The article offers an existential interpretation of Roman Polanski’s movie: Two men and the wardrobe (1958). Despite a large number of publications dealing with Polanski’s work, there is still no single study that would directly and primarily show the philosophical and existential potential of this short film. This article aims to amend this situation and reveal this potential. The paper is divided into five parts. Firstly, it depicts the issue of loneliness presented in Polanski’s film, referring – secondly – to the recognition of selected existential philosophers (J. Ortega y Gasset, E. Lévinas, J.‑P. Sartre, A. Camus). Thirdly, the article presents the specificity of the grotesque and absurd motifs characteristic for the film, exposing their connection with the problem of loneliness raised in it. Fourthly, the paper interprets the Polish director’s short film in the context of an authentic way of existence. It refers to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, and emphasizes the gap between ‘being oneself’ and belonging to community (society). Finally, the article presents a psychological‑existential reading of Polanski’s short film, paying attention to the psychological determinants of human existence.

The article opens with a brief history of a genre of literary works that blend both tragic and comic elements, the latter of which seem to have been increasingly more prominent in European culture in general. This article examines various functions of the tragic and comic combination in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, some scenes from Shakespeare’s King Lear, and two modern narrative fictions, where the main character is simultaneously heroic and comic, Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote and Sławomir Mrożek’s short story The Last Hussar.

This article tries to outline the history of the theater of the absurd in Poland by focusing on the metaphor of theatrum mundi (a device which is characteristic feature of this type of drama) and its use by Tymoteusz Karpowicz in his dramas Dziwny pasażer [A Strange Passenger], Charon od świtu do świtu [Charon from Dawn to Dawn], Kiedy ktoś zapuka [When Somebody Knocks], Człowiek z absolutnym węchem [The Man with an Absolute Sence of Smell], Przerwa w podróży [A Break in a Journey]. This metatheatrical device enables the dramatist to create a world of play-acting for its own sake, a world without God, with characters unable to look beyond the exigencies of their role and thus to express his disenchantment with the 20th century and his estrangement from the post-World War II reality. It also enables him to explore the mechanisms of theatrical performance and the role of language in the creation of reality.

The article aims to depict Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of the human condition. It presents the main ideas of Sartre’s anthropological reflection (the man as an entity that is absolutely free, lonely, and doomed to experience the absurdity of the status of an ‘in-the-world-being’). Although Sartre’s thoughts have been criticized by the ‘philosophers of dialogue’, his anthropology still seems to express appropriately the complexity of the human condition in the context of everlasting and fundamental queries about the purpose and the sense of individual existence.

Manuel de Lima (1915–1976), violinist, painter and music critic, began his writing career in 1944 with the long short-story Um Homem de Barbas [ A man with a beard]. It was the middle of the Second World War and the Salazar dictatorship was well established in officially neutral Portugal. A few years before the belated emergence of Portuguese surrealism, to which he was linked, and in the midst of the development of neorealism, a protest movement followed mainly by the young writers of the time, Manuel de Lima asserted himself from the outset as a very singular writer. Um Homem de Barba is a narrative of a love triangle that ends with the spectacular disappearance of the three protagonists. In this first work placed under the sign of the absurd, which mixes satire, marvelous, and burlesque and in which, according to Almada Negreiros' 1944 preface, the author uses realism to "undo realism", we will study the place and role of humor, as well as the various devices used.

The article studies the problems of forming intentional deformations of a narrative category of event in the prose of a famous Russian absurdist of the 1920s‑30s, a member of the avant‑garde collective Oberiu – Daniil Kharms. The study defines the main regularities of generating “normal” textual events as well as the mechanisms for their deformations and destructions within a narrative “story” and its “discourse”. The most important reasons for the “ludic” absurdity of events within D. Kharms’ short stories are the unintelligibility of the described objects, the ontological absurdity of the objects of events, the absurdity of the heroes’ behaviour and thinking, the sequence (multiplication) of events, the violation of structural order and the integrity of the described objects and their constituents, among others. The absurdization of events in the narrative “discourse” is presupposed by a set of semantic and pragmatic devices, in particular: the author’s assumed inability to create an event’s manoeuvring or to build the plot; the violation of the logic of the development of the plotline; making the modus and modality elements of the story weird; shifting points of view and their focuses, to name a few. The author’s intentional deviations within the “story” and the “discourse” of the belles‑lettres narrative cause communicative senses characteristic for an absurd type of writing: the senses of mental “charming”, which border on the reader’s cognitive “stupor”, as well as numerous senses of an evaluative and ludic character generated by the common “background” of the reader’s consciousness and borrowed, so to say, from “standard” belles‑lettres text types and narratives. The article outlines the perspectives of lingual‑narrative studies into weird (absurd, in particular) belles‑lettres texts.

In his book Mortal Questions (1979) Thomas Nagel discusses four practical moral issues: (1) fear of death, (2) the absurdity of human life, (3) sexual perversion and (4) military massacre. His primary concern is neither to justify moral opprobrium nor to find an appropriate punishment for the culprits. Instead, he wants to clarify motives of those individuals who are not afraid of death, who can deal resolutely with the pointlessness of human life, who are not deeply dismayed by the crudity of some forms of sexual behavior or who refuse to justify whatever forms of military atrocities with higher purposes. He reviews various cases of excessive or deficient moral sensitivity and offers specific, case‑oriented advice on how to deal with them. Nagel favors self‑persuasion in cases of fear of death and argues that the sense of absurd is not much different from skepticism. He proposes to draw a line between private and public aspects of sexual behavior and supports dual evaluation of military activities by distinguishing between the moral value of an act and the moral value of the motives of the actor. He condones no atrocities. These arguments do not add up to constitute a form of moral relativism but, instead, seem to restore intellectual respectability of casuistry.