In his article titled ‘Rzut oka na ścieżkę, którą poszedłem’ [A look back at the path I have taken], published in 1832, the twenty-year old Józef Ignacy Kraszewski named a few novelists he thought worth imitating. Among them was the author of Don Quixote, “a man with an intimate knowledge of the human heart, a great investigator, and an exquisite painter”. His masterpiece was “a small collection of essays”, a treasure house of major literary forms for all European writers that came after him. Unexpectedly, however, in the last paragraph of his feuilleton Kraszewski declares he is not interested in following Cervantes because in his writing practice he makes a point of not imitating anybody. “Good or bad”, he concludes, “I am content with myself and with what I write.” I am doing my myself. Yet, if the article is put side by side with some extracts from Don Quixote shows that his demonstrative rejection of literary models does not include the legacy of Cervantes. So, in the end, it is no more than a tongue-in-cheek declaration by a young writer. After all, the novel entitled Pan Walery he is about to write, as it is announced in the article, will be a Cervantes throwback. Its unconventional form (what with interleaved, contrapuntal narrative technique, fragmentary narratives, experiment-ing with hybridity and improvisation) is in fact a literary game with Don Quixote and an ironic appendix to Cervantes' inquiry into the nature of imitatio.

Wawrzyniec Engeström (altern. Lars Benzelstierna von Engeström) was a 19th-century Polish aristocrat with Swedish roots, a historian, writer and political activist who made it his life's mission to build bridges between Polish and Swedish culture. The rapprochement he sought was based on anti-German and anti-Russian sentiments. In his poems A Song about Our Stars (Pieśń o gwiazdach naszych, 1874, 1883) and The Vistula: A National Fantasy (Wisła – Fantazja narodowa, 1883) he drew on Wincenty Pol's Songs of Our Land (Pieśni o ziemi naszej). They all celebrated the idea of national unity based on historical memory, religion and custom. His inspiration came from Swedish Romantic literature, whose main works he translated into Polish.

The aim of this article is to trace the relationship between time and dead bodies or human remains in selected works of the Romantic period featuring Poland’s legendary (pre)history, notably Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s Stara baśń ( An Ancient Tale), ‘Lech’ from Deotyma’s Polska w pieśni ( Poland in Song), Cyprian Norwid’s Wanda and Krakus, and Juliusz Słowacki’s Balladyna, Lilla Weneda and Król-Duch ( The Spirit King). As Polish state was effaced from the political map of Europe (“laid in the grave”) the Romantics sought to affirm Poland’s indelible cultural and historical continuity by blurring the hard bound-ary between past and present. Hence a new interest in all kinds of burial sites – tombs, mounds and barrows – and the human remains interred there. Their continued presence undermines simple notions of life and death.
The article examines the poetic elaborations of the idea of temporality, especially the imagery used to challenge the official narrative of Poland’s history. If the dead (con-ceived realistically or symbolically) do not cease to exist, the historiography of the victors does not have the last word. Moreover, by reanimating the dead, investing them with a bodily form and giving each of them a voice to tell their story, the Romantic writers produced a new way of history writing based on a radical revision of the relationship between past, present and future.