connected with the experience of losing independence by the Republic. The major part of the poet’s main works, i.e. Zjawienie Emilki, Świątynia Sybilli, Assarmot, Lech and Hymn do Boga, constitutes forecasting Poland’s future fate, whose main function is consoling the nation. This issue is a very interesting one to many researchers, who see Woronicz as a precursor of the Polish messianism. In his poem the Preacher expressed his conviction about a special bond between God and Poles. He based this concept on the idea of God’s covenant with His Chosen People. The Poet distinguished himself by his exceptional historical knowledge, which, combined with a perfect knowledge of the Bible and the pagan tradition, contributed to the development of his historiosophic concepts.

The article concentrates on the works by Maurycy Gosławski undertaking a broadly understood religious subject matter and analyses their various relations with the Judeo-Christian tradition with the Bible in its centre. The author of Podole writes, among others, on the Old Testament flood, God as a stern Judge who punishes the apostates, as well as the theme of the cross of Christ. Typical literary devices include semantic references to a Biblical event, descriptions of situations or characters, occasional quotations, and the new context only slightly modifies the meaning of the referenced images. Gosławski usually writes approvingly on the Christian traditions, does not question any dogmas neither modify the theological message. Heroes of his text undertake polemics with God relatively rarely. The poet-lancer conveys the diagnosis of man and the image of the Almighty shown in the Holy Scripture to his own works – one can state this is literature of kerygmatic assent. However, it is ideological and aesthetical dominants of Romanticism (including Messianic ideas) which influence the final significance of Biblical threads. The poetic devices result in sublimation and positive axiologization of individual elements of the presented world.

Bolesław Prus’s friendship with Julian Ochorowicz began in a lyceum in Lublin attended by both of them. The school friends shared common interests, passions and reading. Their classmate was also Aleksander Świętochowski, yet the young men did not get to like each other, and the mutual antagonisms would become even more intense in their adult life, in journalist polemics. Further studies at the Main School had linked Prus and Ochorowicz for two years, after which Głowacki interrupted his study in Warsaw and left for Puławy. All that time he maintained contacts with Ochorowicz, reviewed his articles, visited him; they made plans of joint undertakings, such as lectures and articles as well as larger scholarly works. When Ochorowicz, after a period of travels across Europe, had settled in Wisła, where he built several villas, Prus visited him, but agoraphobia he suffered made him leave Wisła quite quickly. He detested not only wide spaces but also boredom, since Wisła of those days (in early 20th century) was not a spa town as popular as Prus’s beloved Nałęczów. Their friendship had matured through many decades, regardless of different tempers and differences in their perception of reality, which is evidenced by records in Ochorowicz’s Journal and the preserved correspondence.

The goal of the article is to show how activities of the communist censorship tried to block, and when this proved impossible, to diminish the social resonance of one of the most important historical works of documentary character – the book 1859 dni Warszawy by Władysław Bartoszewski (Kraków 1974, “Znak” publishing house). When this chronicle had been released, a number of positive reviews was restricted and some of them were not admitted to print. There were attacks on this book in communist party and military periodicals, however it found defenders among scholarly and moral authorities and was valued by the Polish emigration press.

The sketch concerns the way Tokarczuk applies the preserved threads of the Sumerian myth plot, and universal motifs of mythical stories. It sets out the rules of the ‘myth game’ from the author’s perspective, and the function that the use of the myth poetics plays in a novel, incorporating in it the modern world attributes and science fiction elements. As it interesting whether and, potentially, why the myth in the form proposed by the writer might be attractive to 21st century people, and what are the links between the convention applied in the novel and other forms of cultural tradition of the myth. Finally, an attempt at answering the question about the artistic value of the ‘myth game’ practiced by Tokarczuk is just as important. Undoubtedly, the author of Anna In attributes a sense creative and reality uniting role to it, it is worth considering, however, if her novel may play such a role.

Jacek Hugo-Bader is an author of three reportage books attempting to make a literary description of modern Russia. His writing evolves – from a classical reportage to a search of a “more comprehensive form” transcending the schemes of travel reportage prose in which the cognitive function is predominant. The primary goal of his travel is a search for authenticity, a desire to experience the “real” Russian reality, but also to find a proper method of literary description of the experienced world. Due to this search, the reporter’s experience of writing about Russia became increasingly personal with each book, which is realized in the text through increasingly clearer revealing of autobiographic elements. In the works of the author of Biała gorączka, one can notice slowness and uncertainty of his vision of the world; not a wide perspective but a fragmentary and detailed observation. Thanks to this perspective, one can advance a thesis that the author’s creative assumption is continuous balancing between showing Russia as exotic and as close and familiar.

The subject matter of truth cannot be separated from considerations on thinking and cognition. The remarks above point out the primordial nature of the concept of truth. Without this concept, human intellectual activity would be futile. All human thought would make no sense, and knowledge would be impossible. One can discern two layers of study of the subject matter of truth: understanding it and thinking about it. The sense of the concept of truth, expressing itself in what actually is, what really exists, remains unchanged. Only analyses and interpretations of what is real are diverse and changing. Thinking about the truth, although laden with historicity, diverse, and even nihilistic, does no harm to its basic sense.

