The author of this article, following the lead of Agnieszka Gajewska’s research, contemplates affiliation of Stanisław Lem’s oeuvre with the Polish-Jewish literature, understood as a literary recording of Jewish experiences in the Polish language. The author analyses Lem’s correspondence with Michael Kandel as well as his early oeuvre, in which the writer sees himself confronted, in different ways, with the experience of Holocaust, each time camouflaging the autobiographical character of the described experiences. Their symbolic character in Lem’s prose is reminiscent of the categories of the incorporation and the crypt which are crucial notions in Nicolas Abraham’s and Mária Török’s psychoanalysis. In the light of these ideas, one can speak of cryptonomy of Jewish origins and Holocaust experiences in case of Lem’s work that are coincidental with a tendency of their substitute reveal. The combination of visible fear of self-reveal to the Polish audience with more or less encrypted references to experiences of Holocaust and anti-semitism is the reason why Lem’s oeuvre documents the situation and the attitude to the inherited identity not only in case of the author but also of many other Jews living in the post-war Poland.

The article is an attempt to interpret the food themes that often appear in Stanisław Lem’s novels, interviews and correspondence. Most attention is devoted to Hospital of the Transfiguration, a novel that was the author’s first literary attempt to confront the experience of World War II. The knowledge about Lem’s life in German-occupied Lviv, significantly expanded due to biographical research from recent years (especially thanks to the books of Agnieszka Gajewska and Wojciech Orliński), made it possible to link the “food cipher” noticed in this novel with the most painful experience of war extermination that was carefully hidden by Lem. Some ideas of Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Lévinas, as well as the concept of “messianic vitalism” developed by Agata Bielik-Robson, turn out to be helpful in understanding the particular thanatic-alimentary coupling in Lem’s work.

Solaris belongs to the canon of the science fiction genre, and strictly speaking to its subgenre that uses the motif of encounter/contact with an alien. Although it is already 60 years old, it does not cease to fascinate successive generations of readers. Could it be due to the fact that it is surrounded by the nimbus of modernity and technological advancements? The problem of conquering the cosmos and penetrating its mysteries still belongs to the category of science fiction, seen as a reflection on the possible scenarios of the future. The issue, however, is more complex, because the novel is at the same time immersed in futurology, and ‘retro’. The text highlights some surprising inspirations that fuelled Lem’s imagination – a short story by Stefan Grabiński Szamota’s Mistress and some philosophical ideas by Arthur Schopenhauer. Such influences seem surprising because they do not fit the popular image of Lem as an advocate of philosophical naturalism and a ‘cerebral’, anti-Romantic artist. The author suggests, that Solaris is so successful because it is both futuristic and well-rooted in tradition.

A topic often addressed in Stanisław Lem’s oeuvre is the interplanetary communication. Depending on the adapted convention, the author depicts the Alien in various ways. The goal of the article is to discuss three scenarios of communication based on the story The Eighth Voyage from the The Star Diaries as well as the novels Eden and Solaris. The starting point for the comparison is the model of Roman Jakobson. Remarks on semantic strategies that are employed by Lem (such as marked vocabulary, neologisms) are a crucial element of this article because they influence the philosophical undertone of his works. Through the conducted comparison it is possible to demonstrate that the Lem’s terrestrial characters seek the dialogue with the Alien; they, however, don’t reach the full understanding in any of the discussed works. The communication with the Alien showcases first and foremost the human, who has been taken off of his pedestal.

A close, and sometimes polemical, reading of Joanna Rzepa’s study Modernism and Theology: Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Czesław Miłosz reveals the cognitive fruitfulness of a comparativist perspective in considering the nature of the relationship between theological and literary modernisms in a broad European context that, through Rilke, even takes in Russian Orthodoxy. The article shows how in the British context, in which 1922 is a key year for literature, the once clear connection between modernist concerns in theology and literature has been largely forgotten. In Polish literature in turn – since modernism is generally equated with the “Young Poland” movement around the turn of the twentieth century and thus coincides with the most heated period of the modernist controversy in the Catholic Church – the connection is more obvious. In discussing the questions raised by Rzepa’s study, the author is led to reflect on how the substance of historical modernist – anti-modernist debates, as well as their rhetoric, continues to be of importance in the present day, in certain respects very disturbingly so.