The article discusses Bruno Schulz’s attitude toward politics. It is well known that the author of The Cinnamon Shops was a nonpolitical man. This was the reason for some fi erce attacks against his prose conducted by politically engaged literary critics in the interwar Poland. The author mentions these attacks but he also analyzes Schulz’s less known essays about Piłsudski, Aragon and Brecht, and the way Schulz pictured politics in his prose. It seems that a political dictionary of the author of The Street of Crocodiles comprised terms from different political ideologies; he alluded to Marx, anarchism and Brzozowski. At the end of his article the author discusses the question whether Schulz’s nonpolitical attitude could be compared to the so called conservative revolution in Germany after World War I.

Bittersweet heterotopias: Bruno Schulz and the ‘sanatorial text’ in european interwar literature
This essay puts forward an idea to read Bruno Schulz’s story „The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” against the background of a specifi c genre in European literature of the interwar period, namely, the ‘sanatorial text’. This term, coined here by analogy to V. Toporov’s ‘Petersburg text’, is based upon the observation that narratives set in sanatoriums share some semantic and structural features; the most important being the heterotopic character of the sanatorial world. According to M. Foucault, a ‘heterotopia’ is a place that ‘represents’, ‘contests’ and ‘inverts’ common places in a society. In M. Proust’s Recherche…, Th. Mann’s Magic Mountain, and M. Blecher’s Scarred Hearts the heteropic setting is used to produce a feeling of estrangement. These novels explore the notions of time and society by constructing a heterotopic counter-world where the ‘ordinary’ stream of events is interrupted and life becomes intensifi ed, it is made palpable again. Schulz’s story points to the deeply problematic consequences of such a renewal of ‘authentic experience’. It shows that a break taken from civilizational habits can unleash barbarism.

Not only marionettes and mannequins: Kleist and Schulz
The paper discusses several striking affi nities between some passages in the prose of Heinrich von Kleist and that of Bruno Schulz. The Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka, designer of a life-size puppet and author of a text on his fetish, published in 1925, appears here as a go-between between Kleist’s marionettes and Schulz’ mannequins. All of the presented similarities by no means qualify as a case for plagiarism, nor even as imitations. Rather, they prove a soul affi nity, Schulz’s intensive reading of Kleist’s prose, and his accommodation of certain motifs and stylistic oddities, which are further developed in his prose, and, linked to other, not only literary, inspirations, yield a new and unique quality.

Schulzand Simulacra
Schulz and Simulacra is an analysis of Bruno Schulz’s short essay entitled Mythicization of Reality. Michał Kłosiński argues with Dorota Głowacka, who tried to interpret Schulz’s prose with the use of Jean Baudrillard’s category of simulacrum, that her understanding of the term is wrong. Kłosiński searches for places in Schulz’s theoretical essay, where he is the most ambivalent and where his ambivalence works against the text’s consistency. He performs an interpretation of some of Schulz’s notions, such as sense, myth and poetry, to depict how the author of Mythicization defi nes them and how the poetics of Schulz’s text somehow changes these definitions. The main objective of the analysis is to show that Schulz’s theory points the reader not to the concept of simulacrum, but to another Baudrillardian notion – the symbolic exchange. Kłosiński finds evidence of the possibility of such reading in the example given by Schulz of the fragmented body of a snake in legends and the poetic mechanism which he calls „the short circuiting of sense”. In the conclusion the author performs an analysis of Schulz’s view on poetry and how the mythicization as a poetic act works against simulacra and the excess of meaning produced in language to constantly recreate a bond with reality.

Spiritual exercises of literary scholars
The author discusses the book edited by Jerzy Jarzębski and Jakub Momro from different points of view. He examines the range of meanings of the terms used in the title. Considering the question of pessimism in the context of early modern literature, he states that the book gives an overview of an alternative history of Polish literature and draws attention to the role of philosophy in shaping the concept of pessimism (e.g., Existentialism). The book is both a monograph on a single topic, and a collection of material for a compendium about the present times built out of literature of the last few decades.

Still, time to sow ideas: Wielkopolski Alfabet Pisarek (The Alphabet of Women Writers in Greater Poland) edited by Ewa Kraskowska and Lucyna Marzec
The article is a review of Wielkopolski Alfabet Pisarek (The Alphabet of Women Writers in Greater Poland) – a collective work which is an effect of historical research in the field of Polish women’s writing carried out by academicians collaborating with the Center of Feminist Criticism (Pracownia Krytyki Feministycznej, UAM, Poznań). The review points out the most important assumptions taken up by the editors and the authors of the compilation , which determined the methodological consequences in the book – namely: the signifi cance of the sex/gender category and local context in both the production of literature and academic knowledge about it. Also the generic form of an „alphabet” – with its arbitrariness and variety – was analyzed here as the manifestation of a general principle chosen by the editors to provide a comprehensive view of the literary tradition created by women-authors who were (or are) related to the region of Greater Poland.

The city on a rhetorical foundation
The article is a review of Jakub Niedźwiedź’s latest book concerning literacy in medieval and early modern Vilnius. The author analyzes the notion of ‘the rhetorical organization of the city’ employed by Niedźwiedź in his book and points out some consequences stemming from the way such notions as ‘text’ and ‘rhetoric’ are used in it. The reviewer also emphasizes the signifi cance of the book as both a statement in the discussion concerning the dematerialization of the text in modern literary studies and as a work that may inspire a number of similar research projects.

(Non)critical orderings? On Dorota Kozicka’s book Critical (Dis)orders. A Study on Contemporary Literary Criticism in Poland.
The book by Dorota Kozicka entitled Critical (Dis)orders. A Study on Contemporary Liter-ary Criticism in Poland contributes a number of new and signifi cant ideas to the investigative discussions on the mechanisms of literary criticism. As a starting point, the author accepts a wide awareness of metacriticism, and assumes a metacritical perspective to order many and various critical discussions and attitudes of the last halfcentury (with anticipations). Fol-lowing the reinterpretations of Polish modern literary criticism traditions, she observes how in the altered cultural and communicative situation of postmodernity, the roles and functions of the critics alternate, and how they sign in to miscellaneous social and political discourses. The author’s contemplation heads for an impossible synthesis, comprising, in a dichotomous or-der, both the autonomy of critical operation and the dialogical dimension of critical self-reflection.

My Marvellings
Moje zdziwienia/My Marvellings/ is a column run by Henryk Markiewicz, retired Professor of the Jagiellonian University and one of the most outstanding Polish literary historians and theoreticians. In his essays, Professor Markiewicz presents and discusses various literary theory publications, comments on current events at the academia, argues with and questions authors of scholarly and popular articles, all the time being indefatigable in his insistence on respecting standards of academic professionalism, competence, honesty and responsibility for judgments and opinions expressed