This article examines the position of Cervantes' Don Quixote in the intertextual network of Juliusz Słowacki' digressive poems, closely bound up with Schlegel's conception of Romantic irony. The article analyzes in turn direct references to Don Quixote; the use by the Polish poet, often with an ironic twist, of Cervantes' narrative strategies; the influence of Cervantes on the creation of the world of the poems (not least their central characters) and on Słowacki's extensive use of parabasis in all its varieties – from authorial commentaries and addresses to the reader, through characters who step out of their role to speak to the reader, to the foregrounding of the problems involved in the act of reading – to highlight and disrupt the illusion of fictional truth. The analysis shows that the Spanish classic was in many ways Słowacki's literary model and an aesthetic inspiration.

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.

In his introduction to the German translation of Norwid's Vade-mecum Hans Robert Jauss calls the work of the Polish poet a lasting challenge to German poetry. This essay attempts to show the ways in which Norwid’s further reception could help re-evaluate German assessments of their own Romantic tradition. For instance, the ironic undermining of the value of work, both creative and physical, in Norwid’s ‘Irony’ can be used as a tell-tale clue for the pursuit of similar intima-tions in the writings of early German Romantics, especially the barely noticed ironic undertones of their representations of labour economics. Furthermore, the adoption of the newly-developed concept of a political and economic Romanticism for the critical study of Norwid leads to the discovery of an unexpected theoretical coherence of his oeuvre, which in effect (let it be made absolutely clear) loses nothing of its heterogeneity and dialogic nature. The irony generated by the habitus of Norwid’s crypto-parabases (a technique which is a distinctive feature of his dramas) reveals the productive role of time in this mode of poetic representation, the time of work and the time of great projects, and conjure up the jeering specter of eternity.

This is a deconstructive reading of Juliusz Słowacki's Lilla Weneda, focusing on Ślaz, an enigmatic character usually marginalized in interpretations of this quasi-historical Romantic drama. Drawing on Professor Marta Piwińska's study of ‘Lilla Weneda’ in Dramat polski: Interpretacje (2001), this article explores the gaps and fissures in Słowacki's text. While complementing her analysis with a number of alternative readings, this article also uses deconstruction to challenge some of the points that are embedded in the traditional reception of the drama.