The article presents an account of the origins, course and effects of a trip to Poland in September 1969 by the Italian writer, journalist and painter Dino Buzzati (1906–1972). In Warsaw, Buzzati met the painter Maria Anto, with whom he formed a brief but intense artistic relationship.

In Dolgopyat’s works, the world appears as an inscrutable mystery in which the wonderful and supernatural is closely connected with the realistic and everyday. Probably the most important part of this universe is chronotope. In this article, I focus on the category of time in selected stories in which it comes to the foreground. „The heroes of the analyzed stories travel in time, stop time or look for an answer to the question of the originality of their experiences. After all, if one can go back in time, maybe the whole of life is a mere repetition of what has already happened?”. Transitions between various time levels open up the way to other worlds and variants of one’s own destiny. The magical properties of time show that the reality of the heroes is not limited to matter and does not fit into the rationalistic picture of the world. This confirms the affiliation of the works to magical realism.

The article focuses on the term “train situation” created by Vyacheslav Kuricin, which is considered a metaphor of the work of the contemporary Russian writer Elena Dolgopyat. The proper analysis of Dolgopyat’s works is preceded by an introduction in which the definition of magical realism and its history in Russia is briefl y presented. The attitude of the Russian literary scholars to this phenomenon is presented as well. Next, the meanings of the figure of train in the writer’s stories are discussed. It is noteworthy that the features of magical realism (specific space-time construction, polyphonic narrative, fantastic elements perceived as something natural) are realized in her texts often through the image of a train. In works in which this picture does not exist, we deal with the „train situation”, which boils down to the combination in the presented world of various aspects of reality, unlimited by matter. The heroes live between different dimensions of reality, and combining into one cohesive whole of various space-times, ways of existence, realistic and fantastic elements allows to see the term of Kuricin also as a metaphor of all magical realism.