Tadeusz Rittner steered clear of political themes in his dramas with the single excep-tion of the Wrogowie bogaczy (The Enemies of the Rich). First performed in 1921, the play exposes the insane madness of social (Bolshevik) revolution. At the same time, though, the tragic horror is handled with ironic distance and diverted into absurd grotesque. Moreover, Rittner invests the individual scenes and exchanges between the characters with hints and references that turn the story into a playful game with the theatrical traditions, including the familiar set of plot drivers, i.e. the pursuit of power, love/eroti-cism and art/imagination. For all its cleverness, the play, when staged at the Słowacki Theatre in Cracow, turned out a complete failure. One simple reason for it was that Rittner’s broad, generalized vision failed to meet the current demand for a more con-crete reenactment of historical events.

This article discusses the unknown circumstances of Stanisław Rembek’s debut as a poet. Stanisław Rembek is the author of highly acclaimed novels about the Polish--Soviet War of 1919–1920 and short stories about the January 1863 Uprising. But practi-cally nobody knows that he made his debut as a with ‘O polski Żołnierzu!’ [‘O Polish Soldier!’], published in the college magazine Razem [ Together] in Piotrków. The poem displays a strong influence of Romanticism; the Romantic attitudes and intellectual legacy would later be discussed and infrequently scoffed at by the characters of his novels.