In a number of passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer introduces theomachoi, i.e. “those who battle with the gods”, or hoi proteroi – “the earlier ones”. This generation of heroes precedes the generation of the heroes of the Trojan war and differs from them by, e.g., possessing certain supernatural capacities and by encountering fantastic monsters. This essay discusses the appearances and the function of the theomachoi in the Homeric poems. It is argued that Homer’s consistent use of such tales creates a net of parallelisms between the proteroi and the heroes of the Trojan war, which prompts the reader’s deeper reflection on the latter’s choices and actions.

A review of the commentary on the Batrachomyomachia by Joel Christensen and Erik Robinson.

This article talks about a famous novel by Leopold Tyrmand entitled Zły (The Bad) which was translated into English by David Welsh as The Man with White Eyes (New York: Knopf, 1959). The author claims that the novel which describes a life in destroyed Warsaw of the 1950s gradually became an epic. The author refers to a conception by Polish literary scholar and critic Kazimierz Wyka who claimed that epics are not written, but – under some circumstances, sometimes even against the will of the writers – some texts become epics. According to the author, in Zły (both in the style and in the plot) can be found the elements of brilliant epic stylization. The novel which at first was read as a thriller gradually became an epic because it described with epic accuracy a world that had disappeared, a world where a new life was born in the ruins.

The poetics of the Sanskrit ornate epic ( mahākāvya), recognized as the most prestigious genre of Sanskrit kāvya literature, significantly rely on literary devices creating the sense of grandeur. The aim of this study is investigate the notion of atiśaya discussed by early works on Sanskrit literary theory and to identify it as a focal term within a discourse explicating the poetics of grandeur characteristic of mahākāvya genre. The here introduced distinction between atiśaya and hyperbole enables to capture the specificity of literary grandeur in mahākāvya compositions and elucidates the broader matter of ‘excess’ in the Sanskrit literature.

A Polish translation of Book 10 of Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, whose climactic part treats the deaths of Paris and Oenone. This foreshadows the first Polish translation of the whole of Quintus’ poem since the rendering by Jacek Idzi Przybylski published in Cracow in 1815.

Five major phases of interrelation between the Bible and literature may be distinguished in German literary history. During the Middle Ages, when the Church and Christian faith played the dominant role, the Bible was treated in literary circles as a work in itself. Authors of the abundant biblical epic poetry, affirmatively paraphrasing Scripture texts, initiated the emergence and development of national literature. The works of that period had a propagandist character and served Christianization as well as the deepening of the faith. The original sense and meaning of the Bible was challenged - in the name of science and the social idea - during the period of the Enlightenment. The Bible seen as poetry endowed with wonderful rhythm, having powerful imaginative impact, and containing elements of Eastern folklore became popular and enjoyed its renaissance in the 19th century, mainly on Herder's account. Contemporary literature employs the language of the Bible not as ornamentation but as key element of poetic expression, and biblical characters serve either auto-reflection or the presentation of archaeological archetypes. 20th century German literature tends to have critical and negating biblical stylization. Such sty- lization results when the author's intentions and value system do not agree with what the biblical text contains, and when the word of God is used for the purpose of alienation and parody. Affirmative biblical stylization occurs sporadically in contemporary literature. The most common kind of biblical stylization, typical of modernist and postmodernist lyric poetry, is partial stylization, serving polemic purposes or alternative solutions.

The paper concerns biblical heritage in Polish medieval and early modern literature. In it's first section the author presents the first Polish psalters and their influence upon religious poetry of the time. The second part focuses on the development of biblical scholarship in medieval and Renaissance Poland, presents the most important old translations of the Bible and shortly discusses their impact on Polish literary culture. The last part of the study shows how various types of biblical plots and characters were present in old Polish drama and theatre, in religious hymns and epics, how biblical patterns inspired certain literary genres; it also stresses cer- tain significant differences between Protestant and Catholic authors of the time. The conclusion of the paper points out serious need for more systematic researches and studies in the subject of biblical tradition in old Polish literature.

Adam Mickiewicz's epic poem Pan Tadeusz, published in Paris in 1834, can be seen as an expression of a romantic culture of remembrance which emerged in Poland and Lithuania in the aftermath of a traumatic political event, the January Uprising of 1830–1831. This article discusses the poet's transformation of the devices and generic model of heroic epic for the double purpose of expressing a notion of historical time which holds out an open future for both the individual and the national community, and of promoting the acceptance of a complicated past through the resolution of its conflicts. Both in Poland and in Lithuania, Pan Tadeusz was regarded as a monumental tribute to the culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and a major influence on the modern national literatures in Lithuanian, Belarusian and Yiddish, sprouting on the territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

This article examines the analogies, and more specifically the historical 'theatre of the imagination', between Tytus Czyżewski's Robespierre/Rhapsody (1927) and Stanisław Wyspiański's poetic dramas Rhapsodies (Kazimierz the Great and Bolesław the Bold). Each of those poems foregrounds its principal historical character. Wyspiański's dramatic poems, commonly known as Rhapsodies, focus on Kazimierz the Great, Bolesław the Bold, and Piast. kings of pivotal significance in his vision of Poland's historical destiny. Twenty years later Tytus Czyżewski, an acclaimed avant-garde painter and poet, composed a poetic-essayistic salmagundi, in which he sought to render in a similarly elevated style and condensed dialogue the drama of the leaders of the French Revolution, Robespierre and Danton. While Robespierre has to face, apart from some common people, God, the Spirit and Judges that sit in judgment on him, the final section of Rhapsody evokes Juliusz Słowacki. A monologue, mimicking his lofty verse, establishes a metaphorical common thread in Polish history – from the days of mail-clad knights to the wretched everyday life in the trenches – set against a broad background of wars, destruction and the French Revolution. For Czyżewski the French Revolution was a ground-breaking event, the first act of a great historical process that ushered in the Modern Age with its ideas of progress, reason, freedom, social justice, the elimination of poverty. It continues to inspire mankind with the hope that even a most ambitious change is possible. For Wyspiański, on the other hand, the grand project of human emancipation does give rise to doubts whether a wholesale obliteration of the Old is justified and to questions about God, free will, theodicy and destiny, and the 'tyranny of reason'. The differences between the two philosophies of history – Wyspiański's, from the turn of the 19th century, and Czyżewski's, representative of the artistic and intellectual climate of the late 1920s – are no doubt profound, and yet, what both of them seem to share is a deep concern with the relevance of history for the present and for designing the future.

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.