The article undertakes the analysis of social views on an atomic bomb in Stacja Abbesses by Stefania Zahorska. The author refers to the political context and proves that the forgotten short story is a literary voice of reason in the post-war discussion held in exile on the possibility of the outbreak of a new world conflict. However, this is also a fascinating record of the post-war state of the social consciousness of the nuclear threat, its course, effects etc., which can be regarded as the second thesis of the article.
The article is devoted to Józef Wittlin’s text “Ogródek” i historia [“The Garden” and History] (1938), which has not been discussed so far and which was intended as a review of the translation of Walafrid Strabus’s poem Hortulus. In the analysis of this text, the author not only indicates the features characteristic of Wittlin’s works, but also puts his considerations into the broad context of philosophical and botanical findings concerning the life of plants, their functioning in relation to man and historical significance. Thus, the article is an attempt to reconstruct Wittlin’s plant history, which is a precursor to the latest research in biology, as well as ecocritical and posthumanist movements in philosophy and literary studies.