The phenomenon of the so-called Polish monumental theatre has for nearly a century resisted attempts at conceptualization. Created by artists living in a transitional period and formed in a peculiar “trans-era” mental space, this theatre was wrought from a hybrid substance that combined a Romantic and post-Romantic content with an avant-garde form. Being “simultaneously national and supra-national”, it appeared as a unique conceptual and artistic construct; a construct that was touted as the innovative Polish input into the reform of European theatre. Owing to the heterogeneity of its subject-matter, it was at times included into, and at other times excluded from the body of endeavours of an avant-garde nature; the correct categorization was until now made difficult by the conceptual template constructed around the dogma concerning the incompatibility of the two areas: the avant-garde and the so-called national duties. Seen in the perspective of modern-day research on the variegated nature of Modernism and on its inner tensions, however, this phenomenon may emerge as an interesting illustration of the synthesizing efforts of Modernism.

This article contains a bilingual, Latin-Polish, edition of a letter written by Erasmus to John Sixtin (Ioannes Sixtinus), a Frisian student he met in England. In it Erasmus describes a dinner party at Oxford to which he was invited as an acclaimed poet. In the presence of John Colet, leader of English humanists, table talk turned into learned conversation. Erasmus’s contribution to the debate was an improvised fable (fabula) about Cain who, in order to become farmer, persuades the angel guarding Paradise to bring him some seeds from the Garden of Eden. His speech, a showpiece of rhetorical artfulness disguising a string of lies and spurious argument, is so effective that the angel decides to steal the seeds and thus betray God’s trust. Seen in the context of contemporary surge of interest in the art of rhetoric, Erasmus’ apocryphal spoof is an eloquent demonstration of the heuristic value of mythopoeia and the irresistible power of rhetoric.