EN
Letters of Michał Grabowski, a romantic novelist and critic, are an example of per-sonal correspondence dominated by reflections on literature and its transformations. In his correspondence, the author often addressed the issue of functioning on the literary scene. My primary objective was to understand how the author evaluated and understood his own literary critical skills. Grabowski’s remarks on himself (and also on the role of a “professional reader”) will allow one to recognize and then to better understand the formation process of his literary critical awareness. In the letters to Józef Bohdan Zaleski we can find comments on the practices of crit-ics and the development of their opinions about individual authors and their works. Therefore, this article is merely a selection of examples that will be used for a more pro-found analysis of the mechanisms of creating a critic’s image.