Sonnets by Francesco Petrarch played a huge role in shaping European Love Lyrics. Also Laura’s character became a standard beloved woman. Over the centuries poets used the selected topoi and stylistic figures from the Canzoniere, to lay down their feelings – mostly youth and unfulfilled. The female figures similar to Laura we can find in polish poetry only in the nineteenth century (especially in the works of Adam Mickiewicz). Other authors of this period introduced to poetry a various female characters that I call here Laura or anti-Laura.

In the inter-war poetry of Stanisław Młodożeniec, the superior categories of futurism, such as topicality, everydayness and reality, are enriched with an universal dimension, formulated through themes and motifs drawn from the Polish folklore. The artistic language of the author of Niedziela distinguished itself from the background of the Polish avant-garde output due to his use of dialecticisms (including the Sandomierz dialect) and sound effects revealing inspiration by rhythmicity of a folk song and dance. Other examples of used elements of folklore are quotations or allusions to songs and proverbs. Genre references specific for the old folk culture include:  song, ballad, fable, legend, rhapsode and beggar’s song. The poetic reflection often plays the role of a didactic message, stressing the value of the local culture, preserved in customs, beliefs and mindsets, as well as the significance of social standards binding a community. The study of the eponymous issue has been performed mainly on the basis of poetic works from the collections by Stanisław Młodożeniec: Kreski i futureski (Kraków 1921), Niedziela (Warszawa 1930), Futuro-gamy i futuro-pejzaże (Warszawa 1934).

The article is an attempt at synthetic description of various Biblical references in the poetry of Czesław Miłosz. The author first discusses the causes of Miłosz’s interest in the books of the Bible and takes up a comparison of biblicality of the poetry of Miłosz and Różewicz, to proceed, in the main part of the text, to the mechanisms of evocation of biblicality and an attempt at classification of kinds of Biblical signals and the methods of activating thereof in the text

The text attempts to read the poem Potęga smaku [The Power of Taste] by Zbigniew Herbert from the “plebeian perspective”, the “perspective of cultural exclusion”, outlined by the author of the article. Although Herbert’s work does not reference directly the issues mentioned above, the imagery the poet has used when constructing the image of communists (such as “boys with potato faces”, “very ugly girls with red hands”, “a couple of concepts like flails”) unambiguously evoke a figure of a plebeian. Potęga smaku, although this was certainly not the main intent of the author, employs one of the most oppressive oppositions in the Polish culture: the dichotomy of the “gentleman” and the “boor”. This dichotomy is the more severe that the lyrical subject situates itself on the side of “gentlemanhood”, “betterness”, cultural superiority. The goal of the article is to show the mechanism through which a literary text, making use of a specific, overt antagonism (communists–opposition), simultaneously secretly strengthens a contrast which bears signs of symbolic violence

The author of the article asks the emigration literature a perverse question concerning the world that it does not present. He references a Polish book by Juliusz Kornhauser and Adam Zagajewski, famous in early 1970s. He enumerates the peculiar “blanks” in this text, the spheres of the American reality that have not been shown in the emigration literature. The reason why they have been ignored was not always the ongoing propaganda warfare in the ideologically divided world of the era.

In my article, I attempt to analyze the philosophical and artistic premises of the autobiographical project realized in the poetry of Marcin Świetlicki. I try to show that this project leads to negation of the need of existence, both in the order of a work and in the order of existence, of a distinct form of subjective identity, typical for the modern culture of presence. The subject of my interest is a peculiar kind of lyrical autobiographical narrative which I analyze referencing, among others, the concept of authenticity understood in the context of de Man’s approach to irony. In the final part of the article, I suggest a possible direction of considerations concerning the eponymous phenomenon of nonexistence as a negative, “phantom” form of presence that escapes presentation

Marek Lobo Wojciechowski is a Lubusz writer intereseted in heterotopia phenomenon of the Western Lands of Poland. He attempts to understand and describe the Polish-German history of the place. This article is composed of two parts. First part concerns the image of the city that is presented in Wojciechowski’s poems. It is a place marked with the traces of its previous inhabitants. The second part shows the space of “post-Yalta Occident” in microscale: a house and things being inside. My goal is to answer the question whether the vision of Gorzów in this output is the image of two superimposed cities with palimpsest nature, or a merged city with dualistic nature.

Many characteristics of the prose of the outstanding Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal make his works quite difficult for adaptation for the cinema screen. Nevertheless, many films based on these works achieved a considerable artistic success and wrote themselves into the history of cinema. The novella film Pearls of the Deep (1964), along with two short films that had eventually remained outside it, became a peculiar manifesto of the Czechoslovak New Wave and a generation of young authors at the start of their artistic career. Later, the most prominent director of adaptations of Hrabal’s works became Jiří Menzel, who won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film already for his first feature film, the adaptation of Hrabal’s Closely Observed Trains. The Hrabal–Menzel writer-and--filmmaker duo is an outstanding and unique phenomenon.

Sława i chwała [Fame and Glory] by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz has been named as the author’s masterpiece. The work contains autobiographical elements and constitutes a summary of the writer’s ethical experiences, a historiosophical and philosophical synthesis. Only a few reviews have been published concerning the TV series adaptation, directed by Kazimierz Kutz under the auspices of the Polish Television in 1997. The first part of the article (Sensuality recoded) examines the specificity of the imagery of Iwaszkiewicz and Kutz, i.e. the translation of the sensuality of this prose to the language of cinema. Points 2–4 (Antiheroism, “Fame and Glory” as a social panorama, Dilemmas of a 20th-century artist) focus on the reading of the sense of the novel and the way the director relays it on the screen. The final considerations (Infamy) examine the causes of the commercial failure of the adaptation and make an attempt to evaluate the series. It turns out that, despite a modest budget and limited airtime, Kutz has preserved much of the spirit of the original work – it is still the same story about the end of a certain world