The claim of this article is to argue that the main thrust of Karl Marx’s philosophy was neither a critique of political economy, nor a critique of the bourgeois political system, but an anti-theistic raid of a metaphysical nature, and that this drive gave him the impetus that motivated his intellectual activity from the time when he had not yet had any economic theory and when the proletariat had not yet played a major role within the purview of his interests. Marx’ rebellion led him to a condemnation of the entire creation as a product of an evil Demiurge, who – to exacerbate the situation even further – was nothing else than a product of human false consciousness, manifesting itself politically as a division of any populace into friends and foes, who were subsequently conglomerated into antagonistic social classes but could be transformed in appropriate conditions into stateless community of friends.

In the article, I try to show the world of the past as the world of games. First of all, history appears as a game – the game of the historian with his subject of study or cognition. Secondly, history itself can be conceptualised by the metaphor of the game. The history of Portugal is treated as an example of the object of historical research, which changes along with the theories applied. The act of theorising sets the limits of the known past. On the basis of selected examples from the history of Portugal in the 20th century, I try to show how the use of various research tools allows us to ask new/different questions.

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.

An interesting fact in the intellectual history of the fin-de-siècle and first three decades of the 20th century is that the crisis of modernity was understood in categories of sex and gender. In spite of the differences dividing the German intellectual trend of cultural pessimism, the conservative revolution, and Fascist thinking, all these paradigms are linked by the characteristic conviction that ‘modernity’, being the consequence of the French Revolution, was ruled by the ‘feminine principle’. This principle was supposed to represent what is anti-military, anti-state, and anti-cultural at the same time. Variations on the theory of male bonding (Männerbund) were the intellectual reaction to that ‘feminine principle’. The intellectual patterns described here find their continuation in contemporary conservative thought.

This text is devoted to selected questions on the border of the ethnography of Łódź and research into women’s issues, and thus joins the trend of women’s urban anthropology. The author reinterprets selected sources, such as various types of writings and field materials from the archives of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Łódź. Her aim is to reconstruct the local ‘herstory’ from the ethnographic-anthropological perspective. She therefore looks at certain aspects of the life of textile workers and locates them in the context of the perceptions of femininity and the work ethic around which Łódź’s image (stereotypical and auto-stereotypical) was created.

The article discusses views and the ideological evolution carried out by Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin, a Russian-American sociologist, philosopher and political activist. Influenced by his observations of the events of 1917, Sorokin radically reformulated his opinions about Marx and Marxism which resulted in his espousing of a traditionalist and anti-revolutionary position. He still shared with Marx his negative diagnosis of the modern world, but proposed a different solution as a remedy. His solution was a purification of the idea of equality by liberating it from reductive materialism. Nevertheless Sorokin’s concept of spiritual equality was as utopian as Marx’s. He presented his ideas in a littleknown novel titled: Предтеча (or Прачечная человеческих душ – ‘предтеча’ means ‘ancestor’ and is commonly referred to John the Baptist). This work is a signal for Sorokin’s denial of Marx’s ideas and his revolutionary zeal.

W tekście wskazuję na etyczny kontekst twórczości Ryszarda Wagnera. W skrócie sygnalizuję kwestię relacji wartości estetycznych i etycznych. Zaznaczam społeczne zaangażowanie pism teoretycznych Wagnera, skupiając się na emancypacyjnym charakterze egalitarnych i rewolucyjnych tez. W kolejnym wątku opisuję wpływ myśli Schopenhauera na autora Sztuki i rewolucji. Szczególnie skupiam się na wątku miłości, wyrzeczenia, poświęcenia i zanegowania woli. W ostatniej części odnoszę się do wagnerowskiego antysemityzmu i tzw. pism regeneracyjnych.

The article discusses little-known facts from the lives of two great representatives of the Silver Age of Russian philosophy – Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov – referring to the period when both were ardent Marxists. It discusses the beginning of the academic career of both thinkers, the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the archives of Karl and Luise Kautsky in Amsterdam (International Institute of Social History) there are two Berdyaev’s letters to Kautsky regarding polemics about Marx and Marxism, which unfolded between them after Kautsky’s decision to publish in the pages of Die Neue Zeit an article by Berdyaev “F.A. Lange and Critical Philosophy in Its Relation to Socialism” (1900). This correspondence has probably become the catalyst for Berdyaev’s transition from ‛orthodox’ to ‛critical’ Marxism. On the other hand, Bulgakov’s letters to Kautsky (and those of his wife, Helena Tokmakova, to Luisa Kautsky) refer to the time of a research internship of Bulgakov in Berlin in the years 1898–1900. He then met Kautsky and Bernstein families, and engulfed himself in theoretical problems of Marxism. The text of the speech is accompanied by a translation into Polish and provided with comments on two Berdyaev’s letters to Kautsky (February and May 1900).