The article aims to prove that the narrative structure of The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz by Ilya Ehrenburg can be viewed as a starting point for understanding the overriding idea of the novel. In the material for interpretation among other things analysed what follows: the similarity between the narrative of the fi rst few chapters and the skaz narrative (Russian oral form of narrative) based on the defi nition of formal mimesis, the introduction to a “foreign word” narrative (the protagonist using reported speech and free indirect speech), the restriction of the storyteller’s role (which is the overriding element of the skaz narrative) and simultaneously putting the protagonist at the forefront, the language markers used in order to mask the convergence between the storyteller’s and the protagonist’s points of view. As a result, the article implies that the presence of a skaz storyteller allows analysing the fi gure of Lasik Roitschwantz not as a character from a book or of a certain type, but rather as a human being in a universal sense.

This article argues that the short story ‘Ave Patria, morituri te salutant’, first published in a book of Stanisław Reymont's short stories in 1907, shows an overwhelming influence of the expressionist aesthetic. It is conspicuously present in the story's stripped-down sentences, spiked with highly emotive (animal) imagery, and cast in lines that move inexorably towards the catastrophic end. It manifests itself in the disillusioned, sarcastic tone which the writer uses to take up old certainties like military glory and patriotism. Finally, it brings to the fore the conflict between man and nature, man and the universe, the individual and the crowd. As all of those elements are evidently part of the narrative and dramatic structure of ‘Ave Patria…’, it should be viewed as an exemplification of Reymont's drift from realism to modernism (preexpressionism). That transition is also signalized by the tripartite structure of the story. The divisions are worked out with the precision of a master craftsman assembling ‘an epic clock’ (to borrow a telling phrase from Kazimierz Wyka's analysis of the structure of The Peasants), or a painter designing a triptych. The article pursues the latter analogy further by discussing the impressionist technique of framing and cutting off the dispensable elements of the picture.

This analysis of selected novels and short stories by Józef Bogdan Dziekoński – Pająk [ The Spider], Siła woli [ Willpower], Piosnka [ A Simple Song], and Wyzwolenie zapaleńca [ The Liberation of Enthusiast] – shows that they share similar narrative structure based on the interception of messages sent by the narrator to an absent ideal recipient by an eaves-dropping intruder who gradually displaces the original addressee. Working within the framework of a romance story Dziekoński develops a philosophy of desire which accepts incompleteness, contingency and disillusionment. They combine in an affirmation of life and an opposition to morbid phantasies or the idea of irreplaceability of love in the myth of l'amour tristanien.