The author of the sketch convinces that literature may be treated as a model of a culture, as both these areas of human activity are subject to the same rules of dynamism and alternation, i.e. replacing worn-out forms by innovative ones.
In the history of the Polish culture of the 20th century three types of culture are distinguished: politicized, autotelic, consumerist. The predominance of one of the types listed was connected in Poland with the experiences of the nation, where, after brief moments of freedom, there were long years of bondage or political oppression.
The situation changed radically only after 1989, when Poland regained full independence. But it was because of the imitative nature of the cultural changes that in the democratic society of the Polish Third Republic we currently have a surfeit of aesthetical offers with simultaneous vagueness of norms, hierarchy and value, which constitutes a relative characteristic of West European postmodernism.

The article shows the benefits of application – considering the necessary detailed modifications – of the theory of post-colonial studies to the cultural and literary research concerning the area of Central and Eastern Europe, which has been hitherto underrated with regard to interpretation. It used to be so due to methodological barriers, which recently have been effectively overcome by publications by E. M. Thompson, D. Skórczewski, H. Gosk, M. Dąbrowski, B. Bakuła and others. Tools provided by the post-colonial studies can and should be adapted to interpretations of cultures of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe, subdued and colonized by influential empires of this region for centuries. The history of the 20th century provides many model examples illustrating realization of forced cultural doctrines or fashions, such as socialist realism, neo-socialist realism etc. Violent reactions to such aesthetics, but also functioning nostalgia or pop-cultural trivialization, also create the post-colonial style of literary utterances. Examples can be drawn from Polish, German (concerning East Germany), Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian literature, as well as literature of the Baltic nations and the nations of former Yugoslavia. Traces of this subject matter can be identified in the area of a subject matter of identity, history, mentality, morality, or forms of social interactions. Every reliable literary history synthesis of these areas of the subcontinent demands these topics to be taken into consideration. The vitality of problems connected with post-colonial aspects of the past and modern literary production is evidenced by opinions of authors themselves and literary critics, especially of the younger generation.

The author of the essay attempts to follow the history of the ‘workshop prose’ concept in the critical consciousness of the 20th century. The deliberations are based on autothematic strategies, as proposed by Michał Głowiński in his paper Powieść jako metodologia powieści, however, the key role here is given to situations in which the ‘meta’ reflection is ‘in the very story, in the very style, in general in every element which appears in the novel.’ As the focus is on the literary ‘consciousness’, at the very beginning, representative opinions of critics are referred to (W. Browarny, P. Czapliński, B. Kaniewska, K. Uniłowski), who reflected on the scope of occurrence of textual tendencies in the Polish prose of the 1990s – the tendencies regarded by the author of the article as the contemporary variation of the latest model of autothematism according to Głowiński. Referring to the postmodernist view of the text, the author shows in further parts of the article that the traditionally conceived workshopness, whose indicators in artistic prose was a set of metatext tools, and which was rooted in the modernist paradigm, does not constitute today a strong analytical category, or, all the more, a distinct assessment criterion. One of the symptoms of operative ‘expiry’ of the eponymous term is the popularization of the autothematic strategies and the presence thereof in popular literature. Another one – the postmodernist views on the nature and limits of the text. At the end of the essay the author indicates that the notion of the ‘workshop prose’ retains its potential as a descriptive category.

The sketch makes an attempt to determine the poetics of a reportage on an example of two works: by Wojciech Tochman and Jacek Hugo-Bader. The books, published in a short time interval, differ both with regard to the discussed subject and to the manner of realization of structural features of a reportage. The author has chosen Tochman’s work as the main subject of her discussion, since it combines a historical and social subject matter with a deepened psychological analysis of characters and subjective self-commentary, thus expanding the convention of the genre towards a documentary novel. As opposed to Bader, Tochman puts a greater emphasis on the composition of the text, as well as the stylistic layer of the utterance, to finally become in line with the trend of New Journalism. Bader realizes a travel reportage with social subject matter, therefore he relies mainly on recalled interviews and source materials. Confronting the works on a basis of a simultaneous comparison, the author shows an exceptional image of Tochman’s prose, treating Bader’s collection as an antithesis, as a different manner of realization of specific structural features.

The article presents a concept of the application of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to the description of the organization – environment relation in public relations (PR) studies. The starting point is the view of PR as a co-creationist communication activity, as proposed by C.M. Botan and M. Taylor, and N. Fairclough’s concept of discourse analysis, on which basic PR structures were projected. From this point of view the negotiation of changes in relations takes place as a result of semiotic processes, which ocurs in the framework of social events. The proposed research (critical case study) covers an analysis of the coherence / non-coherence of individual semiotic elements which comprise a given social event. The article was illustrated with the example of the media storm concerning Amber Gold. According to the author, the perspective of PR as a semiotic activity and including CDA in its tools facilitate a more adequate description of the situation of various organizations, their communication and relations, which allows for their improvement.

The author of the sketch chooses an unusual text as a object of analysis – a recording in which children, placed in the role of experts, say what wedding is and what it is connected with. The shape of the text is determined by the situation of the interview, therefore it has been treated from the perspective of theory of genres and registers. The analysis of children’s statements reveals some section of the vision of the world through the eyes of children. We learn how the young interlocutors perceive not only wedding itself but also love, family, relationships between a woman and a man, and finally, a woman and a man themselves.