The article presents Słowacki’s protagonists, Lambro and Kordian, whom the author himself connected with each other closely through intertextual associations as “failed” heroes. “Failed” here means: deliberately constructed as flawed heroes, incapable of action, weak subjects. Failed also because they are people of their time born to greatness but unable to use their potential. The context of the Romantic Child of the age is mentioned. However, the most important context of reading both characters is the context of Søren Kierkegaard’s stages of existence presented in Either/Or and the category of choice, which was fundamental for Kierkegaard. The author puts forward a thesis that Lambro and Kordian represent the aesthetic stage, which is associated with the sense of futility, boredom, lack of fulfilment, uselessness, lack of purpose, dreaming, escaping into illusion, trying on potential roles, irony, and especially with melancholy and illusory choices. Analysing the attitude of the protagonists, the author demonstrates that their choices condemn the individual to existential emptiness, to an empty “I” devoid of content, which is open to the vastness of possibilities.

The article undertakes an alternative interpretation of Juliusz Słowacki’s Lambro as a political poem whose real theme is not so much despair caused by the past as it is the possibility of retaliation after defeat. I would argue that even if Lambro is not fully involved in the politics of the Polish émigré community, it is nevertheless a work inspired by it, and the “Greek costume” masks current references to Józef Zaliwski’s partisans.

The point of departure of the article is the Goethean assumption that intercultural exchange within Weltliteratur can result in mutual “adjustments” of understanding, assessment and evaluation. Lambro and Kordian, two specifically related texts by Słowacki, were therefore situated in the French context, understood not in the genetic sense, but in the sense of reception. Two literary commentaries of various types were analysed, one of which is an example of the reception mediation of a representative of Polish culture in exile, the other, an element of French literary studies (these are: the introduction by Wenceslas Gasztowtt to the French translation of Słowacki’s works from the 1860s and the article Le drame romantique : le héros et l’histoire dans « Le Prince de Hombourg » de Kleist, « Kordian » de Słowacki et « Lorenzaccio » de Musset by Danièle Chauvin from 2000). These texts, created for different purposes and in different periods, share a common field of comparative references (including George Sand’s Essai sur le drame fantastique), but at the same time are differentiated by their cultural contextualisation and different location in relation to Mickiewicz’s legend, meaning that they provide non-standard interpretative impulses which are refreshing in relation to today’s dominant ways of reading Lambro and Kordian.

The article is a review of Kacper Kutrzeba’s book Kalekująca nowoczesność a literatura. Dialektyczne przygody u zarania polskiej nowoczesności [Crippled Modernity vs. Literature. Dialectical Adventures at the Dawn of Polish Modernity], understood as an attempt to re-interpret the canonical works of Polish Romanticism by means of philosophical concepts of modernity (Georg Hegel, Karol Marks, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Marshall Berman).