The paper offers a brief overview of the ways in which both early modern medical knowledge and religious culture interpreted and shaped the experience of the pestilence. The first part of the text presents medieval and early modern medical theories on the origins and spread of the plague and other infectious diseases. The second part of the text discusses how the idea of airborne plague shaped the image of pestilence as not only a universal bane but also a somehow egalitarian experience. It also summarises the theories on the astrological origin of the disease, which were widespread in the early modern period. The third part of the text explores to what extent the early modern experience of the plague was truly egalitarian. The author points out that although the plague was commonplace at that time, the foundational inequality of the early modern society effectively differentiated the experience of the disease for its various members. The subsequent part of the text analyses how the process of ascribing a moral – and, specifically, religious – dimension to the plague and all the suffering it caused promoted acceptance of this state of affairs in the early modern society. The concluding part of the text discusses how the concept of the plague arrow served as a tool for the individualization of the experience of the disease and its consequences, which on the one hand provided some relief to the affected and helped rationalize the destruction brought to the world by the plague, but on the other successfully proscribed any potential attempts to reimagine the social order in the wake of such a disastrous experience.

The cholera epidemic originating from the Ganges Valley reached Europe in the 1830s, only to plague the continent in successive bouts until the end of the century. The disease decimated the population and harrowed European physicians, though – surprisingly – not many contemporary sources describing the epidemic have been preserved. One of the few surviving accounts can be found in the letters of Zofia Lenartowicz née Szymanowska, who was travelling around Europe with her husband during the 1865 cholera outbreak. The 1860s were a particularly difficult period for Zofia and Teofil Lenartowicz. Their distress stemmed from their chronic destitution, which in turn exacerbated the suffering caused by the medical maladies experienced by both spouses. In view of this overall misery, the threat of cholera was far from the greatest worry of the Lenartowicz couple, which found a clear reflection in the content of the letters discussed in the present paper.

The topic of the paper is the complex image of a cholera epidemic in Thomas Mann’s short story Death in Venice. In the first part of the text, devoted to the symbolism of the disease, Asiatic cholera is interpreted as a symbol of human finitude (mortality) and a manifestation of the degeneration of the artist, who, having previously led an ascetic life, falls in love with a teenage boy. Asiatic cholera becomes a symbol of the body rebelling against the mind, which is also reflected on the level of Western culture (reason, discipline) succumbing to Eastern influences (sense, spontaneity). Therefore, Mann’s story can be interpreted from the perspective of colonial discourse, according to which the East is perceived as a threat to Europe; in the narrator’s view, the source of Asiatic cholera is the climate of India and its poor level of medical knowledge. In the second part, devoted to human attitudes towards the epidemic, the article presents the local government’s policy towards the collective threat; despite the growing number of deaths and infections, the politicians are calming people down, claiming that the situation is completely under control and any sanitary restrictions are introduced as a mere precaution. The reason behind the lie (also repeated by the inhabitants of Venice) is the threat of bankruptcy faced by the people who make their living from tourism. The epidemic is also an opportunity for robberies and even murders, because criminals believe that in these circumstances they will remain unpunished. This pessimistic image suggests that humans are egoistic and care more about their own fate than the fate of others when standing in the face of danger.

The present paper discusses two examples of literary depictions of epidemics: the libretto Zaraza w Bergamo (1897) by Young Poland writer and critic Karol Irzykowski and the novel Palę Paryż (1928) by Polish futurist author Bruno Jasieński, with both works exemplifying the trend to use the metaphor of pestilence to create a pessimistic image of reality. The author points out that interest in disease and epidemic as a literary subject often grows in the times of radical change and crises. The narratives of pestilence, plague or other collective threat in modernist and interwar literature were examples of apocalyptic narratives. The output of Polish modernist and avant-garde writers encompassed the entire spectrum of catastrophic themes, even if the range of disasters was limited only to plagues: the Black Death, cities ravaged by the bubonic plague, and raging epidemics of deathly flu strains frequently featured on the pages of literary works produced in the 19th and the 20th century.

The article proposes a parallel, comparative reading of two texts: the Polish nonfiction story Zaraza (1965) by Jerzy Ambroziewicz and the English essay The Last Days of Smallpox: Tragedy in Birmingham (2018) by Mark Pallen. The texts discuss, respectively, a smallpox epidemic which took place in Wrocław (1963) and an outbreak of the same disease in Birmingham (1978). The present paper studies the similarities and discrepancies in the methods of describing the represented world, narrative techniques, poetics, and rhetoric. The final part of the paper poses the question of how both of these “smallpox stories” may be interpreted in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the best-established interpretative approaches to the works of Aleksander Wat is to study them through the lens of his biography. The motif of God is a recurring element in Wat’s literary oeuvre, with Poemat bukoliczny generally considered the writer’s crowning achievement. The aim of the present paper is to analyse this work, one of the last in Wat’s output, independently of his indisputably extraordinary life. When focusing exclusively on the literary quality of the text, it is possible to notice that Cain’s monologue is built on the framework of a well-structured rhetorical speech. By playing with the convention of midrash, using a plethora of philosophical and cultural contexts, and navigating the line between three various types of speech, Wat is able to lead the reader to the universal and invariably valid question of meaning.