This book provides a comprehensive overview of the entirety of Wislawa Szymborska's poetic oeuvre. The author employs in-depth historical reflection on Szymborska's beginnings to reveal that - without describing her post-war beginnings and reflecting on her early entanglement in socialist realist newspeak - Szymborska's mature anti-dogmatic attitude will remain unclear. The book shows how Szymborska's rhetoric and stylistics - figures of reservation, negation, contradiction, tautology, and repetition - are closely connected with the construction of the poetic world and affect the shape of her messages. After all, Wislawa Szymborska is a poet of sophisticated wit, a surprising freedom of expression, and an unusual game with various literary styles, even with colloquial Polish.

Kazimierz Moczarski (1907-1975) was a journalist, soldier, and political prisoner. His life exemplifies a Central European biography under Nazism and Comunism. The addictive and moving Civility in Uncivil Times reveals the story of a man who defended law and democracy all his life. Moczarski fought for it in the authoritarian Poland of the 1930s. During the Second World War, he partook in the resistance movement. After the war, he spent eleven years in a Stalinist prison, including nine months in one cell with the Nazi Jurgen Stroop, who commanded the brutal pacification of the Warsaw Ghetto. The communists imprisoned Moczarski's wife. After release, he rebuilt the broken marriage, rejoined social life, and wrote a work about meeting Stroop. Translated into many languages, Conversations with the Executioner is a thorough study of totalitarianism.

This is a book about impending catastrophe. The metaphorical insane "run" ends with the outbreak of the First World War. The book focuses on European culture of the late nineteenth century and the Polish contribution to it. The word "dark" used to describe modernity is understood as a metaphor of gradual and permanent devaluation of the idea of progress, as a fading hope for the future of Europe as bright, predictable, prosperous, and safe. The "darkening" also receives a literal sense. At the end of the nineteenth century, darkness found its way back to the public space - in the theaters, panoramas, dioramas, and "love tunnels", which awaited the visitors of American and European amusement parks.

Ancient Greek history holds a special place in the works of many 19th-c. writers. The same goes for Cyprian Norwid, one of the most eminent poets in the history of Polish literature, a thinker, and an artist. This book scrutinizes Norwid's fascination with Greek history and culture, especially his peculiar synthesis of Greek thought and Christianity. It focuses on the key themes of the relationship of Platonism with early Christian writings and their presence in Norwid's contemporary culture, the opposition of memory and history in 19th-c. literature and social life, and the image of the artist and its influence on social life in modern everyday. The book analyzes Norwid's oeuvre in a broad comparison with representatives of French, German, and British literature and the humanities.

This book is the first monograph that provides a wholesome overview of the history of Antisemitism in Poland. The author critically analyzes the Polish manifestation of the gruesome phenomenon against the backdrop of historical events in all Europe, as she traces the formation of the ideology and its difference from Judeophobia. A special notion requires the author's meticulousness in research of the archives referring to the Catholic Church and folk culture. Most importantly, she does not end with the historical perspective but uses her studies to shed light on the events permeating in the thirty years of the recent Polish history as an independent country.

The Persona of Czeslaw Milosz considers the poetry of Milosz in the innovative light of world literature and comparative literary studies. The author employs critical debates about Milosz in American and English literature to reshape the image of his reception. The book masterfully elaborates Milosz's poetics of perspectivism with a new method of analysis based on the category of authorial persona-between reception, poetics, and close-reading-separate from the literary persona. Each chapter encapsulates introductory information about Polish literature and moves beyond the horizon of Western expectations about Central European writers. Milosz's most discussed poems reveal new provocative power in the context of T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, William Blake, and Friedrich Nietzsche. To date, no work comprehensively examines Milosz's self-proclaimed contradictory nature and the nomadic quality of his works. As a result, scholarship remains scattered in diverse areas of interest, moving Milosz to the margins of world literature, instead of cherishing the diversity of perspectives he championed, among other places, in his Nobel Lecture. Without properly appreciating the poetics of contradiction proposed by Milosz and a critical analysis of his process of self-situation, we narrow his impact on literature only to Polish poetry, effectively allowing for a petrification of his innovative methods. The Persona of Czeslaw Milosz remedies this gap by revealing that, in contrast to Polish and American literary reception, Milosz was an eccentric eulogist of the concept of a multi-perspectivist persona. Through close examinations of Milosz's poetry, we learn that he develops a method of oscillating between ideas in search of lasting symbols common to all, beginning unfailingly with his current perspective. After all, Milosz persistently placed himself outside of the consensus and maneuvered the subject matter of his works to such an extent that his works became his philosophy of literature and the way of life.